 There are five main traits in psychology that are used to identify the temperament of someone, meaning they're kind of how their personality works out, and these are called the big five. So these big five characteristics are number one, agreeableness, number two, neuroticism, number three, openness, number four, conscientiousness, and number five, extroversion. I'll go by them one-on-one, excuse me for not going on the right order if I might, but I'll give a brief overview. So agreeableness is relating to how much you care about other people in terms of not getting into conflicts and making everybody else happy. So the more agreeable you are, the more you tend to care about what other people think. The best example I know is that someone who's very very agreeable will most likely, if he's in an exchange, it will most likely make sure that the other person gets more than what he gets. Now if he has a very low agreeableness, then the tendency is actually to get more than what the other person gets. So actually like kind of like selfish behavior. Men are like by far a lot more, a lot less agreeable than women, which is actually one of the main predictions about why women tend to do less well in the office in terms of getting themselves to higher and higher positions. It's because it's a very competitive field and usually someone who's as hardworking as you, but extremely assertive and doesn't care about getting into conflict and getting his hands dirty, will just kind of put himself on the spotlight a lot more. Now the second one is neuroticism, which is the one we're going to talk about in this video specifically. So I'm gonna quickly skip it and then we'll talk about it at the end extensively because this video will relate to anxiety, negative emotions, and what to do about them. The third one is conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is basically how much of a work type person you are. The higher level of conscientiousness you have, the better you are at executing plans, the more disciplined you are. Conscientiousness is the second best way to know how well you'll succeed in life in terms of career. The first number one factor is IQ, the number two factor is conscientiousness, which means that people who work hard and are intelligent vastly get ahead. Now the fourth one is openness. So openness relates to how well you accept new things in your life, and it is very correlated with orderliness. So how much order do you like? People who are very open are mostly, that's a very high prediction of being lefty in terms of political views, and being very low on openness is a high correlation with right-wing political affiliation, because somebody who has a low sense of openness, that person really likes boundaries and categories, and he likes things to be very, very well-defined. And somebody who's extremely on the left basically thinks everyone is the same. There's no categories. Everything is, you know, interchangable. You know, these are the people that are today very much pro gay marriage and people of all races coming together in diversity, and that's pretty much what's currently taking over a lot of the culture in the United States, and especially in Europe, it's the whole talking of diversity. So people with extremely high openness have basically taken over the government, and by the way, none of these traits are inherently good or bad, besides maybe conscientiousness. You can have, you know, a person who's very open, and you can have a person who's not very open, both of them are important to society, because a tribe made of only people who are extremely open is, doesn't have borders, doesn't have proper protection, because high openness usually doesn't go with low agreeableness. So people who are highly open are usually also very agreeable, so they don't like to get into conflict. And again, women tend to be a lot more open than men. So in a society that's completely open, they're usually very defenseless and get easily run over by other tribes who are a lot more fierce and aggressive, and on the other hand, if a society or a tribe is not open enough, so there's too much, too little openness, then that means that they're sealed off from the other world, from the world, and they're not gonna be able to properly have, you have good proper relations with other tribes, other communities, or, you know, you can even say you're neighbors, if you think about it this way. So this is very much like Germany, in the World War II, well, you know, they tried to invade most of Europe, and they were so strict about their borders and the pure race that there was no place for discord, so nobody could talk to them, so it's like you against the world, and you don't want that. And on the other hand, the Indians, for example, they were very open, at the time when Columbus came and the Americans came, so they intermingled with the white people, you know, they trusted them, and they actually didn't protect their borders enough, so the whites were easily able to dupe them, and, you know, basically genocide most of them, and then America got going. So that's the fourth trait, and then the fifth trait is extraversion. That's a pretty simple one. Extraversion means how open you are to social interaction. Do you like talking to people? Are you charismatic? Somebody who's very