Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vox, and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award. Olga is also the author of a new book on changing your personality, Me, But Better, which releases March 11.
Olga joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss her own experiment to change her personality, the big five personality types, and much more.
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The Atlantic Journalist Olga Khazan On Embracing Weirdness And Changing Your Personality
Our quote for this episode is from Fran Lebowitz. “Humility is no substitute for good personality.” My guest, Olga Khazan, is best known as a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and several other publications. She’s a two-time recipient of the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award. Olga is also the author of a new book on changing your personality, Me, But Better, which will be released soon. Olga, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
The Impact Of Childhood Experiences On Personality Development
I always find it interesting to start at the beginning of childhood, and this is probably the case here. Given that your book delves so much into your own personality traits, can you talk about what you think was hardwired from some of your early childhood experiences or maybe changed over time?
The premise of the book is that I tried to change my own personality. Some of those traits that I tried to change were there from childhood.
Birth or formative childhood experience? You don’t have any measurement tools?
I have a lot of anxiety in my family. Both my parents are very anxious people, which would be the trait neuroticism, which is one of the big five personality traits. Also, a lot of stressful things happened to me when I was little. I’m an immigrant. We moved to the US when I was three.
Where did you move from?
The USSR. That increased the stressors on my parents and also on me at that time. Neuroticism has been there my whole life, and then other stuff formed over time. I became more introverted over time, trying to build my career, and got sucked into always working. I deprioritized personal relationships, connections, and things like that as I focused on work. Some of the stuff I picked up gradually, and some has been there the whole time.
I’m guessing a lot of introverts find their way into writing. It tends to suit introverts well. Introverts are misunderstood. Susan King helped with this definition. Some people perceive it as shy, but it’s more of how you recharge. Some people want to go to a room with loud people, and that’s how they recharge, and others need to retreat quietly to recharge.
That’s right. Susan’s definition is how you regain your energy. In personality, we also think of extroversion as doing a lot of stuff. Those are people who are very active and get out there a lot. They say yes to things. That is also one element that I wanted to work on, not just how much I physically talk to people but also getting out there more, trying new activities, and seeing what I enjoy.
Turning Feelings Of Difference Into Professional Passion
In your previous book, Weird, you talked about how your unique experiences made you always feel different and how that feeling of difference sparked this curiosity and journey into science journalism in particular. We all have strengths and weaknesses. It’s a good example of turning that discomfort or feeling into professional passion. I’ve had someone who’s been on this show who said, “Our greatest accomplishment lies right next to our pain.” Can you talk about how you thought about or reframed that?
When I talk about this project, sometimes people are like, “Your personality wasn’t that bad,” or “You’re doing something right because you have a pretty functional life.” It’s true that I do, but my neuroticism and my anxiety would sometimes give me fuel. It would give me the motivation to work hard and achieve great things, but it would also stand in the way of enjoying life sometimes.
It was more about finding that balance between working hard, striving, and doing all you can, and being happy with success, being happy with what you get, and being grateful for what you have. That was the part that I was struggling with. I don’t think that personality change means that you’re miserable and everything in your life is falling apart. It could be like, “My personality has helped me in various ways, but what is still missing?”
I tend to believe having worked with a lot of leaders on looking at strengths and weaknesses, and likewise that a weakness or a problem is a strength overused. There are certain careers where you need a healthy amount of neurosis. For example, we were talking about DC traffic controllers. I want a laidback, chill person on that, but then you could push any of these things past the red line to where they’re not helpful. It seems like we’re trying to find this sweet spot in between where it’s helpful but not hurtful.
Conscientiousness, the trait, is a good example of this. This is one of the big five traits as well. It’s the one that’s self-disciplined. You’re a go-getter. You get places early. You tend to eat right and exercise. A lot of leaders are probably very high in conscientiousness. You can take it too far and you can become a perfectionist. You take it even further than that and you can develop an obsessive compulsive thing where you can’t let go of something, or you get a donut one day and it ruins your whole week. A fair amount of these traits will help you, but you do have to know when to stop. That’s also part of the personality change journey.
