The three components of personality

Or why self improvement only works if you know yourself down to your brain functions.

Did you ever ask yourself what your personality is and how it became what it is today?

Then you have probably had a hard time defining what actually makes you You. In fact defining one’s personality is not easy, simply because we all have multiple personalities. There’s you the way you see yourself, you the way you think others see you, you the way you would like to see yourself. And frankly don’t we all act different when in presence of certain people : you in front of your boss is not the same person as when you’re with your wife or your seven year old son or your dad, …

And yet there is something inside of us of which we like to think as “ this is me “, isn’t there? That’s what we usually consider being our own personality, even if the exact outlines and borders are not so clear. There is something we consider unique and genuine.

What is causing this impression that we call “meta cognition” ?

Well it comes from the way human beings interact with their environment. Every living organism needs to interact with the outside to survive. We need to eat, cool down in summertime, keep warm in the winter and we need to procreate or otherwise we just disappear. And so in order to survive humans need to interact.

So how do we do that? In our world every action calls in response for a reaction. Our ancestors found out rapidly as soon as they tried to steal the meal of the first saber toothed lion they encountered… And there has to be a balance between action and reaction in order for the system to work. So nature gave us three types of elementary information units out of which our brain develops the hopefully correct analysis of a situation thus putting to action the hopefully most accurate behavior.

As you can see our behaviour will modify the initial stimulus defining thus the term interaction. We will get back to that point later.

So the stimulus we receive are of three types. Let’s call them elementary information units just like in the binary system for computer language. But instead of “O” and “I” our units are :

• Sensations
• Thoughts
• Emotions

The first one is easy to define because we all know what physical sensations are and where they come from. They are produced by specialised organs : our 5 senses (audition, vision, olfactory system, touch, taste) collecting stimuli from the exterior and there are multiple nervous sensors for pressure, temperature, pH, gravity, … informing our brain of what’s going on inside our body. Sensations are the output sent by all these organs to our brain. They help us staying alive and in good shape by telling us for example that our body temperature is too low or too high, or by telling us “don’t eat this thing it smells dangerous” or “this big cat has long teeth, you’d better run for your life”.

The second unit is less obvious because there are 2 types of thoughts. There are ideas we construct consciously when we decide to “think”, for instance searching the solution for a math problem, and there are automatic thoughts directly created by our brain in response to the stimulus in action. It might come as a surprise to you but not only is the major part of your thoughts of the automatic type but also it’s the automatic thoughts that play a by far bigger part in the construction of your personality. For now let’s just say that they derive, just like the sensations, from our most ancient part of the brain, the one specialized in staying alive and procreation.

Comes the third and toughest part, our emotions. Emotions are a strange thing. Everyone has some but no one has the same. Every human has his personal definition for a given emotion. And so when you look around and try to inform yourself on the “science of emotions” then there is no real consensus. Even the number of specific emotions are different from one author to another. Why is that? Well that comes from the fact that emotions are not measurable. You can measure temperature, pressure, nerve transmission, wavelength, and so forth. But you cannot measure love, hate, fear, disgust or joy. They all depend of where you come from, how you live, who your parents were, … and so on. What is their purpose? Well mostly they enforce the first 2 components. You see the lion and the fear you feel is a darn good motor for running faster. And on the other end feeling love for a woman or a man is many times going to lead to procreative actions, right? Other emotional status are less obvious. Why do feel depressed or joyful? We are sure of that.

So now that we have our 3 components, how do they work together? In the diagram above they would come to action in the “cognitive process” in other words these units translate our analysis of the stimuli into easily integrated information for the decision centers of our brain. In much the same way as a computer translates inputs into a series of O and I, our brain translates the stimuli into a combination of emotions-sensations-thoughts. That, of course, as most models, is an oversimplification of an immeasurably complex system. In fact in the binary system the 2 units are perfectly fix and un modifiable, whereas in our model, as we already stated, each one of the elementary units is cultural influenced, personal and individual.

