A new study led by Michigan State University found that as people get better at handling stress on a daily basis, they also become more extroverted, agreeable and open to new experiences over a nearly 20-year period. Likewise, the worse they manage daily stressors, the more introverted, unfriendly and closed off from new experiences they become.

The study, published in Psychology and Aging, is the largest and longest study to look at how managing stress on a daily basis may translate to personality. 

 

The study involved over 2,000 people who completed daily diaries three times over an 18-year period (from midlife into older adulthood). Each time, participants reported on their personality traits, various types of stressors, and their emotional experiences for eight days. Researchers then employed a sophisticated statistical analysis to link how people dealt with daily stress to how their personality changed over those 20 years.

“Previous research has shown that your personality predicts how well you deal with daily stressors. The cool thing about this study is that, as you got better at handling stressors on a daily basis, you also became more extroverted, agreeable and open to new experiences over time. These improvements trickled up to affect how your personality changed over time,” said William Chopik, lead author of the study and associate professor in the MSU Department of Psychology. 

“What that also means is that, if you got worse at managing daily stressors, you became more introverted, less agreeable/nice, and more closed off from new experiences over time.”

The researchers hope that people see this as a useful way to think about themselves and how they deal with stress. 

“This study has the potential to give people a little bit of hope — if they’re able to find ways to regulate their emotions, that might accumulate and translate to changing their personalities. Being more extroverted, agreeable and open to new experiences all correlate with greater happiness,” said Chopik. “I’m hoping that people see that the decisions they make on a daily basis and how they frame them can potentially make them happier and maybe even change their personalities.”