You're Not Your Personality (And Science Now Confirms It)

4 min. read | Mindset | Habits | Personality

Science now confirms your personality can change - intentionally. But the harder part, of course, is execution, and changing takes more than willpower alone. Here's where hypnosis helps you shift the traits you want to change with far less friction and struggle.

Literally one week after I posted on Instagram about how you’re not your personality, CBS Sunday Morning aired a fascinating story making the same case. The universe has a wicked sense of timing!

This article is for anyone who's started to feel like some aspect of their personality - some way of thinking, feeling, or behaving - has become so ingrained it feels like identity. Maybe it's overthinking, people-pleasing, perfectionism, or whatever pattern you've tried to change a hundred times and still haven't been able to crack, even though some part of you has always known it isn't really you.

And yet, at some level, you know you can shift it. You want to shift it. You’re just not sure how to do it without fighting yourself every step of the way.

Let’s get into it.

Can you actually change your personality?

“That’s what our data tell us.”
- Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala, Clinical Psychologist at University of Kentucky

The CBS segment from Susan Spencer featured personality science researcher Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala, who studies how people intentionally change their personalities over time - traits like introversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness.

Dr. Sauer-Zavala continues, “When we make intentional changes to our thinking, our feeling, and our behaviors - and we maintain those changes over time - then we’re essentially shifting our personality.”

Separately, a comprehensive 2024 analysis pooled dozens of experiments on personality development and found a clear takeaway: when people actively work on changing a specific trait (like becoming more agreeable or less anxious), those interventions are usually successful at shifting the trait over time.

Psychologists are increasingly confident that our traits aren’t set in stone - with purposeful effort and the right strategies, our personalities can evolve in meaningful ways.

Translation: Your personality is fluid, not fixed. It’s not permanent. It’s not “just how you are” (unless you really want to keep believing that). It’s shaped by the habits of thought, feeling, and behavior you run - and these subconscious patterns can be changed.

But - here’s the kicker: “The principles are simple. The execution is not easy,” Dr. Sauer-Zavala adds.

And that’s where hypnosis comes in…

Why Hypnosis Completes the Loop

Personality change isn’t just about setting goals, journaling better, or paying a coach to ask you questions and keep you “accountable.” It’s about shifting the subconscious patterns that make realizing those goals feel either frictionless, or impossible.

Hypnosis and hypnotherapy bypass your internal resistance and the "critical factor," reaching the part of you that's been running the same identity loops and limiting beliefs on autopilot for years.

It’s not magic or woo-woo. It’s accessing the subconscious mind directly, without the conscious, thinking mind throwing all manner of blocks and resistance into the mix. (You likely already know exactly how that works.)

When we work with the subconscious directly, we don’t have to push change - we just align all levels of consciousness behind it.

(And to be clear - talking about a pattern in everyday waking consciousness, however skillfully facilitated, is not the same thing as working with the subconscious directly. That distinction is exactly what makes hypnosis so effective where other thinking mind-level approaches like coaching and therapy plateau.)

Tapping the subconscious makes changing personality traits feel more effortless. Emerging research highlights that hypnosis and other subconscious-focused techniques can dramatically accelerate and amplify personal change.

One meta-analysis found that people who incorporated hypnosis into their therapeutic process achieved better outcomes than approximately 84% of those in control groups - specifically in the domain of anxiety, which is where "I'm just an anxious person" tends to calcify most stubbornly into identity.

That's a pretty striking number, especially when you consider how many people spend years working on anxiety-driven patterns without ever touching the subconscious level at all.

Hypnotherapy puts your mind in a highly open, suggestible state where positive changes (say, adopting healthier habits or a calmer outlook) can take root more seamlessly at the subconscious level.

Transformations that might normally take months of repetitive brain and willpower training can unfold far more easily and efficiently - as if your brain's "autopilot" is helping rewrite your personality in the direction you choose.

Your subconscious mind is the autopilot that's really running the show, so aligning it with your conscious, thinking mind is what makes the shift feel more natural and effortless. It's really just more of you coming online, getting in line with what you truly want, and importantly for lasting change, getting your real needs met at a deeper level in the process.

Final Words from the Story

CBS’s Susan Spencer closed the Sunday Morning segment with a light but pointed question:

“For all the people sitting out there watching this with their completely unsatisfactory personalities… what advice do you have?”

Dr. Sauer-Zavala responded:

“Don’t get stuck in a personality type box. Think about the life you want to have - and then know that you can intentionally develop the traits that will facilitate that journey for you.”

Exactly!

And hypnosis helps you bridge the gap between the life you want and the version of you who actually lives it - not by constructing some new identity from scratch, but by clearing the interference and resolving the incongruences, making the whole process a whole lot less of a fight.

Book some time for us to talk about your goals and how hypnosis can help you.

Let’s start the conversation your subconscious mind has been waiting for.

And catch the full cover story, “A New You? on CBS Sunday Morning.

(originally published July 2025, updated March 2026)