Changing Your Personality: A Self-Experiment
Let’s dive more directly into Me, But Better. It’s a great title. I love that. I don’t know if that was a result of a lot of testing or if that came to you quickly. The genesis of the book is pretty interesting. You conducted an experiment to change your entire personality. Walk me through the why and then the how of that.
The why is best encapsulated by the intro to the book, where I describe a day. I’m a new parent, so recounting this day sounds like an amazing day that I would kill to have again, but at the time, it seemed to me so bad and stressful. It was that day when I woke up and I was on vacation. I’m still working but I’m in Florida. It’s great. It’s sunny in the middle of winter. I’m eating great food. I have to go get a photo taken.
On the way to the photo, a bunch of stressful things happen. I get stuck in traffic. I get a haircut that looks bad, which throws me off like going directly into this photo shoot. After the photo shoot, I get stuck in traffic again. I have this stressful thing at the grocery store where my shopping cart locks and I have to drag the shopping cart full of food across the parking lot.
I get back to the Airbnb where we’re staying and I have this meltdown. I’m like, “Life is so stressful. It’s so awful.” I’m crying. I’m chugging wine and wailing. I’m having this meltdown. I then had the presence of mind to take half a step back from that and be like, “Did anything bad happen or was this my reaction to this day?” Honestly, I got the groceries fine, the pictures don’t look great but whatever. No one has said anything about the pictures. No one died, but it wasn’t even that no one died. I had a pretty good day.
I noticed that I did this a lot. A bunch of little stressful things would happen and I would fixate on them and not be able to appreciate the greater moment or the greater thing that I have and not be able to live in the moment, which sounds cheesy but is honestly one of the keys to being happy. I decided to change everything that was holding me back from the gratitude, the presence, and the joy that that life has.
One of the keys to being happy is being able to live in the moment.
I have lots of questions. First, I had a book as a child. It was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. That’s what was coming to mind when you said that and also this notion of the locust of control or this focus on the things that we don’t control, which tends to be pretty unhealthy, versus what we do control. A lot of times, we control our reaction, not what happened. That’s the story. I need more information on this. After this, you decided you wanted to do this. What did you do to inventory and then decide what you were going to change? What’s the baseline here?
Anyone can do this. There’s a researcher named Nathan Hudson at Southern Methodist University who studies personality change. He has this website called PersonalityAssessor.com where he has uploaded this science-backed tool that is a quiz that you take to measure your personality. This is something that lots of researchers use. He didn’t invent it. He put it on the internet. You answer a bunch of questions like, “Do you like parties? Do you like poetry? Do you feel sad a lot?” You answer, “I strongly agree,” or, “I agree,” and what have you. It takes all those answers and tabulates them. It gives you a readout of your big five personality traits and where you fall on all of them.
That was the next question I was going to ask. The big five comes from his assessment of this.
He didn’t invent the big five.
It is in the public domain.
It predates him. The big five is from the ‘90s. It is very complicated how they got to the big five, but there are five.
The Big Five Personality Traits
You jumped into a couple of them. Let’s walk through each of them so people can maybe, for the rest of this discussion, think about which archetype or archetypes they might be. Are you one of them or can you be multiple of them?
Most professional psychologists have moved away from these types of people. What you would have in the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram is a certain type or number. All the traits are a spectrum, and you’re somewhere on the spectrum. You might be 70% extroverted or 30%, or something like that. It’s not that you’re like, “I’m an introvert,” or, “I’m an extrovert,” generally. Sorry, did you want me to list the five traits?
Yeah. Let’s list them.
The acronym to remember them is OCEAN.
I can remember that.
The first one is Openness to experience, which is creativity and imaginativeness.
A world traveler.
