Tag: mind

Aside from baseball and competitive singing TV shows, there is likely no better American pastime than blaming things on your parents. Whether it’s that distinctive voice you use when you get mad or an impossible-to-kick barbecue ribs habit, everyone likely has something that they want to blame on the people that birthed and raised them. And there’s nothing that connects us more to our parents than our genes.

Indeed, The Simpsons once dedicated a whole episode to Lisa’s fear that she’d inherit Homer’s trademark stupidity due to an intelligence-decreasing “Simpson gene.” But what qualities do we truly inherit from our parents, and what characteristics do we develop over time from how we’re raised and develop? Eye and hair color are one thing, but can a child really inherit their parents’ wit (or lack thereof)? Is three-point shooting ability passed down?

There are a few genetic features that are expected, namely physical ones; there are also some traits that we get from our folks that may not immediately come to mind. And with other traits, science continues to debate the age-old query as to whether all that makes us “us” comes from the environment we are raised in or our own genetic makeup.

A key question: “Nature” or “Nurture”?

It’s a question hotly debated around both kitchen tables and scientific circles: Are we born with our best attributes entwined in our DNA? Or do we develop them over time from our environment?

It’s all based on the genetic blueprint.

A reminder from this Stated Cleary video tells us that DNA is the molecular blueprint that makes proteins, which in turn make cells, which form and eventually make a living thing, like a plant, a person, or a dinosaur. DNA is passed down in tightly-wound coils known as chromosomes. When people talk about genes being passed down, they’re talking about the genes within a person’s set of chromosomes that come from their mother and father.

Mark Payson, MD, is the practice director for the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine of Northern Virginia, and he states that there are many things that are “hardwired” into us from birth: “Certain traits, physical traits, are very clearly genetic. Our eye color, our hair color, our skin color. Our height. It’s all based on the genetic blueprint.”

These physical characteristics are often the most obvious features we inherit. The old, “He has his mother’s eyes!” of it all.

However, less identifiable traits, like parts of a person’s personality or someone’s interests, fall into a more debatable category. Did that love of tennis come from deep within your DNA, or was it because you were playing doubles with mom since the day you could pick up a racket?

Answering such questions with certainty can be nearly impossible. Genetics are at the very core of what makes us unique, thus making any attempt to study them fraught with variables. But there is one way scientists can gain a better understanding of how the genetic lottery can play out: twins. Specifically, twins with identical DNA.

Payson describes the useful findings of some of these studies: “People have done twin studies where they look at twins and they see how similar or different they are. The best studies are when they looked at identical twins that were separated at birth, and then 20, 30 years later, they meet each other.” Such revealing studies are a genetic bonanza for interested experts. “It’s amazing as to how similar they are sometimes,” Payson says.

There is no doubt upbringing and the nurturing, or lack of nurturing, of a talent or attribute can have an effect. Todd Graham, a biotechnology consultant at Delevan Street Biosciences, points out that some traits can be more like tendencies and require a certain amount of environmental support to flourish. “If someone has a trait to be tall, but is malnourished, it won’t come out as strongly,” explains Graham.

Despite the debate, there are plenty of traits that have clear or highly likely genetic ties, at least enough so that you can definitely throw them into your parents’ face when you’re feeling rebellious.

Blame genetics for never getting your shot in the NBA.

It may be all too obvious that something like height is passed down from your parents, so if both your folks are under 5’5″, your hoop dreams may be pipe dreams. But there are many signs that athletic ability itself can also be deeply hardwired into your genes.

Payson says that athleticism is unquestionably a mix of both genetics and upbringing, though there’s no doubting the clear physical gifts and abilities that some athletes inherit—it’s usually when you hear the phrase “natural athlete” get tossed around. Payson explains that there are “certain physical traits in terms of strength and how quickly your muscles respond and endurance that certainly you can be genetically predisposed to have.”

ACTN3 is a high-level muscle protein that is often associated with elite athletes. The muscle composition is just one of many factors that separates some Olympic athletes from the rest of us weekend joggers.

Graham discusses the variances in what effect genetics have on an athlete’s abilities: “There are a number of facts involved
in such skills, and it’s not clear how well they are linked yet. We know that slow-twitch muscle versus fast-twitch muscle is important. Slow-twitch muscle is useful in sports that require explosive power, like track and field, baseball and football, while fast-twitch muscle is more useful in endurance sports like distance running.”

Genes go a long way, but if junior was raised since the age of 6 to eat, sleep, and breathe hoops, that certainly has an impact as well. Payson points out that becoming a pro athlete requires “years and years and years of high-level training. If your parent is an athlete and you grow up in that environment and you start doing that from a very young age, that is an enormous advantage.”

Just how much influence genetics has in sports versus development and practice remains a source of constant debate. Sports Illustrated’s David Epstein wrote a whole book seeking to explain “the Sports Gene,” and his takeaway mirrors that of other experts: that neither one factor on its own ensures athletic glory.

So just because neither one of your parents ever played in the big leagues doesn’t mean you won’t have a chance. Like the old adage that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, you also won’t be a superior athlete in 100 percent of the sports you don’t play.

Sneezing into the sun is a thing. And it’s hereditary.

Looking at the many odd things that children can inherit from their parents, perhaps no other shines as bright as one especially peculiar trait. There are certain people who will sneeze as a reflex just from catching sight of the sun or from entering a room with an abundance of light. It is called Autosomal-Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome, and the honest-to-goodness acronym for this particular condition is the ACHOO syndrome.

Are you a sun-sneezer? If so, it’s more than likely you’ll be able to blame this nose nuisance on your parents. Graham talks about the genetic nature of the ACHOO syndrome: “The European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology published research last March about how ACHOO syndrome was observed in 57 percent of a patient population in a hospital in Germany. ”

According to the study, a “familial disposition” to the syndrome was observed, meaning that the sun sneezing could be traced back on the family tree.

So if you greet your mornings with a smattering of mucus, feel free to blame the mess on your genes.

Blame your parents if you’ve got the taste palate of a picky five-year-old.

Most everyone has at least one favorite dish that is “just like mom made,” but what if this “mom” of yours is responsible for limiting the full potential of your tastebuds?

If you’re a supertaster, you are born with a different anatomy.

Payson says that there is a genetically gifted group of taste gods that walk among us: “There’s a phenomenon called ‘supertasters,‘ which are these people that seem to have an ability to taste a wider variety of taste than us poor average people, which certainly is thought to be genetic.”

If you were supertaster, you’d most likely already know it: Some vegetables would be unbearably bitter, most sugar would be too sweet to savor, and spicy peppers could send you running for the hills. One of the early forerunners of research on the super-taster front is Linda Bartoshuk, PhD, who revealed some of the biology behind this phenomenon in a feature for Yale Medicine.

“If you’re a supertaster, you are born with a different anatomy. [Everyone has] fungiform papillae, which are the little structures that hold taste buds. You have many, many more of them if you are a supertaster,” Bartoshuk said. “It is like reaching up and feeling something with 500 fingers as opposed to 50.”

