When someone repeatedly disappoints us, breaks a promise, or falls into the same destructive pattern, we eventually confront a difficult question: can this person actually change, or are we waiting for something that will never happen?
The question becomes especially complicated when the person is someone we love. We might have spent years explaining our concerns, offering support, forgiving mistakes, and hoping that the next conversation will finally make a difference. At some point, patience begins to compete with the fear that nothing will ever improve.
We can also ask the same question about ourselves. Perhaps we have struggled with anxiety, anger, procrastination, unhealthy relationships, or self-defeating habits for so long that these patterns feel inseparable from our identity. Even when we understand what is wrong, changing how we live can remain frustratingly difficult.
Psychology offers a more encouraging answer than the idea that people are permanently trapped by their personalities, but a more complicated one than the promise that anyone can become whoever they want. Our dispositions are relatively stable, while our beliefs, habits, emotional responses, and even certain personality traits can change over time. What matters is understanding which parts of ourselves we are trying to change, what makes meaningful change possible, and how we can recognize it when it happens.
What Counts as Real Change?
Before deciding whether people can change, we need to establish what change actually means. Two people might agree that someone has transformed their life while describing entirely different developments.
One person may be referring to personality. Someone who was previously shy becomes more outgoing, or a person who frequently worried about the future becomes calmer and more emotionally secure. Another person may be referring to behavior, such as drinking less, managing anger more effectively, becoming more dependable, or treating a partner with greater consideration.
There are also changes in beliefs, values, attitudes, and identity. A person who has spent years believing they are incapable of success might develop a more realistic understanding of their abilities. Someone who once valued professional achievement above everything else might begin prioritizing family, friendships, or community.
These changes are related, but they are not interchangeable. A person can retain a familiar personality while behaving very differently, and someone can experience a profound change in perspective without immediately altering their daily routine.
Consider a naturally introverted person who wants to develop stronger friendships. They might remain introverted, continue needing substantial time alone, and still become better at initiating conversations, making plans, and maintaining relationships. Their underlying preference for solitude has not necessarily disappeared, but their social life may improve considerably.
Alternatively, someone might experience an important change in values. A person who once considered career success the defining measure of a good life may realize that their professional ambitions have crowded out other priorities. They could then decide that a smaller income or less prestigious position is acceptable if it allows them to live according to what matters more.
The resulting change might involve different behavior, but it could also involve seeing a previously distressing situation in a new light. If a person’s perspective changes enough that an old problem genuinely loses its importance, that can be meaningful even without a dramatic external transformation.
There is another distinction between a temporary response and a lasting pattern. A person who becomes unusually organized during an emergency has demonstrated different behavior, but that does not automatically mean they have become consistently conscientious. Similarly, someone who promises to be more considerate after an argument has expressed an intention, not yet established a change in how they treat others.
Mark Manson approaches the question through its practical consequences. Has the person’s relationship to a problem changed? Are they responding differently, interpreting the situation differently, or making decisions that alter the outcome? By this standard, personal transformation matters most when it produces a meaningful difference in lived experience.
This does not mean that every important psychological change must immediately be visible to other people. Recovery from emotional distress, shifts in private beliefs, and improvements in self-understanding can be genuine even before they produce obvious external results. But when we are evaluating whether a recurring problem has actually improved, sustained changes in responses, choices, and consequences provide stronger evidence than declarations of transformation alone.
Personality Is Persistent, Not Permanent
One reason people doubt their capacity to change is that personality often feels remarkably consistent. Someone who has always been meticulous may find it difficult to imagine becoming carefree, while a naturally adventurous person might struggle to picture a life built around routine and predictability.
Psychologists commonly describe personality through broad traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism, which reflects a tendency toward negative emotional experiences. These traits describe patterns in how people typically think, feel, and behave rather than fixed rules governing every action.
Personality traits tend to show considerable stability, particularly as people move into adulthood. Someone who is more conscientious than their peers today may still be comparatively conscientious years later, even as their absolute level of conscientiousness changes.
However, relative stability is not the same as permanence. A person can remain more introverted than most people while becoming more comfortable in social situations. Someone who is relatively prone to worry can become better at managing uncertainty, and an impulsive person can develop routines that make their decisions more deliberate.
The research supports this more flexible understanding. A 2022 meta-analysis of longitudinal studies on personality stability and change, led by psychologist Wiebke Bleidorn, synthesized findings from hundreds of studies involving large samples across different stages of life.
