Is It Your Personality… or Just Stress? The Truth About Who You Are

Ep 141. Personality is often treated as something fixed—an identity we carry and a label others use to define us in social life. In psychology, personality is commonly understood as the product of environment, upbringing, conditioning, and repeated exposure to life experiences.

But what if much of what we call “personality” is not who we truly are?

What if it is simply how we have learned to respond under stress?

When stress—especially chronic stress—becomes a constant in our lives, it begins to shape our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Over time, repeated stress responses can become so familiar that we begin to identify with them:

“I am anxious.”
 “I am angry.”
 “I am always tense.”
 “I am a worrier.”

But neuroscience and biology tell a deeper story.

Research shows that the brain is highly adaptable (neuroplasticity). Stress doesn’t just affect how we feel—it physically shapes neural pathways and reinforces patterns of reactivity. The more often we respond to stress in the same way, the more automatic that response becomes.

This is where confusion happens.

We begin to mistake stress reactivity for personality.

In reality, many of these traits are not fixed identity—they are conditioned responses developed through repeated exposure to stress over time.

The good news is that this process can be reversed.

By practicing physiological self-regulation techniques—such as controlled breathing, body awareness, and nervous system regulation—we can begin to change how the body responds in real time. This is not just cognitive reframing or positive thinking. It is training the body itself to respond differently under pressure.

With consistent practice, the nervous system becomes more familiar with calm, control, and stability—even in high-stress situations.

And something powerful begins to happen:

We shift from reaction to response.

We begin to experience ourselves not as the stress patterns we’ve learned—but as the person beneath them.

This is the difference between:
 “This is who I am”
and
“This is how I’ve been responding.”

Through self-regulation, we reclaim authorship over our internal state. We rediscover clarity, presence, and a more authentic sense of self—one that is not defined by fear, anxiety, or chronic tension.

Personality is not always permanent.
 Much of it is practice.

And with new practice, new patterns—and a new experience of self—can emerge.