Supertasting is not that uncommon, with roughly one-in-four Caucasians have the genetic makeup of a super-taster.

Is this another clear instance of genetics playing a role in how we perceive taste and smell? Payson says those tricky X and Y chromosomes may have something to do with it: “There are gender differences where women in general have a better sense of smell than men, there are certain smells that women in general are a little more aware of.”

The big takeaway is that the next time you find yourself in a fight at the dinner table with your folks, you can always blindside them with the old “It’s your fault I don’t have a super tasting abilities!”

DNA can sometimes be a grab bag of diseases.

Ultimately, one of the most significant reasons for knowing your genes and your genetic history is less about home runs and taste buds and more about knowing what kind of health issues you may face one day.

There is a s
ignificant list of diseases that are passed down genetically, such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, sickle cell anemia, and Marfan syndrome.

Sometimes a syndrome can occur if not all the genes are passed down. Payson points to conditions like Angleman and Prader-Willi syndromes, which develop because part of the genetic code in the chromosomes has been inexplicably deactivated. This is otherwise known as genetic imprinting: an unfortunate genetic circumstance that leads to the syndromes listed above, which are known for affecting the nervous system and can cause seizures, developmental disabilities, and speech deficits.

Marfan syndrome is another genetic disease that Graham calls “particularly notable.” This disease has had effects around the sports world recently because of it is commonly seen in tall, thin people…the very kind of people who seek to become NBA players.

“It is a condition related to problems with producing connective tissue, which can also result in heart issues such as mitral valve prolapse and aortic aneurysm,” explains Graham. He says that the syndrome has been found in some sought-after basketball prospects, forcing the league to start to pay special attention to the genetics of its all-star athletes.

Forget about your genetic past: The future is now!

Interest in preventing diseases and plain old scientific curiosity has propelled the science of genetics forward with blistering speed in the past decades.

Our genetics influence nearly everything about who we are and how we perceive the world.

According to Payson, the rate at which we are learning new things about our genes is stunning: “Our understanding of genetics has increased tremendously in the last 5 or 10 years.” He says that because of our ability to map out an entire human genome, “we are going to find so many things about people, and also susceptibility to various diseases.”

So there is some good news concerning heredity diseases: Scientists may be able to treat or plan for some of these syndromes that wait like ticking time bombs in our genetic blueprints. “From a medicinal standpoint,” Payson says, “we can determine what medicine will work best for you depending on how your body will process the medicine.”

Payson sums up the importance of our genes pretty succinctly: “Our genetics influence nearly everything about who we are and how we perceive the world.”

It is amazing to think that the most simple connection, parent to child, contains such a complex and incredibly detailed blueprint for every single human being. It can influence so much of who we are and who we’ll become.

So even though you can heap some blame on your folks for your less-than-noteworthy fastball or regular ol’ tastebuds, you can also be grateful for your best attributes because those have been passed down to you as well.

Courtney and Vann Thornton started out as friends.
“We wrote music. More importantly, we connected over music,” Courtney wrote about their early days. Gradually, though, the two became more than just friends making music.
[pullquote align=”center”]There was something a little unusual about Courtney and Vann’s friendship-turned-relationship-turned-marriage[/pullquote]
“He is very handsome and I became increasingly aware of that as we bonded and laughed,” Courtney wrote. “I enjoyed his company and found myself happier than I had been in a long time.”
After several months, as the pair’s friendship blossomed, and they began dating. Pretty soon, they decided to tie the knot.
While that all may sound pretty normal (if not idyllic), there was something a little unusual about Courtney and Vann’s friendship-turned-relationship-turned-marriage: Courtney was 25. Vann was 50.

Which brings us to the question—how common are age gap relationships?

Turns out, they’re more common than you might think, and they become even more common when you’re looking at those who have married more than once.
The majority of heterosexual Americans (about 80 percent) opt for a partner within five years of their own age when they first marry, according to the Pew Research Center. That number, however, drops to 57 percent for the men surveyed and 62 percent for the women in subsequent marriages.

While those numbers may seem to lend credence to the old cliche that “age is just a number,” other research suggests it’s not quite that simple.

Research out of the University of Colorado at Boulder found that both men and women reported greater relationship satisfaction with younger spouses, specifically in the early years of the marriage.

A study by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, published in 2014, suggests another important implication of the previous work in the field.

The study, which recorded and analyzed a variety of data from 3,000 individuals who had been married at least once in their lives, centered on the relationship between the amount of money spent on a marriage and that longevity of the marriage. Throughout the course of the study, though, another interesting trend emerged: a correlation between age differences and marriages ending in divorce.

Neither study, however, was able to ascertain the reasons why large age gap relationships correlated to initially high but rapidly declining satisfaction and eventual divorce.

Jonathan Bennett, however, has a few ideas why. Bennett is a certified counselor and a relationship coach; he also runs The Popular Man, a website he says is “dedicated to helping men make friends, find love, succeed at work, and live a happy, free, and fulfilling life.”

Bennett believes that the initial high levels of satisfaction among those with younger partners may owe, at least in part, to an “us against the world” sort of mentality caused by social disapproval. According to Bennett, “Forbidden or frowned upon relationships provide a greater meaning and purpose to love. The relationship becomes about standing up to others, even entire institutions and systems.”
As time passes, though, that disapproval may grow wearisome.
“The negative social pressure from age-gap marriages can take its toll,” he tells HealthyWay, a sentiment supported by a 2006 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “Over time, that judgment can get tiresome and cause one or both partners to want to end the relationship.”
Bennett also tells us that, “age gaps don’t always age well.” Large age differences can also mean that a couple find themselves in significantly disparate stages of life.

Ultimately, though, while age may be an important consideration when entering a relationship, it’s far from the only factor.

For anyone considering initiating a relationship with someone of a significantly different age, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions.

First, how much do you actually have in common? The saying goes that “opposites attract,” but a 2005 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggests that perceived similarity is highly indicative of a highly committed, long-term relationship’s longevity.
Next, are your social circles supportive? As both Bennet and the 2006 study referenced above mention, general and ongoing disapproval of a relationship can lead to fatigue and a reduced commitment to resolving tensions that arise between yourself and your spouse.

Finally, are you financially prepared to deal with a long-term relationship with someone much older or younger? According to McKennish, couples with a large age gap “tend to have a much larger decline in marital satisfaction when faced with an economic shock than couples that have a very small age difference.” Additionally, age-gap relationships can present difficulties in retirement planning.

Courtney Thornton, however, has a more romantic take on the matter.

“Love is a rare thing and it is worth fighting for,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, you can’t help who you fall for; you love who you love.”

It’s a scenario familiar to all parents: You put your child down in her crib so you can do the dishes or get some other household chore done. She immediately becomes hysterical. You can hardly focus on the task at hand with all of her crying.
Eventually abandoning your fruitless efforts, you start walking toward her and she puts her arms up, begging to be held. As soon as you give in and scoop her up into your arms, the crying stops. Peering at her cheeks, you notice there isn’t even a hint of tears. Believe it or not, your child just deceived you.