Spiritual but not religious. We have Conscientiousness, which we talked about, which is getting places, getting stuff done, never being late, always meeting deadlines, and things like that. You have Extroversion. That’s pretty self-explanatory there. You have Agreeableness, which is friendliness, warmth, and empathy. These are your bridesmaids or BFFs’ traits. You have Neuroticism, which is a bad thing. The other ones are good things.
Everyone has a specter on each of these?
Yes.
It’s not like you’re one of them.
You could be someone who identifies as an introvert.
Negative extroversion is introvert in this scale.
The opposite of Neuroticism is something called Emotional Stability. The reason they don’t use that one is because there’s already an E in OCEAN.
It almost seems to imply that one side is too far and the other side is good. Is there an opposite to that? Stable sounds good, but is there something so stable?
The research that we have says that being higher in the good ones is better. It’s self-explanatory. Being super emotionally stable is a good thing. However, there is some other research that suggests that even small amounts of anxiety are good.
I was talking to someone. People retire and they die. It’s like every diet thing. Too much bad, not enough bad.
It’s not directly from the personality research, but it suggests that having a little bit of anxiety, some stressors, or some adversity in your life is a good thing. If you think about it, a lot of the stuff that is worth doing is stressful, like having kids or getting a promotion. Although you want to process the anxiety and the stress in a certain way, you don’t necessarily want to eliminate all stress and anxiety from your life.
Having anxiety and stress is a good thing. A lot of stuff that is worth doing is stressful. You don’t want to eliminate all stress. You want to process it.
How To Turn Personality Assessments Into Actionable Change
I’m a big believer in Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. There’s stuff like, “If you don’t work a muscle, it doesn’t build.” It doesn’t work that way. It’s interesting how they’re worded. There’s a scale but there’s implied good and bad in that scale. You take this assessment, you rank yourself on all of these things, and then you’re like, “I’m going to do the opposite.” How did you turn that into practice?
The ones that I wanted to work on were Extroversion. I wanted to bring that up. I wanted to bring down Neuroticism and I wanted to bring up Agreeableness.
Let’s go through each of those. What do you do to up Extroversion?
I had a little bit of help. Nathan Hudson, that same researcher, has a study where he helped people change their personalities. He didn’t help them, but he did an experiment where people did change their personalities by giving them a list of activities to do. Some of them are quite easy, like saying hello to someone new or starting a short conversation with someone. I decided to up the ante a little bit. I did an improv class. It was out of character for me.
That is way out of the comfort zone of an introvert. I’ve been forced to do one of those and it is not comfortable.
If you’re not someone who likes to be silly or be perceived as silly, it’s hard. It’s hard to drop those defenses and be silly. I also did a bunch of different activities. I talked to strangers a whole lot. I went to meetups. I went to a sailing class. I went to parties. I was out on the town.
Did it feel like a buzz or did it get better? Did you feel like it was improving or was it hard the whole time?
I was reading my journal from the early days of improv and it was like, “I am dreading this so much. I feel like I’m so bad at this. I would do anything to get out of this.” For all of these activities, you had to drag me to them. I didn’t want to go. I did not want to talk to strangers. I did not want to socialize. After I went with very few exceptions, even if I didn’t drink, even if I only stayed an hour, I felt slightly better after I went. I had a little bit of a buzz from being around people.
The next time, was the pre-anxiety lessened?
It took a year of doing improv for me to stop dreading it, or many months of doing it because it’s so hard. Eventually, with some of the meetups and such, I did stop dreading it. I was like, “This is how it’s going to go. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to talk to four people and then I’m going to leave.” That honestly helped, having like a little bit of a plan and a little bit of a sense of how it’s going to go.
What were the other two that you mentioned before?
The other big one that I worked on is reducing my Neuroticism and trying to become less anxious. People hate this recommendation, but the way to do that is meditation.
Did you do guided? I feel like for a lot of the people who dread meditation, guided is much easier than they perceive.
