How Personality Changes With Age: What Science Says About Getting Older

Now that I’m heading into my late-30s, I have noticed that my personality has changed quite a bit over the past decade. Maybe even more than the decade preceding it. It’s strange to discover that I no longer care about the things I thought would be important to me forever and to find myself deeply entrenched in topics and hobbies that I was never drawn to before.

While I never thought this was unique to me, I did think that this seismic shift in my personality was perhaps the last significant one I’d experience in my life. I mean, how many times can a person change and still be themselves?

However, some psychologists believe that we have five personality factors, called the ‘Big Five’ that stay with us throughout our lives. These are:

• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Neuroticism
• Openness

Psychology Today explains: “Individual personalities are thought to feature each of these five broad traits to some degree. When the traits are measured, some people rate higher, and others rate lower: Someone can be more conscientious and less agreeable than most people, for instance, while scoring about average on the other traits. These traits remain fairly stable during adulthood.

“People can also differ on the more specific facets that make up each of the Big Five traits. A relatively extroverted person might be highly sociable but not especially assertive.”

A study published in Communications Psychology has challenged the long-held belief that the Big Five stay relatively stable throughout our lives.

In the initial part of the study, researchers surveyed 887 people who rated the Big Five traits as some of the most stable

Then, in a follow-up analysis of data from eight large-scale longitudinal data sets involving 166,971 individuals across the United States, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands, researchers were presented with a very different story.

The study found that levels of neuroticism, openness and extraversion drop overall from age 15 to 90, with neuroticism showing the steepest decline. However, agreeableness and conscientiousness tended to increase as people age.

I can attest to this a little myself. I definitely feel calmer as I’ve aged but I am also very set in my routine and prefer my own company. I’ll work on it.