According to Dan Ribacoff, a private investigator, credibility assessment expert, and polygraph examiner, children learn to deceive their parents when they’re as young as 2 months old. “[Children] learn at a very young age, ‘Hey, I’d rather be in mommy’s warm arms than in this cold bed,’” he says. So they turn on the fake waterworks to get what they need.

Why We Lie

Ribacoff defines deception as anything that might be seen as deliberately misleading: lying, trickery, and even telling “white lies” to make oneself look better. According to Ribacoff, there are three main reasons people lie: “They don’t want to hurt you, they don’t want to look bad, or they want to scam you.”

“In an average 10-minute conversation, a person will lie at least one time.”

For instance, if you ask someone what they think of your new jacket, they might hate it but tell you they like it to spare your feelings. Or someone who wants to look more impressive in front of peers or a romantic prospect might say they are the manager of a business when they’re really just assistant manager.
And then there’s someone like Bernie Madoff, who can create an entire scheme just to defraud others.

While it might seem like a big jump to go from innocently commenting on someone’s clothing to Bernie Madoff, it’s all part of the same process. “Deception is part of survival,” Ribacoff says, “and that instinct is built in.” In fact, he says that deception is so ingrained in us, “In an average 10-minute conversation, a person will lie at least one time.”
And so finding out whether you’re being lied to becomes a survival mechanism as well. “Everyone needs to know if they’re being told the truth,” Ribacoff says. “You have to protect yourself against being victimized by people that will deceive you.”

The ability to discern truthfulness keeps you from spending a lot of money on a product that turns out to be a scam or from meeting someone from the internet in person who may be a serial killer. Everyone has human intuition that alerts them if they think someone isn’t being completely honest.

Trust your gut. Or not.

But too often, Ribacoff says, we want to believe the best about people, so we wind up suppressing that intuition. “We have human intuition built into us from caveman days—fight, flight, freeze, or surrender,” he says. “And people wind up killing that [intuition], and that’s how they become victims. They’ll actually turn their own radar systems off.”

“When you give me the truth, your brain is not working very hard, because it’s accessing information that is already there or not there. When you want to lie, your brain must work harder.”

So how can you tell if someone is being dishonest? Ribacoff says that there are physiological changes that happen in your body when you lie. The polygraph machine is an instrument that was created to measure these changes.

“The polygraph is actually several medical instruments that were put together to detect physiological changes that take place in the human body when a person lies,” Ribacoff says.
“The truth is in your memory. Your memory is like the hard drive in your computer—record found, no record found,” he explains. “When you give me the truth, your brain is not working very hard, because it’s accessing information that is already there or not there. When you want to lie, your brain must work harder. You have to create the lie, usually by accessing information that is already in your brain, and mixing the two: lie and truth. And then you have to express the lie in a way that seems credible.”

Brains and Lies

Ribacoff says that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans show that when someone tells the truth, they use only about seven parts of their brain. But when they lie, they have to use about 15 parts of their brain.

“Your brain really goes into ‘rev the engine’ mode when you lie.”

He compares the experience of watching a polygraph machine work to watching a mechanic check a car engine. “Your brain really goes into ‘rev the engine’ mode when you lie,” he says.

In fact, the human brain and a car motor are actually quite similar in what they need to operate. Just as an engine needs fuel, oxygen, and cooling to run properly, the brain needs blood, oxygen, and cooling.
“When you lie, you call for more blood, your blood pressure increases, your heart rate [increases], your oxygenation of that blood has to increase,” Ribacoff says. “And your sweat glands have to activate, otherwise your brain will overheat.” These bodily changes, all medical in nature, are how the polygraph does its work. “You can’t feel it, you can’t control it. But we can measure it.”
Obviously, you’re not going to be able to hook everyone you suspect of lying up to a polygraph machine. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. The process is tedious. A lot of preparation goes into a polygraph interview, and the test often has to be done three to five times. And although it’s not true that a polygraph machine can be “beat,” it is possible to deceive an inexperienced examiner.

“There’s only one reason to try to beat a polygraph test: You’re lying!”

“There is no way to beat a polygraph instrument,” Ribacoff says. “[But] you can defeat the examiner.” The internet is full of misinformation on how to “beat” a polygraph. “Really, none of it works, because an experienced examiner will see that [the behavior is] not natural,” says Ribacoff, adding, “because there’s only one reason to try to beat a polygraph test: You’re lying!”

Low-Tech Detection

So for someone who doesn’t have a polygraph, how can they detect mistruths in someone they’re talking with? Ribacoff says there are a lot of telltale signs that can give someone away. All of these behaviors are what polygraph examiners look for when interviewing a subject.
To start with, latency, hesitancy, and repeating the question usually means the subject is trying to fabricate their answer. “Repeating the question allows for time to fabricate the lie,” Ribacoff says. “A lot of ‘ums’ and ‘non-ums’ [show] hesitation also.”

There’s body language clues, like if a person is sweating or shaking or if they cross their arms. That’s usually out of a self-conscious desire to protect themselves. “If someone’s sitting in front of you, they will actually lean back and perhaps stretch their legs out, to try to get maximum distance between you and them,” Ribacoff says. “If I ask you a question, and within five seconds you shift positions in your chair, I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
All of these signs are ways to polygraph with your eyes and ears. Ribacoff adds that someone who’s lying will often either not answer the question or blame someone else. “Touching your nose also means, ‘what I’m telling you stinks,’” Ribacoff says. “These are all ways that humans are programmed. The sensory portion of the brain goes towards the nostrils when you say something that smells like crap.”

The best way to detect deception, however, is through written or spoken language. Examiners will often ask for written statements and look for the details a person includes or neglects to include. This process is called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis. Ribacoff told the story of a woman who was accused of causing serious harm to her husband but kept referring to him as “Mr. Smith.” “Who the hell calls their husband ‘Mr. Smith?’” This lack of pronouns, he says, allowed her to dehumanize the situation.
Even with these telltale signs, finding the truth can be complex. For Mary (not her real name), a former judge and arbitrator in the Chicago area, finding the truth in the courtroom was her profession.
In a courtroom, she says, “each side is doing its best to distort the truth in its favor. …This is very unlike the medical scenario, where everyone is trying to find the right answer and working collaboratively to find it… So in the trial arena, the fact finder is always very suspect of anyone who has something to win or lose in the trial.”
For Mary, it was rare to see visual or auditory signs that made it clear someone was lying.

“Personally, I always found it difficult to just decide that someone was telling a lie by just looking at them and listening to their testimony in a vacuum,” she says.
“A number of court reporters over the years thought that they could make that determination. I never questioned them about their opinions. But I’ve always wondered whether their position in the courtroom was helpful. By that, I mean their actual physical position, because they are in front of the witness and watching them as they transcribe their testimony.”