introverted is usually likes to be with themselves, or likes to write or use computers. Somebody who's very high in extraversion likes to talk, likes to talk to people. Again, both of them are really good, and by the way, they're not correlated in any way, like a zero correlation between extraversion and success. So you can be highly successful being an extrovert and as well as highly successful being an introvert. Now, I'm not sure about all the career types, but let's say you want to be a CEO or a business owner, there's really no distinction between the two. So let's talk about neuroticism, because this is the topic of the day. Neuroticism is what it means to this trait is how how much you, how high or low your tolerance to perceived or real danger is. So how hard you get hit emotionally by bad things that happen, or bad things that you notice or you think. Are happening or will happen. How prone your physiology is to discover threats. So I'm actually very high in neuroticism, like a lot of people that like my content. If I remember correctly, in the seventh or eighth percentile of people of neuroticism. So someone with a lot of neuroticism is extremely, it gets like very upset when bad things happen and is very suspicious. So you know, you're in a relationship, every small thing your partner does, you're suspicious. That doesn't mean you're not, you don't trust them. That just means you are very good at reading into things and sometimes too good where you somebody will say something and you think maybe that means their intentions are bad. You notice threats a lot more easily, so you could be out in the street and you very much, you notice the way people react to you, the way people look at you. You're just very, very attentive to the world, but not because it's fun and awesome, but because it's a dangerous place and by noticing danger, you'll be able to prevent it better. And of course the lower your neuroticism, the less you notice and care about negative things and let us you speculate about them. So people with incredibly low neuroticism, the best example I can give is that guy that works with you or worked with you in the office or the job you had where he would not do his job, like he would just not do his job at all, which again, it's conscientiousness. It's not related specifically to neuroticism, but then what would happen is people would be angry at him, people would complain to him and he just wouldn't care. He'd be like, yeah, okay, sorry, sure. Or you know, his girlfriend would break up with him. He'd be like, okay, yeah, fuck her, you know, I don't care. Like that person would never feel any negative emotion because neuroticism is self-speculation and and just kind of being self-aware. And people are usually surprised when I say that, that neuroticism means being self-aware because they're like, wow, what does that have to do with being aware? It's that you're only aware of yourself when there's something wrong. Like imagine you are listening to this video and you know, everything's going fine. No problem. So you're not very self-aware, but then suddenly you get a text message from a friend that sounds kind of a bit angry at you. So somebody with very low neuroticism would be like, oh, I guess, you know, he's mad at his problem, whatever. Maybe not even notice that he's mad, but somebody with very high neuroticism would be like, oh shit, like he's mad at me. Did I do something? Does it mean anything? So immediately you go into self-aware mode and you try to fix the problem. You look if there's a problem and then you look if you can fix it. So that is the definition, basically, of self-awareness, which again isn't always a good thing. So I struggled with this even until today. I have to deal with it because maybe it will make you kind of happier to know, but having high neuroticism, it's not something that's wrong with your brain. It's not a disease. It's simply part of who you are. It's your temperament and there's not a lot you can do to change it. So instead of working on becoming less of a stressed person, you want to focus on being, uh, adapting your life to that stress and to that, uh, high level of low tolerance to to perceived threat. Again, it's really important that you have this high neuroticism. Like it's not a bad thing. If Churchill was not highly neurotic, he would not have been able to lead Brittany, Britain to win against Germany because he was, he noticed like years before anyone else that danger was coming. So this was a very good period. Everybody was prospering and everything is good. And only Churchill was like, look, there's the Nazi threat. We have to deal with it. And he was highly, highly neurotic, but that's what allowed him to, to ahead of time, uh, see ahead of time the, the danger and prepare for it. Uh, same light with Peter Schiff, who's a financial investor that I really respect. The guy is pretty much brilliant and he predicted the 2008 financial crisis where half of the United States wealth evaporated in a matter of months by being highly neurotic. Because again, it's not something you can cultivate. Obviously, the more bad things that happen in your life, you tend to be more wary and notice things, but it's basically a temperament thing. So either born with high neuroticism or you're not. And it's very physically