Take care. Walk well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome back, folks, to episode 141 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD on health psychology, licensed professional counselor, and an adjunct professor at a local community college. And what we're going to be discussing today has to do with personality and how it relates to stress. Since this is a program on stress regulation, this absolutely is one of the most important things and relatively controversial in the psychological and psychiatric field, having to do with personality, how we develop that in our environment, and what it is that we call personality. And is it malleable? Does it change? Or is it something that we're just kind of stuck with once we develop it? So these are things we're going to be touching upon today because it is a rather deep topic, but also one that's kind of a hotbed for misunderstanding and misidentification of what we would call personality, ideas on identity, and also what we would call stress-born identity traits versus states. And those are some very important topics that we're going to be covering because they're all so related but incredibly powerful, but also very hope-generating because things are not as solid as they seem. So to kick off the discussion that we're going to have right now about personality, how it relates to stress and self-regulation, what can we do in a moment of stress as much as across a lifetime where we experience chronic stress that uh can mitigate or minimize the impact of what stress in environment does that shapes, in essence, what we call our personality, who it is that we identify as for the most part. And this has nothing to do with uh what we would call the gender politics we're talking about, but more so at the biological, physiological level, how I identify myself as to how I relate to stress. I'm either an angry person or I'm upset. I tend to be very tense or anxious. Those are the self-adjudications, the judgments we give of ours uh of ourselves to ourselves, and then we take on the label, so to speak. I tend to be uh really anxious where I'm always worried, these kinds of things, and we tend to couple them with words like absolute terms, like always, I'm never relaxed, I can't ever sleep, these sorts of things. And these uh self-talk snippets that I'm sharing with you, they're very powerful because we generate them, but often there's an underlying foundation of emotion that actually makes that have a little more impact, a little more punchy, so to speak, such that there's some influence there, even if it is a self-or autogenic influence, and we need to pay attention to this. Now, as far as personality goes, what psychology tends to think as a concept about personality is that who it is that we tend to consider ourselves, not our self-image, so to speak, even though it's tied to personality, or how we want people to believe us that's tied to our sense of personality as well, having to do with acceptance in a social sense, but also in the biological survival sense, getting convoluted already, but I'm I'm gonna make a real clear distinction here, that personality is not just how we think of ourselves, but really how we respond, how we react, what it is that our environment is, based on the conditioning or the training or the teachings or the upbringing or rearing that we were given, or how we came up in an environment that required me to act certain ways to get the things that I needed. These are survival orientation, once again, that uh allowed me to live or to minimize pain, especially if I came up in a familial structure or in a situation, if I were like in an orphanage or this sort of thing, or maybe even a group home, because maybe family things weren't working out if there's already been a history of stress, then we're dealing with people that are historically stressed, and there are a lot of neural signals going on that externally we tend to read body language tonals and also how people act and think and the way they behave to manipulate their environment to get what it is that they need. So personality tends to be our best attempt at basically interacting with our environment, but also what it is that comes out that we would call um a trait that we can say that over time it's pretty steady, that if trait A comes up, let's say it's uh social dominance, for instance, and it doesn't sound great, but it's not a terrible thing, but it is one that uh people often utilize that is uh studied within type A personality, having to do with aggression, uh social dominance, and also anger and irritability sometimes to be able to overcome environment. Um and these are the things that like social dominance that we will see person to person, um, if we have one person that has social dominance and they're interacting with person B uh over here, then person A, the person that we're talking about that has a steady trait of social dominance, will exhibit that with person B, person C, person D. And there are of course dynamics there, but it's a consistent trait that we see. So the constellation of traits that we call personality are not thought processes per se, but there are some that are within it, not necessarily biological processes per se, but they occur within how we interact and react to our environment that become what we would call steady and consistent and we could say pretty darn measurable as far as behaviorals too. And um, even at the level of flushing of skin or upset or tone, these sorts of things that tend to be a little more little more intangible, so to speak, when it comes to measurables, then we can quantify what we call the idea of personality as this con conglomerate set of traits that we arrive with when we interact or respond or react to an environment, regardless of how stressful or not stressful it is. So from that perspective, personality is that coupled with kind of how I show up and who it is that I identify as. I could be playing a role that has to do with like when we discuss um unhealthy family relationships, where we have somebody that's a scapegoat, somebody that's the clown, somebody that is the healer or the one that placates everyone, and then we have somebody that is always trying to not be involved, and we have this person that's always in the background, so to speak. So we have roles that we play, and these tie into what we call personality, but they they aren't personality. Those are the jobs, so to speak, in quotes, that uh we take on to be able to interact in our systems of whether it be work, the people that we interact with, so that way we can fit in and be accepted and be acceptable and run the risk of getting a paycheck or or being at home wherever we also increase our chances of getting what we need food, shelter, water, protection, and acceptance, and maybe stop anything that could be painful if there's anything particularly neglectful, painful, traumatic, or abusive there. So personality is shaped by many of these forces. And we'll go on to the next