“People want to confess.”

Mary says that knowing whether she made the right decision over credibility assessments was one of the most difficult aspects of her job. “At the end of the day, it was very hard to say, ‘I got that right,'” she says. “You have to just make your best judgment, and I imagine I got it wrong from time to time. I imagine most people get it wrong from time to time.”
Still, Ribacoff maintains that if you take your time and are patient, you can get to the truth eventually. Guilt is a powerful motivating factor, and people want to share the truth. “People want to confess,” Ribacoff says. “There’s a saying in SCAN: ‘Everybody wants to tell you everything, you just have to be able to get them to tell you.’”

Any school child knows the three “Rs”: reading, writing, and arithmetic. It seems a given that these three skills will always form the backbone of a child’s educational development. Yet for students who graduated from elementary school before 2010, visiting a modern-day classroom may contain some noticeable differences.

In particular, one might notice the absence of cursive, the style of penmanship marked by conjoined letters. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCS), a set of benchmarks in math and English designed for kindergarten through twelfth grade, has set off a debate over handwriting and cursive and when—or even if—such skills should still be taught.

“The Common Core State Standards were developed through a state-led effort in 2009 and 2010 and published in June 2010,” says Olympia Meola, press secretary for the Council of Chief State School Officers, an organization that co-sponsored the standards.

“Since then, states have voluntarily chosen to adopt the Common Core, or chosen to develop other standards that prepare students for college and careers. There is not a standard specific to cursive writing in the Common Core; instead, these standards give schools and teachers the flexibility to teach cursive writing in the classroom. States also have the flexibility to adopt standards above and beyond the Common Core State Standards.”

To date, 42 of the 50 U.S. states have adopted the CCS, but only 14 have passed laws requiring cursive proficiency. Everyone from local, state, and federal officials to educators, psychologists, and scientists are sharply divided on the issue. Cursive’s defenders say it’s a valuable skill and can aid in word proficiency; its detractors call it a waste of time and want more relevant skill building, like keyboarding.

Steve Graham, Warner professor at Arizona State University’s School of Education, says that the benefits of handwriting can be boiled down to a few essential elements. “There’s different styles of handwriting: there’s manuscript, which is a stick and ball; there’s cursive, which has joined letters; and there’s italics,” he says.

“There’s other forms as well, but the two that have dominated this country are manuscript and cursive.” Graham says that in looking at these two forms of script and considering their benefits, it’s helpful to think in terms of reader and writer effects.

There’s evidence that suggests if your handwriting is less legible, then people form negative opinions about what you’re saying.

“By reader effects, what you’re really talking about in terms of handwriting … is if it’s hard to read what’s written because the handwriting is not legible or less legible, then that influences the reader. And second, there’s evidence that suggests if your handwriting is less legible, then people form negative opinions about what you’re saying.”

Knowing this, Graham says, the question becomes which is more legible: cursive or manuscript? “If you ask a person on the street, usually they’ll say manuscript,” he says. “But the reality is that there’s not much real difference in terms of legibility, if you have an equal amount of practice in both.”

In terms of writer effects, Graham says the thing to look at is automaticity. “The more automatic you are, usually the more fluent you are,” he says. “If you’re writing something by hand or you’re typing it, and your ideas are coming really fast but you’re not such a good typist or you’re not really quick with handwriting, then ideas might slip away out of your working memory as you’re trying to write them down.”

Graham points out this is something that happens to all writers, no matter how efficient they are. But it highlights the fact that someone’s dexterity with handwriting can interfere with other processes, like content generation.

Do we need to teach two forms of handwriting, or should we just teach one?

“So the question [now] is, which is faster: cursive, or manuscript?” Graham says. “If you ask the typical person on the street, the answer you’ll get is, ‘cursive’s faster.’ But when you actually look at the data, as long as there’s an equal amount of practice, then there’s not much difference. You might get a little edge for cursive for the speed issue, and for the legibility issue, you get a little bit of an edge for manuscript. …So, the question becomes: Do we need to teach two forms of handwriting, or should we just teach one? My opinion on this, given that’s such a crowded curriculum, is we should teach one.”

Graham’s assertion is that people are overreacting over the loss of cursive. “I think too much has been made of this issue,” he says.

In Arizona, you have state legislators passing a law that you have to teach cursive handwriting.

“In Arizona, you have state legislators passing a law that you have to teach cursive handwriting. Come on, give me a break—they don’t have anything better to do, that they need to be legislating what teachers teach in terms of … handwriting? I think this is one of these things [where] we assume we’re losing something, and I’m not exactly sure what we’re losing by teaching one versus teaching two, as long as we teach one well.”

Yet Virginia Berninger, an experimental and licensed clinical psychologist and professor emerita at the University of Washington, says that the loss of cursive puts students at a real disadvantage, particularly those with learning disab
ilities. Berninger has been involved in a number of studies that she says show the unique benefits of cursive on understanding letter formation.

For instance, a longitudinal study showed that when comparing manuscript, cursive, and keyboarding from students from grades four to seven, “It was the cursive that was uniquely contributing to [children’s] spelling and to their composing quality,” she says.

“We think that’s because with cursive, there are connecting strokes that link the letters, and we think that helps with creating those word units representing what you need for spelling.” Since cursive was originally invented to speed up writing, being able to write faster may have given students a composing advantage.

Berninger goes on to say that for students with learning disabilities in reading and writing, the physical act of handwriting is often beneficial. “What we’ve learned in our research in the last six years, is that even if a learning disability involves reading, like pronouncing words or reading comprehension, it still has writing problems associated with it,” she says.

This correlation between reading and writing in learning disabled children has largely been ignored. “Dyslexia is not just a reading disability,” she says. “In addition to word reading, the more persistent problems … are spelling problems. That can affect [a child’s] composing.”

Berninger’s recommendation then, contrary to Graham’s, is that children should be taught to be hybrid writers. “You teach manuscript first for two years, and then you teach them the cursive,” she says.

In due time, cursive will help with spelling and composing.

Teaching manuscript alone has its own benefits. “Teaching printing, we found in several studies, transfers to improving your word reading. We think because the production of the letters enhances perception of the letters. So that helps with reading, and in due time, cursive will help with spelling and composing.”

Berninger says it doesn’t even take that much to teach a student good handwriting. “People say, ‘With everything else we have to do, how can we possibly find time to teach handwriting?’ Well actually, it only takes five or 10 minutes a day, or even three times a week, and you really can accomplish a lot,” she says.

In other fields, like medicine and law, you do have members of the community that more actively participate in making the standards. For whatever reason, we have not accorded that privilege to the teachers.

Part of the issue for Berninger is that the Common Core standards are not written by actual educators. “We have people who are legislators, government regulars, educational policy people … they’re the ones that are writing these standards,” she says.

