We previously covered that gender equality may help increase longevity for both men and women — but while society continues making progress toward this systemic change, a new study has revealed how your individual personality could also impact your lifespan.
Publishing their findings in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, researchers searched for links between longevity and the Big 5 personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. They found that those high in extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness displayed a lower mortality risk, and on the flip side, respondents who scored high in neuroticism were associated with a higher mortality risk. Openness, meanwhile, was not found to be associated with longevity one way or the other.
For the first time, the team also identified specific personality nuances within each trait that they connected to longevity — and under the extraversion umbrella, participants who were active demonstrated the lowest risk. To come to these conclusions, the researchers analyzed data from more than 22,000 older adults in four national studies that measured the characteristics and tracked the participants six to 28 years later.
“The word ‘active’ was the most striking,” co-author René Mõttus told The Guardian. “Participants who described themselves this way were significantly less likely to die during the study period — with a 21% lower risk, even when age, gender and medical conditions were taken into account.”
If you’re interested in homing in on the traits that may help extend your life, here’s a quick breakdown. Extraverted folks tend to be sociable and experience positive emotions, while those who are agreeable are often empathetic and trusting, and people with neuroticism are generally vulnerable to stress and negative emotions.
Conscientiousness, which the team said was the strongest and most consistent mortality predictor of the five, is described as the tendency to be responsible and self-disciplined. This isn’t the first time the trait has been aligned with a longer lifespan: A 2021 study partially credited the association to lower levels of IL-6, an important protein in the immune system linked to age-related diseases.
The researchers discovered that following the descriptor “active,” those who reported themselves to be lively, organized, responsible, hardworking, thorough, or helpful had a lower mortality risk. Combined, the nuances held more “predictive power” than the Big 5 traits they funneled up into, Mõttus noted.
“We found that it is often these specific personality traits, nuances, that drive personality associations with mortality,” Mõttus told The Independent. “It stands to reason that these personality nuances are easier to change than broad trait domains such as neuroticism or conscientiousness. So, our findings offer hope.”
However, the characteristics themselves aren’t the be-all-end-all when it comes to predicting longevity — the team also noted that lifestyle, clinical, and mental health factors (like smoking, BMI, and depressive symptoms) played a role. “Being ‘organized’ might help people stick to routines that improve health, but it may also reflect underlying psychological resilience or social habits that contribute to a longer life,” co-author Páraic O’Súilleabháin told The Guardian.
And fascinating as these findings are on an individual level, they also hold broader implications for public health, and could be used to create personality screenings to assess health risks. Ross Stewart, a personality specialist at the University of Chester who was not involved in the research, said: “Until now, most studies stopped at the broader trait level. But this research shows the ways people describe themselves using individual words may be just as powerful.”
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