aspect of personality having to do with stress-born identity, identification, and also what we call stress-born personality. When we think of personality, we realize that we are shaped from very young within an environment. Then whenever we're looking at some of the traits, those are the things that we develop that make us more socially acceptable, or even what we call socially graceful if we're learning how to be more polite. Certain things that we do when we arrive to encourage our acceptance, especially by people that are strangers, or we're getting old enough to go to school, or we're out in public at the shop or the store with family, so that we become uh what we would call more acceptable and not outside of the norm. Not anything that'll draw any unnecessary attention, especially if it's something that might be potentially irritating within certain paradigms. And uh, we are talking about behaviors that sometimes are what are called socially adroit, not appropriate, or what we'd call daft behavior if you're in uh in the other side of the pond in the UK, things that you probably wouldn't want to be involved doing because it brings shame upon the family, this sort of thing. So whenever we have behaviors that are not amenable to social um uh sociality, so to speak, or being sociable, then we generally get corrected, and that actually kind of shapes some of the things that we consider acceptable, and then we expect certain behaviors like, you know, maybe apologies, this sort of thing, whenever things are done so as to keep ourselves within our good graces. These are social dynamics that shape what we call personality as well. Now, I was discussing the idea earlier of stress-borne personality. Is there such a thing as the question? And this is something I want you to ask yourself, because I'm almost finished with my book, uh, The Running Man Model, uh, Human Stress Model, and there is much that comes up whenever we're under duress, great deal of stress, such that we start thinking and feeling if there's a regularity or a chronic level of stress that occurs, that we start believing that the way we respond, then I'm always stressed, I'm always tense. And if there's an always involved with that sense of stressed environment or stress events or stressful situations, family, work, whatever, that somehow I'm that reaction to the stress that I'm experiencing and somehow trying to navigate and overcome. I tend to identify that because it occurs in my body. This is my environment pushing me to respond or react in a certain way. Heart rate goes up, breathing changes, I'm starting to do exercise in the sense of I'm sitting down and I have anxiety and an elevated heart rate and that pressured sense and my breath breathing changed, and I start getting kind of the loss of my broad vision and start moving towards tunnel vision, and I don't hear as well. I become more reactive because I can't understand what I'm hearing as well. When we have that sort of thing, then we start realizing that's the body reacting to stress from the outside. These are in quotes feelings, okay? And these feelings aren't the to be spoken of and all of a sudden off the cuff, whatever you think as you're feeling, you should just blurt it out. This is your signal from the environment directly to your body to where your mind determines maybe I need to remove myself from this stressful environment. But often we've go to a therapist or we talk to a friend, we start talking out loud about things that are transient and often immediate their sudden onset because of the fact that sometimes environments are always in flux or change. And this is that chronicity of stress that if it's occurring in my body, I start getting familiar with it. And familiar tends to bring along this sense of acceptance over time. So it's kind of like a hypnotic effect where we have the repetition of a suggestion over and over and over. And if that is the case, then suggestion by environment that says I'm always stressful out here, so therefore you're going to be stressful within, then we tend to take it as this is normal. And it may not be normal, that just may be what is chronically occurring, but far from who we would call in quotes normal. What is normal is the question people throwing around, we don't know what it is. Well, we do know what it is, but we don't like to say that, well, I'm living in a state of consistent stress or above um baseline stress or below baseline stress. We don't like to identify that either we have too much or not enough stimulation or too much stimulation, this sort of thing. And um we do know what normal is. And my normal, in quotes, is my baseline. We'll call that our homeostatic line that that gives us an idea as to when I'm most comfortable. I just may not be around it a whole lot. And just because I'm not around it a whole lot doesn't mean that that state is not something I can achieve or have occur within me. But once again, this familiarity with in an elevated level of stress certainly has a lot to do with how we identify with my state and how I am, and then we start calling ourselves by that name. I'm always angry, I'm always tense, I'm always worried, I'm always depressed and worried. I I have never, I don't remember the last time I remember laughing and enjoying myself. And notice the inflection that I'm putting on this. Often when we have that emotional load, that is our salesmanship trying to encourage us to believe what it is that we're saying. And the problem is that level of body that listens to the tone, it's not listening to the words, but that feel that goes along with that felt sense of tone that I'm speaking with. Not so much the words, once again, the 50% body language, how my body responds to it. I may even be inflecting my body as I'm saying it, and then also the sound of it, the tone, 38 to 43%, that often is cited as being the influence, the 93% that is often the influence that is physiological, more so than the words, the message, the code that I'm telling myself that is the suggestion that is the hypnotist that gets us to believe that we are what it is that we're feeling, and then we start questioning less because it's within me, it's endogenous. How can you question what's going on inside of your body as an experience? That is then considered evidence. It doesn't mean it's true, that just means how you're responding to what it is that is driving your stress, and how we receive that is often what we tend to identify and call me. That's me. I'm always like this. I'm never like that. Now, to advance this a little further to make this useful is to realize as soon as the stress goes, then those stressors tend to linger a little bit because part of its electrochemical neurological uh firings within the brain and the body up and down the neurological system. We'll talk about neurological load and exhaustion in a moment, but also it's triggering the release of hormones such as glucocorticoids, stress chemicals, also a cortisol that stays in the body that is great