“Rarely if ever have they been classroom teachers, actually working with kids. We do think this is a critical issue—we’re not getting enough of the voice of the classroom teacher into making these standards and policies. In other fields, like medicine and law, you do have members of the community that more actively participate in making the standards. For whatever reason, we have not accorded that privilege to the teachers.”

One area in which Graham and Berninger agree is that there needs to be more keyboarding taught in the classroom. “It’s a changing world in terms of how we compose,” Graham says. “If you’re not at school, most composing isn’t done by hand now, it’s done digitally, or by spoken word when you speak into your phone.”

But Berninger says that in her research, she found that students don’t usually start to see benefits from keyboarding until they get to seventh grade.

This idea that we just need to use the technology, we don’t need our ‘old fashioned’ tools, it’s a mindset that we need to be a bit more cautious about in general.

She believes this might be because handwriting uses only one hand, but keyboarding uses both. Developmentally, right brain/left brain myelination doesn’t mature until early adolescence. It could also be due to the fact that keyboarding skills are neglected in the classroom. “Schools in general are not teaching kids to use the computers, the keyboarding part,” she says. “And so it may just be there hasn’t been as much instruction.”

Still, Berninger doesn’t believe that typing should ever replace handwriting. “Every problem we’re going to solve, we’re going to create technology for it,” she says. “So this idea that we just need to use the technology, we don’t need our ‘old fashioned’ tools, it’s a mindset that we need to be a bit more cautious about in general. That’s led to the dismissal of the importance of handwriting.”

But Graham says the real problem is a myopic focus on handwriting as just one of many skills students need to be good writers. He says that out of 20 or so interviews he does a year on the subject of
writing, eight out of 10 of those focus on handwriting alone. Only two are about writing more generally.

“That’s an odd balance, to be honest,” he says. “Handwriting is one of many skills that one needs to master to become a skilled writer. Students don’t write very well, and we don’t do a very good job of teaching it in schools. But we seem to be maniacally focused on handwriting.” He adds, “I don’t want to take away anything from handwriting, but it seems out of balance.”

Whether we’ve got the budget for it or not, luxury goods will probably never go out of style.

On the contrary, they couldn’t be more au courant. Globally, annual sales for luxury brands are rising at more than $200 billion per year.

So what drives us to buy these products? They’ve clearly tapped into a side of us that we just can’t suppress.

You may have many words to describe it, but there’s only one umbrella emotion that covers it all: pride. We buy luxury goods out of pride.

So is pride a good or a bad thing? That would depend on how you look at it, as well as which type of pride you’re experiencing.

Pride is two-faced.

Just as we would imagine it, one face is pretty admirable. The other? Not so much. But both sides play into our national love affair with luxury brands.

Let’s look at this long-standing tagline from Rolex: “A crown for every achievement.”

The idea that Rolex is working with is that if we feel accomplished, our authentic pride will lead us to seek out a reward. For example, after your boss announces that she would like to promote you, that feeling of accomplishment could lead you to buy yourself the new Apple iPhone. Or maybe you know that you will need a car for your first job, and since you graduated with honors, a car with all the bells and whistles is in order.

Well-meaning enough, right? It’s the type of pride we encourage in others.

Yet there’s another face for pride, and it’s called arrogance.

Imagine a handsome man driving a Mercedes-Benz with a beautiful woman in the passenger seat. She laughs at something he says and leans into him. Finally, he turns and sees you. He rolls up the tinted windows, hits the gas, and leaves you in the dust.

You go home, open a magazine, see the shine of that car once again—a Mercedes-Benz C-Class. “A class ahead,” the advertisement reads.

That’s the sort of image we tend to have when picturing hubristic pride. It’s snobbery. It’s also the feeling other luxury brands might try to give us when they market their products. They want us to imagine ourselves as that luxury car driver.

They want us to think about how it must feel to have what others want.

These two marketing schemes were not created equal.

So which is more likely to work?

Almost a decade ago, researchers Brent McFerran, Karl Aquino, and Jessica L. Tracy set forth to answer that question.

McFerran, an associate professor of marketing at Simon Fraser University in Canada, tells HealthyWay that he and Aquino were interested in studying luxury brands, and Tracy was in the middle of a study on the expression of pride.

“We thought there was a natural overlap there, particularly the association that seems to be held among many laypeople linking hubristic pride and luxury brands,” he says.

What they found through their combined research is that while authentic pride is more likely to drive a luxurious purchase, the results can actually be more hubristic.

In the paper “Evidence for two facets of pride in consumption: Findings from luxurious brands,” the researchers recount the time that one of them (they remain tight-lipped about who) had lunch with a friend and noticed a beautiful pair of sunglasses on the table.

He asked for an opportunity to try them on and found the sunglasses to be lightweight and perfectly fitting on the bridge of his nose. These weren’t cheap sunglasses. They were Prada.

He stood up from the table and walked to a nearby mirror, noticing several people glance in his direction, “the way people sometimes do when an arresting object catches their eye,” the paper states.

He stood up straighter and imagined wearing the glasses while taking a walk down a beach promenade.

After returning to the table, he was reluctant to give the glasses back. They had given him an air of superiority that he didn’t want to lose.

This, the authors say, is what we refer to as hubristic pride, or arrogance.

So here’s what we learned from the study:

There were seven experiments in total. In one, resear
chers gave participants a task that would lead them to feel either authentic or hubristic pride. The participants who completed the task and felt authentic pride were more likely to express a desire for luxury goods than those who felt hubristic pride, it turned out.

Authentic pride, in a phrase, made them want a Rolex, not a Casio.

In another, the researchers measured the chronic feelings of accomplished and snobbish participants. Those who experienced higher levels of accomplishment tended to have a stronger desire for luxury goods.

These two experiments led the researchers to believe that people are more motivated to buy luxury goods when they have a sense of authentic pride—hence the effectiveness of the Rolex tagline.

Still, this does not mean you’re safe from snobbery.

The key word that connects authentic pride to a luxurious good here is the purchase of the product.

The consumption of the product, though, is another story.

In one experiment, participants imagined an item they owned. Researchers found that if the item was a luxury brand, the participants were more likely to display hubristic pride.

Furthermore, no matter what your intentions are, other people will probably look at your luxury purchase as an act of snobbery.

The authors note in the paper that this highlights a paradox.

“These purchases are sought out of heightened feelings of accomplishment (and not arrogance), but they instead signal arrogance to others (rather than accomplishment),” they wrote.

Not everyone will experience a change in attitude, though.

There are a select group of people who seem to be a bit immune to the effects of luxury consumption.

According to the paper, McFerran and his fellow researchers believe those high in narcissism are less likely to experience a surge in hubristic pride when they use a luxury good.

That might sound backward, but it’s only because narcissists are naturally high in hubristic pride anyway. Adding on a luxury good isn’t going to increase that feeling much more.

But for a person low in narcissism, good intentions can unfortunately go awry.

This finding, the paper states, “documents for the first time that what is often thought to be an adaptive form of pride (authentic pride) can give rise to another, presumably less desirable, form (hubristic pride).” In other words, honest pride can lead to arrogance.