I do like guided better. I did various kinds. I did guided ones through Happier. It’s an app that anyone can download. Especially loving-kindness is very nice if you are someone who hates meditation. I also did a class called MDSR, which involves 45 minutes of meditation every single day by yourself.
You sound like the type of person who if I said, “Would you like to go to a torture chamber or a week-long silent retreat?” You’d be like, “I’d take the torture chamber.”
Honestly, sometimes, I was like, “I need to feel or hear something. This is so annoying.” At one point, I did a full day-long silent meditation retreat, which I almost lost my mind during, but it did work. I became less neurotic, weirdly.
Meditation works.
Meditation does work, I’m sorry to say.
That could be the best line in the episode. We’re going to start with that as the highlight.
People are like, “Not me,” or, “I’m not going to do it,” writers especially, but it does work. Honestly, a lot of it was this class and some of the stuff we learned about Buddhism through the class. A lot of it seemed very simple at the moment and too basic, but there’s something about having little aphorisms or little bomb mats to fall back on during tough moments. It helped me. It might be different for everyone else though. If you’re not someone who enjoys Buddhism, you probably would not like the class.
I had someone describe this to me once. I’m going to mess up the terminologies, but consciousness is like a flashlight. All this stuff is going around, but where you shine it is what you feel and what your reality is. We all know this from whatever your poison is, left or right. If you watch the news for five hours, you’ll feel worse and angrier because one version of the world is falling apart and another, different version of the world is falling apart. If you had never watched that, your mind would be in a different place. You can see that.
As a journalist, I can’t recommend not watching the news.
You should read a lot.
You should read The Atlantic. That’s the concept. The thing they always say is, “Let your thoughts pass by like clouds.”
You could choose to turn on the flashlight or turn it down.
The concept behind this is that all you have is the present moment. Whatever you’re feeling, experiencing, or thinking about in the present moment is what your life is. It’s not all that other stuff going on in the background. I found that helpful.
There’s a phrase that regret is people who are looking to the past, anxiety is usually people looking too much into the future, and the present is the solution for both of those.
You’re not going to ever be able to completely stop thinking about the past or the future. Do you think it’s helpful to think, “Is the future going to be scary or is there a possibility it will go well?” It is trying to think about things differently, which I know sounds simple, but meditation helped with.
The past is helpful. It’s like, “I burned myself by touching the hot stove. I can call myself an idiot forever or use that to not burn myself going forward.”
I’ve noticed that a lot of people who hate meditation are also mean to themselves.
They don’t want to be with their own thoughts.
Loving kindness sounds cheesy, but a lot of it is being nicer to yourself and admitting that you’re doing the very best that you can and that’s where you are. It is having more of an open and loving feeling toward yourself, which did not come naturally to me.
Loving-kindness is simply being nicer to yourself, admitting you’re doing your best, and having an open, loving feeling toward yourself.
It always seems like one of these hokey things, but it is fairly powerful. It is something that is embedded in most of the morning routines of pretty highly successful people.
I don’t have as much time to meditate because I am a new parent, but spending time with a baby can be meditative because you’re not supposed to look at your phone. They don’t talk yet and they don’t do a whole lot, so you’re just watching this being exist in the world a lot. I’m glad I did meditation before I had a baby because I do think that it makes me more open to doing that for sometimes hours at a time, being alive with this little infant. That’s a form of meditation that I do.
Nurture Vs. Nature: Understanding Personality Development
Another thing you dive into in the book is the genetic factor versus the environmental factor. I’m sure a lot of people are curious about that. We’ll talk about that because a lot of people want to fix other people’s personalities, which we can go into. It’s a different problem. Having gone through this experiment, the research, and everything, where are you on the nurture versus nature scale of this?
This was interesting because a lot of people are like, “You can’t change your personality. It’s genetic.” If you think about it, no one is exactly like their parents. You pretty much don’t know anyone who’s their parents’ twin. Maybe they differ in politics, hobbies, or something else. That means that something is happening between you getting that genetic material and you becoming the person that you are.