for an acute stress and is also a blood thickener, so that way you coagulate more quickly if you're cut or scraped whenever you're running, jumping, and fighting, this sort of thing. But it is terribly corrosive to the inside of the smooth muscle walls of the venous uh arterial structures within the body when there's consistent stress and always uh an elevated level of cortisol. Now, this is problematic in that whenever we have what we call trait neuroticism that we can actually measure. It doesn't mean a person is neurotic, but we tend to say it that way, and that's kind of a labeling naming and kind of almost like a blame, you are this kind of thing. Um, neuroticism is the result of being at a level of stress that never mitigates, it never settles down, it's always perpetually elevated and never really goes down enough. What we do know is that the structures in the brain having to do with fear, the amygdala, and also um the mid-singulate cortex have to do with how we in essence deal with stress and the the mid-singular cortex, the aspect of the brain that has to do with dealing with stress will grow, and therefore, once you get better at managing stress, it grows, so therefore you get better because you have more neural density, and uh that's an important thing. But um whenever we're discussing the idea of what we call chronicity of stress, it's not just about the brain structures, but those brain structures respond, yes, but it's also about what happens whenever we have chronic stress. So if our stress never goes down and we have higher levels of trait neuroticism, that means you're more vulnerable to stress, you're less able to respond to it in a way that you can actually feel better after the fact because it goes down. What it does, it actually cuts back within the amygdala, some of the neuronal structures that regulate glucocorticoids, which means that when it's time for the stress to go away, your body doesn't have that capacity to make the glucocorticoids go away. Those are the stress chemicals released for whenever you're under stress, you're in acute stress, which means that you're always at an elevated level of stress, which now starts looking like trait anxiety, trait worry, trait neuroticism. And that means that it's been conditioned, which this is where the hope within the message of this doesn't sound so positive, is that we conditioned it, we trained it. That means our brain changed as a result of environmental stress. So that also means that we can decondition it by going the other direction. If we can change environment, we can change neuronal structure. And this is what the science says. Nothing new that I'm coming up with, it's earth-shattering whenever you hear it, because that also means that if you're neurotic, and I'm saying it on purpose that way, as a label, that means you can de-neuroticize yourself. Now, does it take time and training? Absolutely does. It's conditioning, it's practice, repetition. And we've mentioned that in the last podcast that if you're going to gain the skills of self-regulation, you also are gaining the skill of learning how to relax, how to de-stress again. And what we're talking about is stress. Stress is a very general broad term, but how we stress and the nuances of what stress looks like and how I react to it is very individual. And back to personality. Personality has a lot to do with what we call individual differences. And some of that might seem like a predilection, might seem like a preference, but actually there are propensities that we develop skills, kind of like dribbling a basketball, the better you get at it, the less you have to think about it. Whenever you get to that level of unconscious competence, boy, it's hard to stop. And the same thing with how we become neurotic, whenever we become those traits within a personality that we might call histrionic, where people get very emotional, up and down, happy, angry, sad, crying, that we are not born that way to be just like that. But often if we're in a stressful environment young enough, whenever we don't have the capacity to run, and somebody can overcome us, and there's nothing we can do. And this happens a lot with people that have been traumatized, uh both physically and and also is what we would call the uh SA. I don't want to say it out loud because it's just it seems disrespectful to me to the people whom I serve. But also, whenever you have those things, when you don't have the reasonable ability to say no, or maybe somebody tricks you into thinking that that's okay somehow, that once you realize and you get older that that's not okay, it has shaped you. And those are some deep things that we have to work through. And talk therapy has limitations because we're talking to somebody that was pre-verbal whenever they were conditioned, or if you will, whenever somebody got that memory track ingrained, that we now have to deal with the physiological aspect. So many times we hear people dealing with what we call these personality differences, and being intractable, that means they're permanently there. But often things are being dealt with with just straight talk, with things that occurred to a level of brain that is pre-verbal. It deals with the unction, with the emotion, with the physiological feel of what became the survival mode or what became the survival personality. And this is something that later on gets overlaid, once we learn, uh, with ethics and morals, and that makes the process so much worse for someone that's trying to heal from this, because when somebody takes advantage and they're being unethical, predatory, and amoral, but yet you're little, and then you have to deal with that overlay, then you realize that somehow there's something you're you just were involved in something wrong. That means by default now you're to blame because you were involved, which is absolutely wrong, and I disagree with that. Sometimes we have to approach, not unlike Carl Rogers, whenever he came up with the idea of unconditional positive regard, but there's a very deep level of acceptance that's required, not in judgment and just acceptance of a human being and seeing the person for who they they are, not who they identify as or what they experienced, or the labels given after the fact by themselves or by their environmental um precursors, and that would be family, friends, job, experiences, that sort of thing. And it's a very powerful thing, but also one that can change what it is that we call personality and acceptance many times is realizing that sometimes we have to know that, okay, this is what happened to me, but I am not what happened to me. Notice what I said, I am not that, I am not my experiences, I am not the sum total of my experiences. My deepest aspect of my personality is actually being observed by who it is that is my deepest self, not your ego, not the person you tell people you are, the self-image, but that person that is observing your own thoughts as they're coming up, and it's observing the thinker doing the