The researchers found that personality becomes increasingly stable during early development, with relative stability reaching a plateau in young adulthood. They also identified changes in average trait levels across the lifespan, including a tendency toward greater emotional stability.
Importantly, these findings describe population-level patterns, not an individual timetable that everyone must follow. Personality development varies, and some characteristics appear more flexible than others. The results nevertheless challenge the notion that adult personality becomes completely fixed after a particular age.
Evidence also suggests that intentional interventions can influence personality traits. In a 2021 randomized controlled trial of a digital personality-change intervention, researchers led by Mirjam Stieger studied 1,523 participants using a smartphone-based program designed to help people work toward desired personality changes.
Participants receiving the intervention reported greater changes in the intended direction than those in a waitlist comparison group. People close to participants also observed some changes, particularly when participants were trying to increase a trait, although observer reports were generally less pronounced and did not confirm every type of self-reported improvement.
The intervention lasted three months, and the researchers found evidence that some changes persisted during the follow-up period. These findings are encouraging, but they do not demonstrate that people can redesign every aspect of their personality, that every intervention works, or that short-term changes necessarily persist for decades.
The practical implication is that inherited tendencies, early experiences, and longstanding habits influence how we respond to life without determining every future decision. Personality affects what comes naturally, but it does not eliminate our capacity to learn different responses.
Anxiety provides a useful example. Someone with a strong tendency toward worry may never become the most relaxed person in every room. But they can learn to recognize exaggerated fears, tolerate uncertainty, communicate their concerns more effectively, and avoid letting anxiety dictate every important decision.
The same applies to anger, impulsiveness, and novelty-seeking. A disposition can remain recognizable while its expression changes substantially. The person may still experience the same initial impulses, but the consequences of those impulses need not remain the same.
It is also important not to confuse personality with mental-health conditions. Depression, anxiety disorders, and other clinical concerns cannot be reduced to immutable personal characteristics. Appropriate treatment, support, changing circumstances, and learned skills can improve symptoms and functioning, even when someone has experienced difficulties for many years.
Rather than asking whether we can completely replace our personality, a more productive question is how much flexibility we can develop within it. Often, the greatest improvements come not from eliminating a disposition but from learning how to express and manage it differently.
Why Insight Alone Rarely Changes a Life
Self-understanding can feel transformative. Someone attends a retreat, spends months in therapy, reads an influential book, or has an emotionally intense experience and emerges convinced that they have discovered the explanation for years of unhappiness.
They might realize that childhood experiences shaped their need for approval, that fear of rejection drives their relationships, or that their professional ambitions are motivated by insecurity. Understanding these patterns can provide tremendous relief, especially when previously confusing behavior begins to make sense.
But discovering why something happens and changing what happens are separate achievements.
Manson has observed this distinction among acquaintances who return from spiritual retreats, intensive seminars, or other personal-development experiences describing themselves as completely transformed. When he asks about their relationships, careers, and recurring problems, however, their circumstances and behaviors sometimes appear largely unchanged.
The person may have acquired a new explanation for their difficulties without developing a different response to them. They understand their emotional patterns better, but they continue making the same decisions, engaging in the same conflicts, and experiencing familiar consequences.
A similar concern has occasionally appeared in criticisms of insight-oriented psychotherapy. Someone might develop an elaborate understanding of family dynamics or earlier experiences without automatically resolving the problems that brought them into treatment.
That criticism should not be mistaken for evidence that psychotherapy is ineffective or that insight is unimportant. Psychological treatments differ substantially, and many explicitly combine reflection with behavioral practice, emotional processing, changes in thinking, and work on relationships. Developing self-understanding can itself be therapeutic and may create the conditions for later improvements.
The distinction becomes clearer through a common relationship problem. Imagine someone who becomes defensive whenever their partner raises a concern. Through reflection, they realize that criticism reminds them of earlier experiences in which mistakes were met with harsh judgment.
This insight may explain why ordinary disagreements feel threatening. But the relationship will probably not improve simply because the person can identify the origin of their defensiveness.
Meaningful progress requires something more. They might practice listening without interrupting, notice when their body becomes tense, ask clarifying questions instead of assuming hostile intentions, or take time to calm down before continuing a difficult conversation.
These actions are often uncomfortable because the original emotional response may still appear. The person has not necessarily stopped feeling threatened; they are learning to behave differently when that feeling arises.