The way one researcher explained it to me is that you get ingredients from your parents. You may get some tendency toward being friendly or being anxious. You get these little impulses, but then how you put them together is more individual and it’s more up to you. Even if you get eggs, milk, and flour from your parents, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have pancakes. You might have an omelet, a souffle, or waffles. You’re going to end up as a slightly different person depending on what experiences you go through. My parents immigrated when I was very young. Growing up in the US made me into a completely different person than I would’ve been had we stayed in the USSR.
You will end up as a slightly different person depending on what experiences you actually go through.
Even though you were here, probably relaying a lot of these experiences and their impact, which is more environmental, probably also faded into it. Think about depression in kids. That has impacted people for generations.
I’m from Texas, but the thing I constantly hear is that I don’t seem like I’m from Texas. People think I’m more like a cynical New Yorker even though I’ve never lived in New York. That’s because my parents are cynical and I picked some of that up. You don’t end up genetically or exactly like either of your parents.
I know it’s a catchy headline. It doesn’t sound like we’re talking about changing personalities. Whatever our strengths are, there are some rough edges or some situations where those become problems. How do we take out the edges? If I’m super relaxed, chill, and get along with every person, that’s great in 90% of the cases, but I have a real problem if I need to find a job or some other things where I am going to have to learn how to go against that nature for a fair amount of time. I think about a lot of this with my own kids. They each have different strengths. They each have different weaknesses associated. It’s not like you have to go fix this, but if the thing you need to do isn’t the thing that you know how to do, you’re going to have to reconcile that.
Some researchers think that personality change is more like this concept called free traits. We all have different traits that we can adopt at certain times when the situation calls for it. Think about an introverted professor, but he has to give an inspirational talk to a bunch of students.
That is a perfect example. It could also be a leader.
He’s going to take on the free trait of Extroversion for that moment. He might have to learn how to do that. It might not come very naturally to him.
He probably has to go practice in the mirror ten times.
It might take a little bit more effort than someone who’s naturally extroverted. There’s this idea that we all have situations where we have to rise to the occasion. You might be the most agreeable, sweetest, nicest person, but if someone wrongs your kids in some way, maybe not.
After the third Ponzi scheme that you’ve signed up for, you might want to become a little more discerning.
You’re like, “No more.” For people who are like, “I don’t want to change my personality,” it’s comforting that there’s this idea that you don’t have to become a completely different person. You can shapeshift to meet the demands of the moment.
You don’t have to become a completely different person. You can shape-shift to meet the demands of the moment.
You are changing your personality to meet the circumstances. I have a personality of always trying to make things better. I’ve had to learn over time that if I try to make everything better, I won’t make anything better. I can exhaust people, whether that’s work, family, spouse, or otherwise. If I’m like, “That’s who I am. I’m going to run like that,” I’m going to cause more problems for myself.
You might have to dial down your conscientiousness a little bit because you’re too conscientious.
I’m going to let that mistake go and not say anything. One of the parenting things I heard someone say years ago and I’ve tried to adopt is you can’t want things for your kid and they have to want it, but you can tell them what’s required. It’s like, “You want to be an astronaut. I’m not going to tell you you can or can’t do it but I’m going to tell you what’s required.” You want to get into Harvard Law School. You want to become a gymnast. You want all these things. It’s helpful to be honest about what is required. Some of those requirements may be very against your natural tendencies, so you have to decide, “Do I want that badly enough?”
It was a great example you gave. If I want to lead a company and I’m an introvert, I’ve got to give some inspiring speeches sometimes. I can’t do that from a keyboard. The extrovert probably starts speaking and then figures out what she’s going to say afterward. The introvert may have to practice that twenty times in a mirror and it may be uncomfortable, but it’s the requirement of the job at some point.
There’s a story of someone in the book who’s from this small town and was always a party guy. He legitimately loved to party. He loved to drink and play golf. He went to college, and in college, he realized that he wanted to become an academic psychologist.