demanding. So I mean physiology, physiologically, because I'm always under stress. Like when my girlfriend wakes up, she's groggy for like half an hour, maybe an hour. Like, yeah, they're like half asleep, half awake, but pretty much in most people I know. But me and my mother, for example, when we don't have that thing, like when I wake up, I'm awake. I'm awake immediately. Like I wake up with anxiety to, to, to some level. Like maybe not immediately, but it's there. And then the moment I open my phone or do anything related to thinking about the world, boom, like I already feel some anxiety. Like I always have at least a bit of anxiety with me. Because again, in terms of temperament, I'm very neurotic. Now, on one hand, you want to recognize, for example, in relationships that it ain't always good. Like when your partner loves you and trusts you very much and you get suspicious because of everything. If you're not able to see that it's because you're highly neurotic. And that's just your temperament. And you start believing every perceived threat that your brain generates, you're not going to be successful in relationships because you're always going to feel like there's something people are hiding for you. You're not like paranoia. But on the other hand, if you, if you, you're not neurotic at all, that means you won't notice dangers. So there's a reason why in times of war and danger, the leaders we choose are always neurotic. They're always people who are like fucked up in the brain. You know, there's a really good book about it called First Rate Madness and basically talks about how the there's what's called a crisis leader and there's a leader for times of peace, prosperity. So when things are good, you want somebody who's extremely mentally stable, very calm, not very neurotic, somebody who's, you know, an extrovert, somebody who's a nice person where he's, you know, he's nice, he's cool, he's, he's charming and everything is chill and just let everything grow. But then when things start to go really, really bad, again, war, intense poverty, global catastrophe, crisis, natural disasters, you want somebody who's highly, highly neurotic, somebody who's had hell, hell in his head and can basically function in chaos very, very well. And the book cites many examples of people from Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King to Abraham Lincoln, many people who have so-called negative traits like depressions, schizophrenia, personality disorder, bipolar with Churchill and how this so-called disorder or so-called deficiency actually allowed them to be literally the best leaders possible for that time and prosper. So going back to the topic, how do you actually deal with the fact that again, this is your temperament, you're a very neurotic person, what do you do about it? So what do you do about it is you avoid situations of uncertainty or you seek to create uncertainty as much as possible. So in your relationship, you want to have everything out on the table. So you both have very, very, very good communication and you know where your partner is and she knows where you are and you agree on the terms of your relationship and if there's a problem, like let's say sexually or anything, you talk about it, it's always on the table, you arrange things. So let's say you want to meet sometime during the week, you schedule it, you want to find somebody who compliments that temperament, somebody who likes order, who likes, you know, maybe it's just a very open person, person who's very, again, my girlfriend, very, very high in openness, you know, she's very left leaning, loves, you know, diversity and having like other people's opinions and like all that, but in terms of openness, because there's sub traits to each trait, in terms of openness, she's very high in terms of, but in terms of orderliness, she's very high also. So usually people who are very open, they don't like order. So they don't like people telling them what to do. They don't like schedules. They, you know, they like everything to be like open and very, you know, not defined and just when it feels right, but, but I chose a girlfriend who's extremely high in both openness and orderliness. So she loves it when we schedule things. She loves to plan and that really, really goes well with my temperament because I can maintain a very high level of order in the relationship and order doesn't mean boring. It means defined and that's really the key difference because you can have an amazing date. You can have, you know, you can schedule two or three hours together where you know what you're going to do. So it's, you know, it's quote unquote, it's boring because it's orderly, but because you chose to spend quality time, the fact that you're going to be focused on each other, that means you're going to have a really, really, really good time. So order does not equate to boring. It merely means it doesn't mean even necessarily predictable. It just means that everything is grounded and definite. So you want as much of that as possible in your life. If it's your work, you want to know exactly what are the different things that are required from you? What are the procedures for making that happen? Who do you talk to when it doesn't work? When do you get your paycheck? When should you be on work? What's the policies? Like