Personality
👉 Here’s a summary of what we covered:
➡️ Personality is our strategy for meeting our needs in the world
➡️ People vary in how much they experience needs across different domains – we call this trait sensitivity
➡️ When our needs aren’t met, we experience stress
➡️ The more sensitive we are, the more opportunities we have to experience stress
➡️ When our brains experience enough stress over an extended period of time, we shift into survival mode to better adapt us to high stress environments
➡️ Survival mode is characterized by:
Lowered threshold to activate instinctive “fight or flight” reactions
Exploitation of a few “tried and true” strategies - or coping mechanisms - that historically meet our most urgent needs
Diminished sense of agency as bypassed cognition limits our conscious setting of goals and acting on them
➡️ This lack of agency gets us stuck in patterns of behavior that don’t meet our needs and feel outside of our control – causing further stress, and impairing our ability to function
Importantly, there are no “good” or “bad” personalities.
🤔 Reflection Questions Recap:
What makes your personality different from others? How would someone else describe you versus how you describe yourself?
What types of experiences do you feel most sensitive to or intolerant of?
What are the most stressful areas of your life right now? Think about that stress as an indicator of a need that’s not being met. What need is it?
Think of a situation in your life where your sensitivity has led you to need more and therefore caused you to experience more stress?
How does this description of survival mode resonate with you? What are your tried and true strategies for coping with stress?
What level of function do you feel like you’re at currently? Would you like to change that?
Questions on how to apply these concepts to your own life? Take the next step.
Live Expert Events
Join an upcoming live event to hear focused discussions of these topics with our teams and answer your most pressing questions
1x1 Training
Our experienced trainers will work with you 1x1 to apply what you’ve learned in this course to your own personal experience.
Newsletter
Join us as we explore the brain and mind. Sign up for our newsletter to get daily insights, research updates and lived experience stories