Those things were not compatible.
He was like, “This means I can’t play golf all the time.” He bought a book on how to study, made flashcards, and studied diligently with someone else. He got mentorship from people who could help him. He became super conscientious because he knew that you could not be a professional academic while drinking all day, and it worked. He is a tenured professor now. He wasn’t like, “I suck. I’m too much of a party guy.” He was like, “I got to buckle down if I want to meet my goals.”
Balancing Authenticity And Fitting Into Social Groups
He was clear on what he wanted and he was clear on what he had to do. This goes to a question I wanted to ask you that’s related. You talk about the struggle to balance between being authentic and fitting into a group. We all deal with this socially. We deal with this on professional teams. I’m curious. My viewpoint is similar to what we were talking about. Sometimes, you have to play the game. If you’re always conscientious and constantly pointing out all the things your friends are doing wrong, eventually, they’re not going to want to hang out with you. How have you come to understand how to balance this so you’re not losing your authenticity but you can meet the moment?
Something from my first book would be helpful, which is a concept called idiosyncrasy credits. This is an idea that when you first start out working with a group, you want to fit in more than what makes sense for you. You want to do whatever the group is already doing. Gradually, as you gain influence within the group, the people in the group start to like you, and you can pioneer a new direction. I wouldn’t go into an established happy hour group and say, “Guys, we should start meeting here instead.” Go to their location the first 5 or 6 times and then be like, “What about this other bar that opened up across the street?” for a low-stakes example. You don’t have to permanently become someone else, but there is a way of ramping up your authenticity.
You’re trying to make it into the tribe. That’s interesting. We touched on this. I can imagine people reading the book or reading this and being like, “I need to go fix my partner’s personality. These are all the things I don’t like about them. This is how they could do better.” Give me all of your do’s and do-nots and caution flags when it’s not you that you want to change these things.
I did not try to change my partner’s personality. I personally wish that he was a lot more conscientious. It’s honestly hard to change someone else. You hear this from people in the support group for the partners. It’s hard to change someone who doesn’t want to change. A lot of these traits involve digging deep and wanting to change in some way. Especially with anxiety, you can’t just tell someone to stop worrying.
I’ve said, “Stop being anxious,” before. I’ve been told it’s not very helpful.
You have to look inside yourself and be like, “What am I anxious about? How can I do this?” Conscientiousness is probably the easiest one because it is making lists, doing the calendar ring, and getting places on time. You can coach someone as far as like, “If you leave fifteen minutes earlier, you will get there on time. If you always put your keys here, you’ll always be able to find them.” Even then, they have to keep up that habit day-to-day.
If you’re in a relationship and you read this book and did some things, and your partner sees that you are getting better results and you are happier and they are motivated to follow that process, that seems to work if you are trying to push them into it. I haven’t seen that work. There’s a lot of change that we want in other people but, unfortunately, they have to want it.
Most of these studies only show results when the person themselves wants to change in a certain direction.
The Role Of Trauma Vs. Small Changes In Personality Transformation
I’m curious. We skipped over this. A lot of people associate personality change with a formative event, whether it’s an epiphany, a trauma, or some other massive life change. How does that formulate the basis of change more than repeating small actions and behaviors? I want to say effective but trauma and effective don’t go well together. I think you understand the question.
There’s been super interesting research on this where researchers have both measured people’s personalities over the years and also asked them, “Was there an event in the past ten years that changed your personality?” People are like, “Yes, my divorce.” They’ll be like, “How did it change your personality?” They’ll be like, “It made me more extroverted,” or something.
They go back and look at the tests, and that person became more extroverted after they got divorced, so it does map. However, there were no patterns as far as how any individual event changes your personality. There are some small signals. In starting a new job, people usually become more conscientious. In starting a new relationship, people usually become less neurotic.
It wears off. Is that it?