Additionally, those low in narcissism might even experience an emotion reversal and feel ashamed for their use of a luxury good because they realize they look snobbish to outsiders.

The folks who feel this way are not wrong, either. The researchers conducted another experiment for their study in which participants were asked to read a story in that the narrator listed his favorite items. In one version of the story, luxury items were listed, while in the other version, non-luxury items were prominent.

Participants who read the story about luxury goods rated the narrator as more hubristic than participants who read the story about non-luxury products. Furthermore, the participants regarded the “hubristic” narrator to have more anti-social qualities.

Think back to the guy driving the Mercedes. We sort of couldn’t stand him, right? That’s because we generally find snobbery to be pretty unattractive.

But despite the embarrassment we might feel later, we continue to buy luxury goods.

That’s because it probably hasn’t occurred to you yet how others could perceive it.

“As consumers, and as people more generally,” McFerran says, “we do not often do a good job of predicting how others will view our actions.”

The lead author says this is something he’s learned over the years to check in with himself.

“Given what I research, I am fairly conscious about what a particular product might signal about me to those around me,” he says.

Still, it’s not exactly surprising that one form of pride could lead to another. They’re both pride, after all.

“Authentic and hubristic pride are somewhat correlated,” McFerran says, “So they can both go hand-in-hand in a sense.”

Knowing all this, we could make more informed purchases in the future.

It should be noted that this study isn’t meant to drive you away from luxury brands. Many people purchase luxury goods because of a perceived (and often accurate) notion that they are better quality and will last longer or be more enjoyable.

Surely there’s a difference in taste between a cheap beverage and an expensive, aged bottle, for example. Or perhaps you want the Dr. Martens boots because you know they will last a lot longer than the knock-offs.

After all, you get what you pay for.

The concern is
more for people who don’t really have a reason to spend that extra dollar, especially when they can’t realistically afford it.

As McFerran mentions in his blog for Psychology Today, there’s a growing number of consumers who are obsessed with luxury brands.

Perhaps family members, financial advisers, or counselors could help the consumer to make a more self-aware decision before purchasing a luxury good, he says.

And of course, this research can help companies that sell luxury goods to market their brands more effectively, probably tapping into that sense of accomplishment instead of snobbery.

Just keep in mind that if an authentic Dr. Jekyll makes the purchase, he might bring along a hubristic Mr. Hyde for later.

In the 21st century, free time is at a premium. We’re a multi-tasking sensory-overload society, consumed by smartphones, email, social media, and an ever-increasing number of tasks. But there are only so many hours in the day, and sometimes we have to learn to say no. It’s for our own self-preservation.

No matter if it’s for work, friends, or family, there will be times when someone asks you for a favor, and just as many times when you don’t feel like pitching in. This isn’t (always) being selfish. Sometimes you have other obligations you can’t shunt aside; at others you’re indulging in some much needed time off. And sometimes you flat out don’t feel like it. And that’s okay too.

… the main reason we commit to things we don’t want to do is that we want to be liked.

So why is it so hard to just tell someone no? And why do we sometimes say yes to stuff, only to flake out later? Both are true psychological dilemmas that add stress to our lives and those around us. And it feels like flakiness is at an all-time high.

So let’s look at why we feel compelled to say yes to things we don’t want to do (and why we’ll probably do a no-show anyway), followed by some guidelines to help you learn how to bow out gracefully.

Why do we say yes to things we don’t even want to do?

According to clinical psychologist Don Corley, the primary reason we say yes when we don’t want to is a need for approval: “We’re afraid of what they’ll think about us if we say no. It’s all about the fear of rejection.”

This is counterproductive and self-destructive he notes, adding that by doing so “we end up losing our sense of self, and becoming a mirror image of who we’re around to get their approval. So the main reason we commit to things we don’t want to do is that we want to be liked.”

Life coach Donna Taylor agrees, adding that maintaining relationships is another factor for overcommitting. “Another reason they say yes is if they feel obligated if the person has done something for them in the past,” she says.

So, why do we flake?

Now that we understand why we say yes when we don’t feel like it, the reason we often don’t follow through comes into play. And it says as much about us as it does about the person we’re flaking out on.

Corley says the main culprit is discomfort: “It’s much easier to say yes and not show up then to say no up front. Saying yes gets you out of that moment of feeling pressured. But the act of not showing up is your true expression of self. It’s an act of passive aggression.”

As far as why this has become such a recurrent issue, Corley says the rise of social media can’t be underestimated: “People post and text things they would never say face to face, and that also extends to overcommitting. It’s easier to be passive aggressive from a distance.”

Taylor adds that flakiness essentially equates to selfishness: “They are looking out more for themselves than the other person. Some will say yes to an invitation, but if a better one comes along they simply disregard the first invitation.”

The Cost of Being a Flake

Let’s face it: flakiness is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re the one who pulls a no-show, you may think you won’t be missed, or that the person you said yes to will understand. But if you’re deemed a persistent flake, you’re the one who will be missing out on stuff you really want to do.

In a piece for Psychology Today, Brent Roberts, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, noted that persistent flakes lack conscientiousness, and it costs them.

Non-flaky folks, on the other hand, value others’ time as much as they do their own; interestingly, they’re likely to make more money, have better social lives, make smarter lifestyle decisions, and even live longer.

The good news? Roberts notes flakiness lessens with age: “The way our society is structured is a path toward responsibility. Bad things happen to you if you don’t increase your conscientiousness level.”

Taylor (who had previous experience as a school counselor) agrees, noting that she saw more exhibits of flakiness while working with students than with adults, but that overcoming the tendency to not commit at any age was “ultimately a choice.”

If you’re a pathological flake, a mental health check won’t hurt either. Those suffering from attention deficit disorder, depression, or other psychological issues are more prone to be no-shows. Getting proper care can be a true lifesaver, helping to keep your relationships and health intact.

Now that we h
ave some inside knowledge as to why we get stuck in the “saying yes when you mean no” trap, let’s discuss ways to get out of them.

“Don’t” vs. “Can’t”

If you’re looking for a way to decline tactfully, your choice of words are key. A 2012 joint research study between Boston College and University of Houston revealed that using the word “don’t” instead of “can’t” is essential to effectively decline a request.

Motivational speaker Mel Robbins discussed the study in a video for Success Magazine: “It turns out it’s not just important for you and me to learn how to say no, it’s actually essential for us to learn to know how to say it.”

The study found that volunteers who said “I don’t skip exercise” worked out more often than those who said “I can’t skip exercise.” “Can’t” denotes putting a restriction on oneself, but allows for negotiation, whereas “don’t” is decisive, final, and helps to end debate.

Don’t Lie or Over-Explain to Get Out of Something

No need to make crazy excuses, because it’s all the more likely you’ll get found out. Just be frank about the reasons you can’t commit. Likewise, there’s no reason to go into great detail on the true reason you can’t say yes—just the facts please.