Repeated experience can then reinforce a different understanding of the situation. They discover that disagreement does not always lead to rejection and that admitting a mistake can sometimes strengthen a relationship rather than destroy it.
Insight and behavior can therefore create a productive cycle. Understanding a pattern makes it easier to notice, experimenting with a different response produces new information, and that experience can gradually change the person’s expectations.
Changes in perspective also deserve recognition even when they do not produce conspicuous behavioral differences. Someone who stops regarding a harmless personal preference as a serious flaw may become less distressed without changing the preference itself. A person who no longer interprets a failed ambition as proof of worthlessness may experience a meaningful improvement in well-being.
The crucial question is whether an insight alters the person’s relationship to the problem. Has it reduced unnecessary suffering, changed the decisions they make, improved their ability to cope, or helped them evaluate the situation more accurately?
A powerful realization can initiate change, but the emotional intensity of the realization does not tell us how much has actually changed. Sustainable transformation generally requires the new understanding to influence how someone interprets experiences, makes decisions, or behaves over time.
Motivation Matters, but It Is Not a Gatekeeper
Even when a person recognizes a problem, changing it can require confronting an uncomfortable trade-off. The behavior they want to abandon may provide immediate benefits, while the advantages of changing appear distant, uncertain, or difficult to achieve.
Someone who procrastinates may temporarily avoid anxiety by delaying an unpleasant task. A person who drinks excessively may experience short-term relief from emotional distress, even as drinking creates serious problems. Someone who avoids difficult conversations may preserve temporary peace at the expense of deeper relationship difficulties.
These patterns persist partly because their immediate consequences can reinforce them. Changing therefore involves more than recognizing that a different behavior would be better in the long run. The person may also need to tolerate discomfort, develop alternatives, and create circumstances that make the desired response easier.
Manson emphasizes two questions: does the person want to change, and do they believe change is possible? Both are important because an individual who sees no benefit in changing or expects every attempt to fail may have little reason to invest effort in the process.
Imagine someone who has repeatedly tried to improve their health without achieving the results they hoped for. Eventually, their past disappointments may make future efforts seem pointless. The challenge is not necessarily ignorance about what healthier behavior involves, but a diminished sense that their own actions can make a difference.
However, it would be misleading to conclude that meaningful change is impossible unless someone begins with strong motivation and confidence. Motivation is not an all-or-nothing quality, and it frequently develops during the process rather than arriving fully formed beforehand.
People can change their behavior because circumstances shift, support becomes available, consequences become clearer, or they discover that a difficult goal is more manageable than expected. A person who initially resists an unfamiliar routine may become more comfortable with it after experiencing its benefits.
This is particularly relevant to interventions involving structured support. Therapy, coaching, environmental changes, reminders, and practical assistance can sometimes help people make progress before they possess a strong internal commitment to change.
External influences also matter, although they are not equivalent to forcing someone into genuine, lasting personal transformation. A workplace may introduce procedures that change employee behavior, and a family may establish boundaries that alter household routines. Whether those changes persist or become personally meaningful depends on additional factors.
A person might initially attend therapy because a relationship is in trouble rather than because they are enthusiastic about treatment. During the process, they may begin recognizing patterns they had previously dismissed and develop their own reasons for responding differently.
The distinction between initiating change and sustaining it is important. External circumstances can create opportunities or pressure for new behavior, but longer-term progress may become more stable when the person understands the benefits and develops some ownership of the process.
Confidence can also emerge through experience. Someone who believes they are incapable of maintaining a routine may not become motivated through reassurance alone. Completing a manageable action repeatedly can provide more convincing evidence that change is possible.
This does not mean that motivation is irrelevant. Resistance, ambivalence, and a lack of perceived benefit can make progress significantly harder, particularly when people have little control over their circumstances or face serious mental-health challenges.
But framing motivation as an absolute prerequisite risks overlooking the very methods that help people become more willing and able to change. Sometimes people begin because they believe in themselves; sometimes belief develops because they have begun.
What You Can and Cannot Change in Someone Else
The question of whether people can change becomes especially painful when we are asking it about someone else. We might be dealing with a partner who repeatedly lies, a family member struggling with addiction, a friend who refuses responsibility, or a loved one whose behavior continues to harm their relationships.
The difficulty is that caring about another person’s well-being does not give us control over their decisions. We can explain our concerns, offer resources, encourage treatment, and establish consequences, but we cannot guarantee that another person will adopt our priorities or sustain the changes we want.