It’s not a very huge signal. If you ask 100 people, maybe 60 people will have that happen but the other 40 won’t. The other 40 will have some random change instead, like they got into a new relationship. They became way more extroverted because maybe their partner was a huge extrovert and they started going out all the time together. Life events don’t tend to change personality in any consistent way. That can also be a good thing because you don’t have to worry that because your life has gone a certain way, you’re always going to be disagreeable or whatever else. You can do the habits and the behaviors that will ultimately lead to change.
Dealing With Anxiety And Neuroticism: Practical Strategies
Neuroticism, anxiety is one that a lot of people would say, “I’d love to change but I don’t know how.” Societally, it’s more prominent than ever. There’s something in the water. I have some suspicions around it. Technology and parenting seem to be at the top of that list. Other than the meditation, what was effective for you in tempering your anxiety and changing your neuroticism?
This is another one that people don’t always love to hear. I work out pretty much every single day. Honestly, for me, that works, especially as a short-term fix. I tend to get a lot of pent-up anxious energy.
Fight or flight. You got to burn it off.
I have to off-gas it and do cardio in particular. Some people find weights work better, but doing cardio and fast yoga helps me with that. Exercise is good for you. That’s backed by research. That’s not a research-backed personality change technique but it is something that worked for me. Journaling is one that they all recommend. People are like, “I don’t want to journal.” It does help because even if you write down what you’re worried about and then you go back and look at it a month later, you’ll find that it didn’t happen. Honestly, it is learning like, “I was worried. It didn’t happen.”
It’s self-accountability. In a way, that’s what journaling is. I love how you’re afraid to even suggest these things, which implies that it’s probably what people need.
People always want an anxiety strategy that doesn’t take any work and is not meditation.
They want the Ozempic for anxiety, right?
It’s Xanax, but Xanax is bad for you.
You should not be on that long-term. I’m not a doctor or anything, but from what I know, it’s very effective in the short-term, not a healthy long-term thing.
I can’t recommend that one.
Was there anything in terms of self-talk or changing your thinking like, “I’m not going to think about this trip tomorrow.” Was there some rewiring in terms of where you put your focus? That is a big driver for a lot of people in my understanding of anxiety.
One thing that my meditation teacher would say that ended up being helpful for me was she would always say, “Things happen that we don’t like.” I know this sounds crazy, but for a long time, I thought that everyone else’s lives were going exactly the way they wanted except for mine. I thought everything was going perfectly for them.
That’s also because Facebook and Instagram are the top 5% of everyone’s lives with everything else omitted.
I’m like, “I’m the one struggling and everyone else has it all figured out.” Reminding yourself that everyone has things happen to them that are not ideal and it’s not necessarily your fault was so helpful in so many moments. I traveled with an infant by myself. Many things happen that you don’t like on a day like that.
Everyone has things happen to them that are not ideal, and it’s not necessarily your fault.
Do you think the universe gives you what you need? There’s a piece of it that, too. That day gave you this book and gave you all of this stuff.
Everything is copy. The way I applied it to that travel day is like, “This is temporary. It is so annoying to haul this car seat and this screaming baby across this Dulles shuttle bus thing.”
The people movers are terrible. I was there. Can we talk for a second? This is an airport in the middle of a foreign country that had all the real estate in the world, and they decided to build separate terminals. There’s a train, but they’re these human people movers that look like they’re out of Star Wars.
They’re like buses, but they’re bad.
On twenty-foot stilts.
They’re not good. One concept of Buddhism is that everything is temporary. You’re not going to die on the people mover. You’re going to get off the people mover, and then every day that you’re not on it will look better by comparison. For some reason, that was helpful to me.
The Impact Of Gentle Parenting On Child Development
A last concept not related to your book but of particular interest to me that I’d love to dig into is that you wrote a feature about the rising trend of gentle parenting. You interviewed some influencers involved in that. What was your impression of the style and, importantly, the impacts and outcomes that it’s having?