A direct response is always the best and will get you far more respect than an obvious lie to get out of whatever you don’t want to do.

Taylor says rather than justifying why you can’t do something, emphasizing graciousness when declining a request is what’s most important. She suggests, “Always say ‘thanks for asking me’ before saying no. It makes the invitation to something seem appreciated even though you can’t (or don’t want to) do it.”

Corley agrees: “You can be be assertive and respectful—be gracious in your no by adding ‘thanks for asking.’”

Just Say No

To expand on the last point: sometimes the bluntest reply is the best, as a direct “no” will nip things in the bud better than any fancy excuse.

But to be able to say no succinctly requires confidence and permission from yourself to do so; says Taylor, “Accepting first that it is okay to say no, I think, is a good place to start.”

Another step in how to say no with self-assurance is ensuring that you’ve given enough time and consideration to the request in question before deciding yay or nay. Corley explains, “You can make a more informed decision going in by buying yourself some time to say yes or no, by telling the person asking to ‘Let me give it some thought and see if I have any conflicts.’ This gives you time to sleep on it and decide if it’s something you want to do and have the time to do.”

And if the person asking doesn’t respect that you need a bit of time before coming to a decision, they’ve helped make up your mind for you! “If they want an immediate answer that’s a red flag, and that would get an automatic no for me, because that’s a sign of disrespect,” Corley says.

Don’t Drag It Out

As stated above, giving a day to think over the favor being asked of you is good advice. Beyond that, though, it’s counterproductive; the longer you think about it, the more likely you are to cave in and do it. The reason? It’s simply fatiguing and pressuring to ruminate over something so much, and by the time you’re ready to say no, it’s too late! You’ve given yourself no room to extricate yourself gracefully.

Not to mention it’s more courteou
s to bow out quickly then belabor delivering the news. If you say no at the last minute, you’re leaving the person who asked you in a real bind. The sooner you say no, the more time the other party has time to contact someone else. It’s a win-win for all involved and will erase any hint of hard feelings.

Weigh the Pros and Cons

Sometimes being asked to do a favor can also be a good opportunity for yourself as well. If you’re particularly tortured on whether or not to turn down a request, write out a list of plusses and minuses. This may sound silly for relatively small tasks, but for anything that requires time and work, it really helps figure out your priorities.

Do a total mind dump and write out every pro and con you can think of.

If the minuses win, your gut reaction to say no was justified. Don’t second-guess yourself. If the plusses win, perhaps it might be worth your while. It’s the ultimate litmus test for saying no without any guilt or extra fuss.

We hope these tips are helpful in giving you options for a stress-free way to stop saying yes to things you don’t want to do, so you can have more fun doing the things you do! Remember that opting out of being a flake by being assertive will keep you in good standing with those important people in your life, all while helping to build your self-esteem in the process.

There’s nothing quite as relaxing as a trip to a day spa.

Unless, of course, you’re covered with snakes.
For some reason, people will believe in the therapeutic effects of, well, pretty much anything, and some spas don’t mind selling dubious services at a premium. You might have heard of bird-poo facials, caviar pedicures, or fishy foot baths; they’re all real, and they’re all fairly expensive.

As for me, I’ll stick with a good old-fashioned deep-tissue massage.

We decided to look into a few unusual spa therapies to determine whether they actually provide any sort of benefit. We also reached out to Emanuela DeFalco, the founder of cosmetics line Dirty Little Secret. A renowned beauty expert and lifelong spa-goer, DeFalco has actually tried a few of these strange therapies herself, and she was kind enough to provide her insight; we also looked into the science to see whether there’s any legitimate reason for a person to, say, rub stem cells on their face.
Not surprisingly, we found that most of these treatments aren’t worth the money, even if they do sound strangely appealing. For instance…

Fish foot spas are exactly what they sound like.

Spa-goers dip their feet into shallow pools, and exotic fish pick off the dead skin. Yes, it’s weird.

For a more terrifying treatment, opt for a snake massage.

Ada Barak’s Spa in northern Israel offers this strange treatment, in which six non-venomous snakes slither across the patron’s body. The service is somewhat gimmicky, as the spa doesn’t claim any pseudo-scientific health benefits. Some customers do say that the treatment eases aches and pains, so perhaps it’s sssatisfying (sorry).

Of course, you’ll have to be careful to avoid sudden movements, and you’ll fork over $70 for the privilege. If you absolutely love snakes, you might as well go for it. However, as DeFalco correctly points out, there’s no reason to think that snake massages are any more effective than human massages.
“I wouldn’t recommend this treatment, not based solely on the fact that snake would be on my body, but also because I really don’t see the point,” she says. “If there was something on [the snakes’] skin that made the massage beneficial, then maybe, possibly, I would go for it. But I think this is more of a thrill-seeking, adrenaline move rather than something beneficial for your body.”

If you don’t mind the cold, you might consider cryotherapy.

This “recovery therapy” uses targeted cold air to reduce the temperature of the entire body, which ostensibly promotes healing. It’s been said to treat conditions as diverse as insomnia and nerve damage, and for athletes, it’s one of the hottest spa treatments around (oddly enough).

For a truly surreal experience, you can invest in an integratron sound bath.

This is probably the strangest item on this list, but it’s also the only one that we’re tempted to try.

Stem cell therapy is an especially popular (and expensive) treatment, and it’s sort of terrifying.

Stem cell facials cover a customer’s face with—you guessed it—stem cells, which are said to promote new cell growth. It’s a popular anti-aging therapy. As one site that offers the treatment claims, stem cells are “among the few cells in the body that are specialized and have the potential to become a particular cell type and replace worn and damage [sic] cells.”
The stem cells come from adult humans and plants, by the way, and they’re either rubbed on the customer’s face or injected directly into the skin. Proponents of stem cell therapy say that it’s an alternative to more invasive procedures.

I’m a longtime personality test and typing nerd. One of my college psychology classes briefly touched on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a personality typing system based on the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who was the founder of the field of analytical psychology. My professor suggested we take the test in our spare time and report back on what we learned.

After that, the MBTI was the gold standard as far as I was concerned. Understanding the implications of the different factors of my personality was a kind of a lightbulb moment for me. At a somewhat surface level, for the first time I finally understood why I behaved certain ways and why I experienced the world as I did for the first time. (I’m an INFP, by the way.)

Recently, however, I started to become frustrated with myself because I was struggling to make changes to a few of my habits. I was trying to get more organized, maintain new commitments to healthfulness, and get back into a routine. And, to my annoyance, I was mostly failing. The MBTI didn’t offer me solutions, either.

It actually gave me excuses. In the world of Myers Briggs, struggling to stick with routines because they feel limiting and boring is just part of who I am.

This is one of the limitations of the MBTI and other personality typing systems according to Dr. Brenton Wiernik, an industrial–organizational and personality psychologist. Personality shouldn’t be seen as innate or fixed, he argues. And personality traits certainly shouldn’t be seen as either/or things.

