How Does Your Personality Affect Your Happiness?

By Jill Suttie

Many of us don’t necessarily have the kind of lives we want. We may not enjoy intimate relationships, jobs that fulfill us, the ideal home, or enough income to do what we want to do.

But do these circumstances dictate our happiness? According to a recent study led by René Mõttus of Edinburgh University and the University of Tartu in Estonia, they don’t — at least not exclusively. Instead, our personalities play a significant role in determining how satisfied we are with our life, and changing our circumstances doesn’t really matter as much as we think.

“You can think, Oh, if I get these 10 papers published and I get this promotion, that’ll make things much better, but probably not,” says Mõttus.” You will be happier if something more broadly changes in you.”

What Personality Traits Lead to Happiness
In this study, over 21,000 European and British adults (many of them Estonians or ethnic Russians living in Estonia) reported on how satisfied they were in different domains of their lives (like their work, health, relationships, and finances). They also filled out a detailed personality survey that measured several aspects of personality, including the Big Five traits or how extroverted (outgoing and energetic), conscientious (efficient and organized), neurotic (sensitive and nervous), agreeable (friendly and compassionate), and open to experience (inventive and curious) they were. And the survey measured other aspects of personality, such as how envious, competitive, loyal, narcissistic, or spiritual someone was.

To get a less biased view of each person’s personality, participants designated someone they knew well to assess their personality traits, too, and the researchers used these to verify self-reports. Ultimately, Mõttus and his team found that people who were less neurotic, more extraverted, and more conscientious tended to be more satisfied with life in all domains, while agreeableness and openness to experience were hardly related to life satisfaction at all.

To Mõttus, these results weren’t too surprising, especially how life satisfaction was higher in people who were less neurotic and more extraverted. But, by looking more granularly into their data, he found that certain specific traits were much more strongly associated with life satisfaction than the Big Five.

For example, people who were risk takers, found it easy to apologize, felt committed to their family, were loyal, respected authority, liked to visit new places, and were working on self-improvement tended to be more satisfied with life, whereas the opposite was true of people who made enemies easily, told lies, often forgot things, and cried easily.

In fact, when they looked at scores on just three of the more nuanced personality factors — how much someone felt understood, excited by life, or able to make decisions easily — they found that these alone predicted life satisfaction with 80 percent accuracy. Of the three, though, feeling understood was the most strongly predictive of all.

“The single most important thing from which you can recognize somebody with low life satisfaction is if they feel that other people don’t understand them,” says Mõttus. “That’s the thing that really stood out…It was by far the most consistent predictor.”

Does this mean that creating greater understanding between people might increase life satisfaction more widely, then? Maybe feeling understood could help people feel less lonely or isolated.

But given his findings, Mõttus isn’t willing to conclude that. Personality traits tend to be stable over our lifetimes, which is what classifies something as an aspect of personality, and that will likely still influence how people respond to social situations.

“Relationships don’t just happen to people; people choose relationships and work for them. And they can screw up relationships by, for example, constantly going around showing that they feel misunderstood,” he says. So, personality is important to consider, even in our quest for more satisfying relationships.

Though these findings are based on a very large number of people, they don’t necessarily prove that someone’s personality causes them to have high or low life satisfaction. To get at that, Mõttus and his team looked at a smaller group of the participants who had also been surveyed about their personalities and life satisfaction 10 years earlier.

What they found surprised Mõttus: Even if someone’s life satisfaction had dipped a bit over time, it could still be pretty accurately predicted just by looking at personality traits measured 10 years earlier.

“Whatever the link between personality and life satisfaction is, it persists over time,” says Mõttus. “If we wanted to predict someone’s life satisfaction in 10 years, we could just as well predict it from their personality traits now.”

Of course, that’s not 100 percent true. Even Mõttus says that they couldn’t predict life satisfaction well for one out of four people. Perhaps in some cases, he says, a change in their life somehow knocked their stability out of whack, and their personality was no longer a strong driver of their life satisfaction.

But, in general, many of the things that happen in our ordinary lives don’t affect our happiness as much as we think, he says. And that has relevance for us all.

Can Personality Change?
While this message may seem disheartening—that our personalities strongly influence our happiness — Mõttus doesn’t think it’s all bad news. Sure, having certain personality traits may make you feel less satisfied with life no matter what happens. But, on the flipside, other traits may buffer you through difficult times. For example, if you are low in neuroticism, you may be able to see the silver linings and not become overwhelmed, even in stressful circumstances.

It’s also possible that people can affect their life satisfaction deliberately through specific behaviors or practices, making it less tied to their personality. For example, research has found that many wellbeing practices — like gratitude and self-compassion, for example — can shift people’s life satisfaction without consideration of their personality type, per se.

Similarly, even though we tend to think of personality as fixed, personalities can evolve via specific effort, says Mõttus, and this gives him some (guarded) hope.

“I’ve been very skeptical about personality change research, but I’m really changing my mind,” he says. “There is a reason we should try these things, and the initial findings are pretty encouraging.”

However, he cautions, shifting from being neurotic to not neurotic at all might be difficult. Instead, it could be more realistic to just learn to worry a little less or feel a little less misunderstood. Those more nuanced traits might be more malleable and a better target for change than the Big Five, he says.

To that end, he and his team have been developing a toolkit that could be widely available as a phone app and would allow people to choose personality traits to work on. He hopes to test it in the years ahead to see if it helps people make the changes they want.

In the meantime, we can keep in mind that, while getting that great job or relationship we’ve been wanting won’t necessarily make us happier, having bad things happen won’t necessarily permanently tank our happiness either. And there is some solace in that.

“Circumstances just happen — they come and go,” says Mõttus. “On the positive side of this, if negative things happen, they probably don’t matter that much. You can be happy based on your personality, and you will probably bounce back pretty quickly.”