Manson describes the complicated position of someone who repeatedly tries to solve another person’s problems. A partner or family member may provide money, transportation, housing, excuses, or constant intervention in the hope that relieving immediate difficulties will create enough stability for change.
Sometimes such support is essential. People facing illness, unemployment, disability, addiction, or other serious difficulties may need substantial assistance to regain stability and access appropriate care.
In other circumstances, however, particular forms of help can unintentionally allow a harmful pattern to continue without the person confronting its consequences. If someone repeatedly avoids responsibilities because another person always takes them over, the arrangement may reduce the immediate pressure to develop more reliable habits.
This is the concern behind discussions of enabling and codependency. The difficulty is determining when support makes recovery or growth possible and when a specific arrangement reinforces behavior that is harming the person or those around them.
A blanket rule to withdraw assistance is not a solution. Removing financial, emotional, or practical support without regard to someone’s safety or circumstances can increase hardship and make recovery more difficult. The appropriate response depends on the nature of the problem, the available alternatives, and the risks involved.
Manson recalls an account from endurance athlete and author Rich Roll’s life in which Roll’s parents established a firm boundary during his struggles with alcoholism. The story illustrates how painful it can be for family members to refuse a particular form of help when they believe an existing pattern has become destructive.
Such experiences can be meaningful to the individuals involved, but one person’s account is not a universal blueprint for supporting someone with addiction. A strategy that one family remembers as necessary may be unsafe or ineffective in another situation.
The popular idea that someone must reach rock bottom before they can recover is particularly misleading. It suggests that worsening consequences are a necessary ingredient of change and that loved ones should sometimes allow suffering to intensify until the person becomes sufficiently desperate.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s guidance on connecting people with appropriate treatment explicitly identifies this belief as a misconception. People do not need to reach a personal catastrophe before seeking or benefiting from treatment.
The institute emphasizes reducing stigma, providing choices, addressing practical barriers, and recognizing that engagement with treatment may require repeated conversations. Evidence-based options can include behavioral treatment, medication, and different levels of care depending on a person’s needs.
This perspective offers a better framework for helping someone who is struggling. Support can remain compassionate while becoming more deliberate about which forms of assistance are genuinely useful.
A family member might offer transportation to a treatment appointment without continuing to cover up dangerous behavior. A partner might express willingness to work on a relationship while refusing threats, intimidation, or repeated violations of agreed boundaries. A friend might offer encouragement while acknowledging that they cannot take responsibility for another adult’s decisions.
Boundaries are most constructive when they clarify what we will participate in, what we can safely provide, and what behavior we cannot accept. They do not require abandoning someone, nor are they a reliable technique for compelling another person to change.
There is also a difference between supporting someone’s autonomy and tolerating harm indefinitely. A person may have the right to make their own decisions, but that does not mean others must remain exposed to abuse, manipulation, or unsafe circumstances. When safety is threatened, protection and appropriate external assistance take priority over efforts to persuade someone to improve.
Ultimately, we can influence the conditions surrounding change more reliably than we can control the change itself. We can communicate clearly, respond consistently, offer appropriate help, and avoid participating in patterns that harm us or others.
Whether another person changes, however, remains uncertain. Recognizing that uncertainty is not a reason to stop caring; it is a reason to distinguish care from control and hope from a guarantee.
Change Is Usually Visible in Repeated Small Decisions
People often imagine personal transformation as a dramatic turning point. They expect a powerful realization, a decisive commitment, or a major life event to divide their history into the person they used to be and the person they have become.
In practice, meaningful change can be considerably less theatrical. It often appears in ordinary moments when someone responds differently to a familiar situation.
Drew Birnie, Manson’s longtime collaborator, describes becoming less reactive in his relationships over several years. Earlier in life, situations that challenged his ego or triggered defensiveness could prompt an immediate emotional response. Through deliberate effort, he became better at recognizing those moments and considering how his reaction might affect the relationship.
The change did not require him to stop experiencing anger, insecurity, or disagreement. Instead, he learned to create more space between the initial emotional response and his behavior.
That difference might look minor from the outside. He pauses before making a judgment, asks a question instead of escalating an argument, or considers what would be constructive for the relationship rather than what would provide immediate emotional satisfaction.
Over time, however, those small decisions can significantly alter the course of a friendship or romantic relationship. Arguments that might once have become destructive can become manageable, and situations that previously damaged trust can produce better understanding.