But still the model works and can explain at least some of the mechanisms we decided to look upon.

To make things a little more complicated, let’s see how these units interact one with another. In fact the automatic thoughts sent out by our brain are influenced and modulated by our sensations and by our emotions. And it goes the same with the 2 other components.

Why ? Ok let me give you an example. When I need to go to my dentist, a very nice and charming young woman, then 2 things occur : I spend at least 3 sleepless nights before the day of my appointment and my wife is making fun of me for a week or so.

I am scared like a 2 year old child because my automatic thoughts turn around miserable pain projections causing simultaneously either more pain than necessary or the impression my pain is gone, thus allowing me theoretically to cancel my appointment, …. Whereas my wife never has any fear before going to the dentist and so experiences less pain, less horror visions and so on. So obviously the value and the degree of every sensation, emotion and thought is individual and depends on our education, upbringing and cultural context.

In the cas of my dentist problem this difference is due to a bad experience during childhood, but that’s anecdotic. And it illustrates perfectly the difference between logical thinking and automatic thoughts, because I know my doctor is a very good professional and a very nice person meaning no harm what so ever to me and et these thoughts I have tend

What is the link between these three components and our personality ?

Well let’s go back to the thought element. As I said before the vast majority of all our thoughts are automatic messages our brain sends out in reaction to the two other units in order to adapt our behavior as fast as possible to any new situation. Example : walking to your car in a dark parking lot after a long day of work, this big guy walks up to you. He’s like one head taller than you and built like a Major league football player. As he comes closer your brain is probably sending you messages like “watch out this dude doesn’t look good”, or “I should have taken that pepper spray the guy in the office wanted to sell me”, or “OMG this is going to hurt”, … whatever. In fact it’s just a guy a bit tall walking to the car right next to yours, but your brain immediately reacted to the stimuli it received and after noticing a possible danger. While this situation is an obvious one for automatic thoughts, they actually occur all the time. As soon as we get up we receive these messages like “don’t forget your dentist appointment”, “I’m sure my employee is going to be late as usual”, “I hate to go to work”, … The problem is we are just not aware of them. The only moment we do not incur automatic thoughts is when we use our brain for logical problem solving, which represent like maybe 10% of our global brain activity or so. You don’t believe me? Next time you brush your teeth try to think of nothing else but brushing your teeth for more than 10 seconds …

Now as we have seen before these automatic thoughts are inter-depending with our physical sensations and our emotions right? That’s why we behave differently when we talk to our boss, our brother or the gorgeous young lady next door. So obviously our personalities have much to do with our immediate environment, our upbringing, our education and our emotional status and is probable not such a stable parameter.

So how about this “real personality” we believe in? Does this “real me” actually exist?

I don’t know but the good news is that we can work on building it. How?

By training ourselves to become aware of the three components. Mindfulness is a good example, since Mindful Based Cognitive Therapy developed by Z.Segal, J.Teasdale and M.Williams is built all around this concept. But it’s not the only way to do so. Whatever you do gaining the awareness of your physical sensations, your emotions and those automatic thoughts is the first step towards building your own unique personality. The second one is accepting these sensations, thoughts and emotions as they are and for what they are. You can’t change any one of them since they are cognitive signals your brain elaborates all by itself. You cannot control their elaboration or their existence, but you can modulate their intensity and their interactions. The simple fact of being aware of them the moment they occur is already interfering with the original automatic process. In the case of my dentist problem this training helped me over time to stop the vicious cercle of pain-fear-pain escalade. I don’t panic anymore when I have an appointment. In other words because I accepted my fear its intensity has dropped and believe it or not the pain became less intense too — simple MBCT process in action. Obviously and logically my personality changed simultaneously because the image that I have of myself and the one I give to my wife and my dentist is no longer the same. I worked on building my personality.

And don’t forget your personality is only useful in the presence of others. So mind the practice of sharing and of kindness towards yourself and all living beings surrounding you.

Namaste