The largest measurable component I know of is the emotional stability/neuroticism measure of the Big Five personality assessment. I went from 60th percentile to 5th percentile over the span of a couple years (not just self assessed, and commensurate with reports of large shifts from friends, partners, family). In that time I did a lot of yoga, self therapy, and meditation, and small amount of psychoactives. Although I can’t be highly confident which interventions had the largest effect, my own best guess is
Insight meditation leading me to believing that the early Buddhist descriptions of psychological interventions are basically correct. This is a bit of a rabbit hole since I think the popular conception of Buddhism is pretty misleading.
Physical recalibration of the CNS through things like yoga, cold showers, intense exercise, massage/somatic work, relaxation training, sarno method etc.
Trying about a dozen modalities of self therapy at the end of which I settled on Core Transformation as having the best intervention model (it’s notably largely isomorphic to a particular Buddhist practice sometimes referred to as aspiration inquiry, though with more detailed scaffolding)
Edit: the Grit sub-component of the conscientiousness factor also corresponds to some of what is discussed in the post. Might go by different names in the literature. The above named interventions did not impact conscientiousness, and conscientiousness is the least impacted factor in broader studies of meditation. It is slightly anti correlated with both emotional stability and openness. I don’t know of any interventions that reliably alter it. I did make an unstructured attempt to alter it for a while which worked a bit at the expense of slightly boosting neuroticism, validating the data I’d seen.
The largest measurable component I know of is the emotional stability/neuroticism measure of the Big Five personality assessment. I went from 60th percentile to 5th percentile over the span of a couple years (not just self assessed, and commensurate with reports of large shifts from friends, partners, family). In that time I did a lot of yoga, self therapy, and meditation, and small amount of psychoactives. Although I can’t be highly confident which interventions had the largest effect, my own best guess is
Insight meditation leading me to believing that the early Buddhist descriptions of psychological interventions are basically correct. This is a bit of a rabbit hole since I think the popular conception of Buddhism is pretty misleading.
Physical recalibration of the CNS through things like yoga, cold showers, intense exercise, massage/somatic work, relaxation training, sarno method etc.
Trying about a dozen modalities of self therapy at the end of which I settled on Core Transformation as having the best intervention model (it’s notably largely isomorphic to a particular Buddhist practice sometimes referred to as aspiration inquiry, though with more detailed scaffolding)
Edit: the Grit sub-component of the conscientiousness factor also corresponds to some of what is discussed in the post. Might go by different names in the literature. The above named interventions did not impact conscientiousness, and conscientiousness is the least impacted factor in broader studies of meditation. It is slightly anti correlated with both emotional stability and openness. I don’t know of any interventions that reliably alter it. I did make an unstructured attempt to alter it for a while which worked a bit at the expense of slightly boosting neuroticism, validating the data I’d seen.