The Psychology of Personality

It might seem funny reading about the psychology of personality in a blog about health and fitness. However it is our personality that really creates who we are. If you were describe yourself you might use a range of physical descriptions, such as age, height, weight etc. However, eventually you would start describing yourself in terms of your behaviour, what you do for a job, what your hobbies are, likes and dislikes etc. So much of you, is your personality and how you approach life, it is therefore not surprising that personality effects our health in two ways. Firstly, personality effects our behaviour, our motivation and how we approach problems. Hence, our personality effects the health and fitness choices we make. Secondly, research has shown that certain personality types directly effects our health. A term used by psychologists is psycho-education. Psycho-education is a process where people are educated about their personalities, the aim being that if people understand their personalities they can take more control over their lives.

Personality is a funny thing, we all intuitively know what personality is and yet it is very hard to define.  Personality is often defined in terms of behaviour. Someone might be said to have a happy personality, so you expect this person to be happy. However what happens at a funeral you would not expect a person with a happy personality to be happy at a funeral. So does personality rely on the situation, do we have different personalities in different situations?

The other thing about personality is that it originates in the brain. The brain is made up of billions of neurons. Now I won’t go into the detail about neurons, you can simply ‘google’ neuron to learn more, but take it from me a neuron is not all that complex in the way it operates. A neuron is a simple switch, on/off. The operation of a neuron is similar in many ways to a computer, a series of switches are either set to zero or one. In fact scientists build computers that mimic the operation of the brain. The problem comes when we try to understand how the brain forms though and creative ideas. If the neurons are so simple, how can the brain be so complicated and hard to understand? Hence, it is intrinsically difficult to understand personality and, importantly, why there is not just one theory of personality.

Over the next few blogs I will present several different theories of personality. The important thing to remember is that no one theory of personality is right or wrong. Also, just about all the theories I will discuss have some common features. It is the case that different theories of personality tend to describe some behaviour better than others. The theories that I will present will include, Behaviouralism, Social Learning, Evolutionary Psychology and the Narrative perspective. The aim is allow readers of these blogs to look at their behaviour in a slightly different ways and hopefully that will allow readers to be better equipped to make more appropriate fitness and health choices.