I did the reporting in most of the writing when I was pregnant.
It’s very easy to judge when you don’t have kids.
I was like, “I’m going to be a gentle parent. This is exactly what I’m going to do.” My kid is ten months old and he started biting us. It was so funny how fast I was like, “Quit biting.”
What is the definition of a gentle parent? I know what it means.
According to the people that I interviewed, you’re not supposed to yell or spank. You’re also not supposed to do timeout or say no. You’re only supposed to use positive methods.
What evidence did these people have that this creates better and healthier adults? This is the one I’m focused on. I’ve been looking at almost 100 years of research and there’s a big disconnect between what some of the experts of today are saying and outcomes over a longitudinal basis.
The thing is timeout, in particular, is very well studied and it is considered effective. It’s behavioral.
Do you disagree with that?
Yeah. They would not ever do a timeout, but the research on timeout suggests that timeout works. They argue based on other types of research that they look at. It’s not exactly study versus study, but they look at neuroscience research more. They’re like, “When you punish a child, they don’t learn that they’re not supposed to do that thing. They learn to be mad at you, and that perpetuates the problem.” It’s a debate among experts.
It’s a duration viewpoint. You have some people saying, “This is what happens at the moment, but what does that look like ten years later when you never say no?” To me, that’s a different set of data.
We’re going to find out because this honestly took off not that long ago. I read some of the early gentle parenting books and they’re like, “Try not to beat your kid.”
Beating your kid is not healthy and creates one set of problems. I am 98% convinced though that we are creating an entirely different set of problems with an evidence-backed over the long-term equal and opposite reaction to stop beating your children as a parent.
I had one friend who was at a kid’s birthday party and the kid did something bad. He was five or whatever. He dropped her cake, kicked her, or something, and then was like, “I don’t have to apologize.” He heard that from somewhere.
I tend to believe that there are actions and consequences in life, and I don’t mean that all the consequences are negative. You do something and there’s an input and an output. You learn organically how that works. Be mean to people and they’re mean back. It seems like we’re interfering with that natural reaction or evolution where people would learn some of these causes and effects that are going to be true for the rest of their lives.
There’s a lot of bad advice out there. The problem is time. If the answer is your kid wasn’t yelling or screaming in the short-term and they ended up not throwing a fit because you let them have the Cheerios every morning and whatever, that might be a great six-hour result. It might be a horrible ten-year result.
Nothing stops my son from biting quite like saying no firmly and putting him down, which is not what a gentle parent would say.
It’s like, “If you need to bite, that’s okay. You do you.”
We started with that, but he has teeth and it’s very painful.
I would like to hang out with gentle parenting kids. I’m happy to be proven wrong on this but I’m suspicious of some of it.
Fair enough.
Learning From Personal And Professional Mistakes
Last question for you, and this is multi-variant. It could be singular or repeated. What’s a personal or professional mistake you’ve made that you learned the most from?
Saying no to hanging out because I thought it was a waste of time. That was a personal mistake.
This is your new extroverted self.
I thought that it was not important to ever talk to people. That was not correct. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that. Changing that has been meaningful to me.
Thank you for joining us. Where can people learn more about your book and your work?
You can read my substack. It’s OlgaKhazan.Substack.com. I’m at TheAtlantic.com with all the other writers. You can buy Me, But Better wherever books are sold.
Me, But Better will be released soon. Pick up your copy. Thank you again for joining us. Your book gave me a lot to think about, especially about my own personality. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me.
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To our audience, thanks for tuning in to the show. Before you go, if you enjoyed this episode or the show in general, I’d appreciate it if you could leave a review. That’s what helps new readers discover the show. If you’re tuning in from Apple Podcasts, select the library icon, click on Elevate, scroll down to the bottom, and you can leave a rating or a review. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Olga Khazan
- The Atlantic
- Olga Khazan on Substack
- Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World
- Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
- Personality Assessor
- Antifragile