Enter the Big Five, one of Wiernik’s areas of expertise and a way of thinking about personality that is set apart from typing and tests. Much to my delight, this model of thinking about personality even provides useful information for making lifestyle adjustments that are in line with your personality traits.

What is the Big Five?

The Big Five isn’t a test or even a personality typing system. Instead, it’s a comprehensive way of thinking about personality, and according to Wiernik, this is one of the many ways it has an advantage over the MBTI, Enneagram, or True Colors.

“Rather, the Big Five traits are at the center of the scientific consensus model of personality. Beginning in the 1970s, personality researchers discovered that a wide variety of different personality traits that have been proposed could be well summarized by five broad factors, categories, or traits,” Wiernik explains.

The five categories in this model include extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability (also known as neuroticism). And instead of limiting people by placing them into inflexible types, the Big Five model of thinking is much more concerned with these traits, which are viewed on a spectrum. These traits are not seen as either/or things for people. Instead they’re considered in light of how high or how low each trait is displayed in a certain person.

Although the Big Five is not a test, there are hundreds of tests designed to measure the five traits. For those looking for a free, online version, Wiernik suggests a short one available at The Sapa Project.

Why the Big Five?

When it comes measuring personality, the Big Five is advantageous for a few reasons. For starters, the Big Five provides an accurate understanding of strengths and weaknesses. Wiernik tells HealthyWay this approach can be incredibly helpful for making decisions or lifestyle adjustments.

“Understanding your personality involves considering what traits you are high and low on and what that means for your personal strengths and weakness, the things you might excel at versus the risk factors you should watch out for, etc. …Each person’s pattern of low and high traits is unique,” he explains.

He gives the example of someone who is low on emotional stability but wants to go into nursing. According to Wiernik, it would be important for this person to consider how they will to respond to the stressors of the job. They may even benefit from participating in a slower paced segment of the profession like working in a family practice instead of emergency medicine.

Additionally, the Big Five has a strength that sets it apart from othe
r models of measuring personality—none of the traits it considers are seen as inflexible or innate. Instead, the Big Five is about measuring a person’s tendencies in certain situations.

“Personality traits aren’t fixed. They develop and change over time based on people’s experiences. For example, people tend to become more conscientiousness (specifically more responsible, dependable, organized) as they age and take on more life responsibilities, such as becoming parents,” Wiernik explains.

The Big Five doesn’t put people in a box. It provides helpful information about strengths and weaknesses that can then inform them in the opportunities they pursue. This means that people who want to make some adjustments to their lifestyle aren’t lured into saying, “This is just who I am.”

Instead, we can consider the changes we can make work thanks to certain strengths while supporting ourselves in addressing our weaknesses. For instance, if I really want to start exercising regularly, I’m probably going to need to embrace the fact that I rate high on openness and start exploring new hiking trails and trying new, fun forms of exercise instead of expecting myself to stick with walking the same trail four or five times a week.

Everyday Habits and the Big Five

When I took the SAPA Project test, I could clearly see how my results are playing out in my life. One 2017 study published in Personality and Individual Differences actually found small and seemingly insignificant habits were predictors of where people found themselves on the spectrum of each of the Big Five traits. Here is what your common daily habits reveal about your personality.

Agreeableness

Those who are on the high end of agreeableness are those who are empathetic and place a high value on cooperative behavior, according to The Big 5 Trait Taxonomy. So people on the high end of this trait are likely to avoid conflict. Agreeableness is also associated with engaging in acts of altruism.

And when it comes to their common daily habits, these people display some interesting behaviors, according to the study. For instance, those who rated high on agreeableness were more likely to sing in the shower and play with children when given the opportunity. They are more diligent about ironing their clothes and keeping their dishes clean and are less likely to become intoxicated when presented with the opportunity to do so.

Openness

The second trait measured by the Big Five is openness, which is largely concerned with how people think and feel about new experiences, according to Wiernik. Openness is also referred to as intellect by some Big Five scholars and resources.

“The trait of openness…captures the degree to which a person is curious about new ideas and experiences. Some people really like to try new things, they are always reading about new ideas, trying new foods and activities, and going to new places. These high-openness folks also tend to think very creatively and flexibly, to like art and culture,” he explains.

In comparison, those who are low on openness love routine. They are more likely to eat the same foods, watch the same shows, and do the same things day in and day out because they are bothered by change. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes.

When it comes to their daily habits, people who were high in openness are more likely smoke marijuana, hang around the house without clothes on, and speak in a language other than English.

Emotional Stability

The emotional stability scale (sometimes referred to as its opposite, the neuroticism scale) measures how a person experiences emotions. Those who rate high on emotional stability experience fewer negative emotions, according to Wiernik, and are more likely to respond to stressful or upsetting situations calmly. In comparison, those who are low on emotional stability tend to experience strong negative reactions to the same experiences.

When it comes to the everyday habits of those who rate high on emotional stability, it seems to be more about what they don’t do each day. More emotionally stable people don’t diet to lose weight, don’t use alcohol as a way to cope with negative emotions, and avoid swearing in front of others.

Conscientiousness

Measuring high on
this trait is associated with orderliness and being driven to achieve, Wiernik shares. If you’re the type of person people can depend on to follow up on the things you promise to do, you probably measure high on conscientiousness.

Comparatively, people who are low on conscientious are unorganized to the point that it can cause problems in their professional and personal lives. Wiernik uses his own life as an example:

“I don’t naturally keep things organized, and that can be a real problem sometimes. So, to compensate, I’ve outsourced a lot of that organization to computerized systems so I don’t have to manage it. For example, I’ve trained myself to put things on a task list immediately and have it give me reminders. I put keywords into my computer file names so that I can find them by searching rather than having to remember where I stored something.”

Those who measure high on conscientiousness tend to avoid daydreaming and would never wait until the last minute to get to work on a project with a deadline. They also typically don’t have library fines because they return their books before they’re due.

Extraversion

Lastly, the trait of extraversion is pretty much what it sounds like: Those who are on the high end of the extraversion spectrum are very social, high-energy people. They tend to have an easier time connecting with new people, according to Wiernik, and experience more happiness and excitement than those who are on the low end of the scale and can be understood as more introverted.

Like all of the Big Five traits, extraversion is scored on a spectrum. This model of thinking understands you’re not either an extravert or introvert; you are somewhere in between those two proverbial poles.

Those on the high end of extraversion are more likely to talk on their phone while driving, cheer during sporting events, and get a tan. They’re also more likely to engage in gambling or drinking in bars, and are willing to talk about intimate topics with male or female friends.

Ultimately, understanding yourself using the Big Five model of thinking can be an empowering experience that might help you make lasting improvements in your life.

For instance, it might mean you do something as simple as creating systems like Wiernik’s to help manage your disorganization. For others, like those who are low on emotional stability, it might mean making bigger changes, like seeing a therapist to learn coping skills you can use in stressful situations.