you want to have everything squared away as straight and out as possible in all areas of your life. You want to schedule your days. You want to stick to that schedule. You want things to be technically very correct. So as little time for like flexibility and, you know, again, if that's your temperament, if you are like me, you are very neurotic, lots of anxiety, lots of anxiousness, always very kind of on edge, you have to take care of that. You have to make sure that you surround yourself with people who are very definite. You talk to them in ways that are very definite. You clear up any misconceptions. So if there's something that it's not clear, that it's a gray zone, you turn it into black and white. Or at least you take the gray zone and you put it in a box called the gray zone. So the more you order things and categorize and speak of everything in terms of absolutes, the more safe you'll feel. You'll have less and less anxiety to deal with. And then what you want to do is you want to block out times for chaos. So when I record a video, these are chaotic times because I don't know exactly what to expect. I don't know what's going to happen in that video. When I do a coaching call, that's chaotic because I don't know what's going to happen. When I do public speaking, extremely chaotic because it's a live audience, I don't prepare my speech ahead of time, just a couple of bullet points. But because it's contained within some sort of containment, so again, when I do a speech, I don't just come up and talk. I prepare five or six bullet points and that is the frame that I need to feel very, very comfortable. Or another example is when I do public speaking and it's an extremely challenging type of public speaking. So it's something new that I haven't done before. I always tell myself absolutely that I am going to, that I make a decision that this is going to be an amazing event for every single person there and that I'm going to change every single person's life. And just the fact that I choose, I choose to change every single person's life. That's a decision that I made that I'm not going to let anybody leave until that happens that already takes that chaos and puts it in a box where I feel a lot more comfortable. So that's pretty much my tips, what I wanted to tell you about neuroticism. Again, if I know it's not easy to be a neurotic person, but leaders in times of chaos are neurotic people. So if you actually use that characteristic, you use that temperament of yours, you'll be surprised how fast you go ahead, you actually push ahead in life. Because if you find the proper partner, girlfriend or boyfriend, they're going to love you because your neuroticism means you notice everything. So you are very good at, you know, being task oriented, making sure stuff happens, noticing problems in the relationship. You don't let things just slip. You make sure they happen. If you're in the work environment, again, you notice things, like you notice if there's a problem, you make sure things are working correctly, you are very self aware. So you correct yourself if there's a problem. So this has infinite advantages as long as you adopt the practice of turning things into absolutes, turning things into structured things. So again, as it goes far away from black and from gray to as close to black and white as possible, if you're also an introverted and neurotic, I recommend that when you go to, you know, to a party, to a social event, find ways to structure that too. So that could be practicing on things you're going to say and having, preparing things to say ahead of time or choosing specifically how much time you're going to be there or how many people you're going to talk to or who you're going to talk to. And by keeping it very structured, you're not going to get anxious when you're there or at least you're going to keep it to a minimum and give yourself a chance to enjoy it. Because again, highly neurotic people can be very, very, very fun people, but they need to have that fun within a structure. So somebody who's not neurotic could just go out, not think about what work, not think about the times or anything, not think about health, just go out, drink a lot, have a crazy, crazy time, wake up with a hangover, you know, not care when he gets up, like, not take anything into account. But somebody with high, high neurotic neuroticism will not be able to do that because he will get like stress or panic or, you know, it's too much chaos. But if you actually choose, I'm going to go out from this hour to this hour. I'm going to have this many drinks. I'm going to spend this much money roughly. I'm going to talk to this many people. This is the experience I want. This is the people I want to talk to you like, the more you ground it in structure, when you actually do do that, then you actually go out and within that structure, you're able to dance and and be free. So be chaotic, but within that structure. So as long as you maintain that structure, you can go crazy. So that's pretty much my best tips. And let me know if you have any question about neuroticism. I guess there's a lot more to say. I just, nothing springs to mind. And you know, check out my links and subscribe if you haven't. And feel free to go on a free coaching call with me. I'd love to talk to you. Bye. Bye.