Identity Hacker: How to Completely Change Your Personality at ANY Age | Olga Khazan : 1268

The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey

Fat, Health & Fitness, Meditation, Biohacking, Lifestyle, Diet, Science, Self-improvement, Fasting, Nutrition, Hacking, Fitness, Brain, Wellness, Education

4.6 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if you could rewrite the code of your personality—on command? Not just cope with anxiety, overthinking, or social exhaustion… but delete the traits holding you back and install better ones?

This episode challenges everything you’ve been told about identity. Dave dives deep into the science of personality change to reveal why your habits, moods, triggers, and even sense of self aren’t fixed—they’re fluid. And more importantly: they’re up for grabs.

Joining him is award-winning journalist from The Atlantic, Olga Khazan, author of Me, But Better, who spent years hacking her own mind—transforming high neuroticism, social avoidance, and chronic self-criticism into calm, confidence, and connection. Her personal experiment in identity rewiring became a roadmap for anyone who wants to feel different… and live differently.

You’ll uncover the hidden mechanisms behind neuroticism, reactivity, and emotional spirals—and how to override them with real-time upgrades.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why your personality is a program—and how to recode it

• What daily behaviors scientifically rewire anxiety, anger, and reactivity

• The surprising link between identity, inflammation, and your gut

• Why gratitude isn’t soft—it’s neurological jiu-jitsu

• How to know if it’s your biology or your story running the show

• Whether pills, psychedelics, or sleep do more to shift who you are

• What to do when your inner critic won’t shut up

• And how to stop being the person you never meant to become

Transcript

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0:00.0	You might be the first guest out of almost 1,300 guests who's talked about personality changes after giving birth.
0:07.0	What gives you the right to change your own personality?
0:10.0	Anyone can change their own personality.
0:12.0	What if your personality isn't who you are?
0:15.0	What if it's just who you've practiced being?
0:17.0	Anxious, neurotic, introverted.
0:19.0	We are told those traits are hardwired, fixed.
0:22.4	But what if that's just a story,
0:24.2	when you've been living inside for too long?
0:26.6	Olga Kazan is a celebrated journalist at the Atlantic,
0:30.0	author of Me, but Better,
0:31.6	and one of the only people to test, track,
0:34.4	and intentionally change her own personality.
0:37.0	Because my family was just so different from everyone around us, up until college, I was
0:41.1	told directly or indirectly that I was weird.
0:43.7	Using science, not self-help or wishing, what did she discover?
0:47.7	Most people feel stuck, not because change is impossible, but because they don't know where
0:52.0	to start.
0:52.8	They mistake their habits for identity, their anxiety for truth, and their personality for destiny. You can
0:59.7	rewrite the way you think, feel, and show up in the world, but it starts with one simple
1:04.4	question. What if you are not your personality? You are not stuck. You're not broken. You're
1:09.9	not doomed to live life through a filter of anxiety or self-doubt. Your personality is changeable. Your mind is plastic. And the story you tell yourself can be rewritten. Your personality is sort of not real. There's nothing about it that is set in stone. Most people's personality changes more over the course of
	...

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