Manson offers a different example involving his longstanding attraction to novelty. He describes recognizing that his desire for new experiences had contributed to both positive opportunities and recurring problems.
The same tendency that encouraged him to travel, pursue new projects, and explore unfamiliar experiences could also make ordinary commitments feel less appealing. Exciting opportunities sometimes received priority over smaller obligations to friends, family, and community.
Eventually, he began recognizing the cumulative consequences of those decisions. The individual choices had rarely seemed disastrous, but years of favoring novelty over consistency could weaken relationships and prevent him from building the stability he increasingly valued.
His realization did not eliminate the desire for novelty. Instead, it encouraged him to become more selective about travel, turn down some professional opportunities, and devote greater attention to the people and commitments already in his life.
He also began placing more importance on showing up for relatively ordinary occasions. Rather than reserving his time for major celebrations or unusual events, he came to appreciate that relationships are often sustained through repeated, unremarkable acts of presence.
This distinction captures something important about the relationship between personality and behavior. Manson did not need to become a person who dislikes novelty. He needed to become more deliberate about the consequences of constantly pursuing it.
The process is closely related to the principles explored in Atomic Habits by James Clear, particularly the role of repeated actions and environments in shaping behavior. Small decisions can become meaningful because they recur, accumulate, and gradually alter what people experience in their daily lives.
Someone trying to become more dependable does not establish that change through a single promise. They demonstrate it by arriving when they say they will, following through on obligations, communicating honestly about difficulties, and repeating those behaviors when doing so becomes inconvenient.
A person working to manage anger may still occasionally become upset or respond poorly. Progress becomes visible when they recognize the escalation earlier, recover more effectively, apologize without defensiveness, and increasingly avoid reactions that once damaged their relationships.
This is also why genuine change should not be judged solely by perfection. Established habits and emotional tendencies can reappear during stress, exhaustion, or unfamiliar circumstances. A setback may indicate that further work is needed without proving that every earlier improvement was imaginary.
A more useful measure considers patterns over time. How frequently does the problem occur? How intense are its consequences? How quickly does the person recognize it? Are they taking responsibility, using better responses, and repairing harm when necessary?
The answers help distinguish a temporary period of good behavior from a more durable change. Someone who behaves differently only when facing immediate consequences may not yet have developed a stable pattern, while another person who makes imperfect but consistent progress may be changing in ways that matter.
Expectations should remain proportionate to the difficulty of the problem. Some habits can improve relatively quickly, while longstanding emotional patterns, complicated relationships, and mental-health conditions may require sustained effort and professional assistance. Change is not necessarily linear, and different people may need different forms of support.
The temptation is to look for evidence that a person has become entirely different. Yet much of what improves a life does not require that kind of transformation. It requires learning how to respond differently, more often, in situations that have repeatedly caused trouble.
This also changes how we evaluate ourselves. Instead of asking whether we have finally become confident, disciplined, emotionally stable, or considerate people, we can examine how our current decisions compare with earlier patterns.
Someone who once avoided every uncomfortable conversation may now initiate difficult discussions, even while feeling anxious. A person who previously abandoned commitments when something more exciting appeared may now follow through more consistently, despite still experiencing the temptation to leave.
Those differences may not feel revolutionary, particularly because they emerge gradually. But they can improve relationships, reduce recurring difficulties, and create opportunities that previous patterns made harder to sustain.
So, can people really change? Psychology suggests that the answer is yes, although the possibility of change is not a promise that any particular person will change in the way or timeframe we hope.
We carry dispositions, experiences, and habits that influence us, sometimes for much of our lives. But these influences do not entirely determine how we interpret events, respond to emotions, treat other people, or structure our daily choices.
Meaningful change may involve shifting a personality trait, revising a belief, abandoning a harmful behavior, or accepting a part of ourselves without allowing it to control our decisions. It may begin with insight, external support, a difficult consequence, or a modest experiment that gradually becomes a reliable habit.
When we are hoping someone else will change, we must recognize the limits of our influence while remaining thoughtful about the support and boundaries we provide. When we are trying to change ourselves, we can focus less on achieving a completely new identity and more on developing responses that serve our lives better.
The most convincing evidence of transformation is rarely a declaration that everything is different. It is the accumulation of moments in which an old tendency appears, a different choice becomes possible, and the person gradually learns to make that choice more often.
Last Updated on October 22, 2026 by Aseem Gupta