Some folks are gregarious and charismatic, others are soft-spoken and wise, and still, these traits do not encompass the dynamic systems of personality existing in all people. Personality can affect your career, relationships and even life span. Researchers examining the power of shamanic rituals are finding that ayahuasca users show changes in personality after their ceremonies. Personality can be a foundational component of identity and the idea of a substance altering someone’s inherent nature can be off-putting. Let’s explore how personality affects life trajectories and the implications of ayahuasca rituals for people’s holistic wellbeing.
What Is Personality?
Philosophers and researchers have been undertaking the daunting task of defining personality for over 2,000 years. There are many theoretical frameworks to examine how and why personality develops. The biological perspective on personality focuses on how biology interacts with personality and investigates the various presentations in DNA and neurological processes. Some argue that a solely biological perspective places too much emphasis on the nature side of the nature vs nurture debate.
Personality comes from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. People are born with inherited neurological traits presenting in their behavior as a temperament. Temperaments are personality assessments assigned at birth. For instance, some babies are easier to soothe and others are fussier. As a child grows into adulthood, environmental factors influence how their personality develops, changes and can even influence genetic presentations.
Aspects of Personality
Most psychological personality assessments are built on Lewis Goldberg’s five dimensions of personality, updated by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa into The Big Five.
The Big Five are 5 dimensions that categorize the most common personality traits in people.
A handy acronym for them is OCEAN.
- Openness looks at how people respond to novel stimuli. People who score high in openness are often creative and love to try new things. People with low openness scores are typically more rigid thinkers and enjoy stability and routine.
- Conscientiousness refers to people’s level of organization. High scorers are often motivated, trustworthy and disciplined, while low scorers are more irresponsible and distracted.
- Extraversion and introversion measures how comfortable people are in their environments. More extroverted people tend to initiate more conversations, appear more cheerful and enjoy high energy social settings. People scoring lower on extraversion tend to be more introverted. Introverts are more reserved, submissive and may appear less cheerful.
- Agreeableness is another relational dimension of personality and deals with how people interact with others. More agreeable people tend to come across as warm, friendly and kind. Less agreeable people can come across as suspicious, self centered or cold.
- Neuroticism is the personality dimension that focuses on emotional regulation. High scorers are typically more anxious, moody or insecure. Low scores are calmer, more confident and tend to feel more emotionally stable.
All of these dimensions occur on a spectrum and can change depending on what environments people are in. No one is tied fully to one dimension or another but rather is a complex mix of all of these facets. People in the middle of the spectrum may exhibit character traits that pull from both extremes or have more varied reactions depending on context.
Personality is not static, instead, it changes as people age and gathers more life experiences. Different parts of people’s personalities are salient when they are around different social groups and can change depending on physiological factors like hunger or tiredness.
Everyone has a unique personality but let’s take a look at how someone’s specific character traits influence their life.
Why Does Personality Matter?
How someone presents themselves to the world affects the way that others interact with them and the trajectory of their life path. Since its beginnings in the 20th century, personality psychology has expanded greatly and today the internet is full of quizzes and surveys to help people place themselves into a wide array of theoretical categorizations. But why does personality matter?
Research examining the validity of personality as a predictive factor for mortality, divorce and occupational attainment found that personality was as good a predictor as socioeconomic status and cognitive abilities. This data illustrates how someone’s character traits can affect their life experiences and mortality just as much as their intelligence and access to resources.
Another aspect of how personalities can affect life trajectories is cultural context. Certain cultures value different qualities in their community members. The world that children grow up in influences how they learn, behave and the standards of acceptable expression. This means that in certain cultures specific personality traits can be helpful in navigating the world. Some research theorizes that people growing up with the same set of cultural norms may share common personality traits.
This homogenizing effect may also make people who have certain traits better able to acclimate to different societies. For example, in the United States, character traits like high motivation, individualistic thinking and high social confidence can make navigating towards a high-paying job — a value set in place by the capitalist structures of the culture — easier. This does not mean that a citizen of the United States whose personality does not fall into these qualities will be unsuccessful, but rather they may have to find different strategies to help themselves navigate their society.
In other cultural contexts, these same individualistic character traits would be seen as disrespectful and unsatisfactory qualities for a potential job applicant. No one personality is myopically negative or positive, but cultural contexts can reinforce certain character traits. On an interpersonal scale, what someone’s nature or demeanor is like affects their ability to navigate relationships. All humans need love and support and nurturing healthy relationships can benefit people’s mental health and overall happiness. The ability to regulate emotions, communicate needs and remain secure are all potential aspects of personality that can be tools in relationships.
Shifts in personality can be positive, negative or neutral and they are a likely occurrence over the course of a long life. People may even want to learn how to manage or understand aspects of themselves and some research shows ayahuasca as an intriguing possibility for personality alteration.
Ayahuasca and Personality
Based on the OCEAN model of personality, researchers examined the association between ritualistic ayahuasca use and changes to the five dimensions of personality. All the participants engaged with ayahuasca at spiritual centers in South and Central America and showed a significant reduction in neuroticism. High neuroticism can cause challenges because it often makes people more temperamental, emotionally reactive and easily overwhelmed.
A week following their ayahuasca ceremonies participants also reported significantly higher levels of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness. These increases held steady three months post-ceremony.
An important distinction of this study is the difference between ceremonial use and the more westernized laboratory setting. The researchers emphasized the significance of tradition and mysticism for the study participants. In self and informant reports, participants were able to engage with ayahuasca in a holistic and emotionally attuned way, which may have influenced the positive alterations to personality. For those wanting to engage with this sacred brew, finding the correct context could influence what they get out of the experience.
Another research team put together a longitudinal study of personality, psychopathology and life attitude changes in ritual ayahuasca users and found similar improvements in anxiety reduction and optimism. Compared to a control group, participants who engaged in regular ritualistic ayahuasca use showed significantly lower psychopathology measures and higher psychosocial well-being, life purpose measurements and spiritual connection. They found no effects of cognitive impairment or maladjustment for those participating in regular ayahuasca use over the course of this yearlong study.
Ayahuasca’s ability to improve mental health and alter perspective could affect people’s personalities. The theoretical dimensions provide frameworks for clinical research and psychological study, but they are not the only paradigms for understanding personality. More research shows ayahuasca’s benefits for people dealing with a myriad of mental health concerns and unprocessed trauma. Personality is affected by life experiences and traumas, making ayahuasca’s healing power even more relevant for personality alteration.
So, Can Ayahuasca Alter Personality?
More research is needed to fully understand the scope of both personality and how ayahuasca interacts with this dynamic system. Wanting to alter personality does not mean abandoning identity, but rather exploring the spectrum of expression available to all people. Ayahuasca provides opportunities for healing that translate in behavior drastically enough to be considered personality alteration. As the world continues to change, so do the contexts in which new personalities grow and form. Fully understanding the array of tools to cope with generational and behavioral patterns may give future children more grace with themselves and allow older generations to heal.
What do you think about these dimensions of personality? Do you think ayahuasca could alter personality? If you are comfortable, we would love to hear your comments below.