thinking. And that's the you that can never be perturbed, it can never be hurt, it can never be dirty, but it's always been there, the observer. When people talk about personality, often we don't realize that personality was a stress borne event, and that over time it's solidified in a sense, but not solidified in a concrete, I can put it in a beaker and measure it in a way it sense. But it's training, it's neurological training. And what I told you that we're going to talk about as far as neurological load and conditioning, uh I'll give you a very distinct. Example today, an anecdote from my life. I went with my sons to the gun range. I totally did not expect to go there today, but it was fun. And we were working on stuff. And uh basically what we have to identify is that we have to have discipline of what it is those those firearms are doing, and be careful and be able to tell people, hey, your range is hot, everybody's behind you whenever you're going to shoot, work on your targets, and then clear whenever you're done and make sure that everything is seen, gunpointed up, even it's empty, and you take the magazine out, and then you walk back to where the staging area is, wherever you load, reload, clean, this sort of stuff. Now I'm adding all those details because this is part of the experience, but it's attention. When I was a soldier, I had to learn something very similar. And we have to learn how to make sure we maintain muzzle discipline, but also do what's called safety dust cover moving. Make sure that when you move, you have dust cover on so you don't get dust inside your rifle, this sort of thing, be able to move so that way you don't accidentally shoot your buddy. And um, these aren't like really nice little things that you do, though those are life-saving imperatives. And not unlike this, we have to realize that by practice we learn to do these. And here I'm probably 40-some odd years away from my military experience, but at the same time, those trainings, even coming to attention, whenever the national anthem plays, it still fires in my wiring because we did it so much, still there. Now, today, what we did by the end of the day, I realized I felt exhausted. We didn't do anything physically exhausting, but the attentiveness, attention burns energy. Personality is not like unlike this, and that is our neurological attentive qualities that have brought these programs to bear to help us get those things that we need to do to make sure we're safe in our environment. Whenever we're doing firearm training today, we have to be attentive to every detail, safety, and also make sure we're pointing the right direction, not do anything foolish or where we could make an accident occur that could hurt somebody or self. So basically, don't make mistakes you can't afford, and make sure that you identify safe first, make safe first always, and that's where our neurological system does naturally. And personality is an extension of that neural principle principle in that we make safe first, then you make sandwiches, make friends if you'd like to. So personality is something that arises out of the stress that we experience as a life, and personality can also change. There is hope. There are many that think that personality disordered people are hard to deal with, and they can be. But a lot of that has to do with how stress-reactive they are, and that their wiring is so crossed often that it's hard for them to deal with typical day-to-day things at a level that somebody that is not or has not been traumatized or gone through things that would look like post-traumatic stress disorder that become highly reactive and treat everything that is just an elevated stress or particularly a novel as threatening. It becomes environmentally threatening. It doesn't mean that they feel like they're in danger, but the body responds with the we could possibly potentially be in danger, so therefore we're gonna turn the machine on and let it go full blast because safety first, we'll make friends later. We hurt feelings, oh well. And it and those considerations aren't part of it. This is about survival. I gotta make it to the next right now. And you're gonna leave people behind and you're gonna insult people and hurt people if you don't learn that much of that is stress-borne reactivity that now we consider as part of our personality or who it is that we think we are. So it's hard to separate. So what I'm telling you is that much of what we consider personality is stress-borne state, not trait. That means it'll come and go. That's where we start seeing the redeeming qualities in somebody that may struggle with personality in social situations. Whenever they're more relaxed, even if it's for a fleet and moment, you see those glimpses of human, of individual, that often we say they're really kind of nice when they're not overreactive, overstressed, or highly anxious, angry, aggressive, or socially dominant. Outside of those behaviors, whoa, there's people there. There's a person there, and that's something to pay attention to. Sometimes we as the individual trying to self-regulate can actually regain who it is that I am, the real me, not the personality, not the socialized self, not the self-image who we want people to think we are, who people actually think we are, but the actual you. And when we get that and we can integrate that, there are often those that that do work with the inner child, and this is our most gentle approach, and I don't have a problem with that methodology. Whenever we identify that there is a part of us that is still like a child, that is so closely tied to what it is that is our lower level of brain, that is our reactive state, that is a most animal part of us, but that's also where our love and our creativity and our kindness and our empathy and compassion stem from. Our most artistic traits come from that, whenever it's unbridled and allowed to flow within a safe paradigm. We don't lose that, but it's always burgeoning and and and bubbling up and wanting to come out, but often we're stuck in that survival state. That's why often we have some really weird dreams that don't make sense. We'll have to talk about that in some other podcast. But what I'm trying to do is tell you is there is hope, and often we misidentify who it is that we are with the experiences of how I interpret stress and how I react to it and call that me and say that's my personality, when in actuality that's a misidentification. That isn't you, that is you handling stress, and those are the traits that come out that help you deal with stress, survival stress, and this is who we call ourselves mistakenly, yes, but there's hope. That means that by conditioning we can actually change how we react. I've had some people that I've been working with just recently that I've been showing the double sniff technique to, and some have taken it to heart and have been doing it almost 24 hours a day, and literally, almost miraculously, I can say, and I've seen this up close within the last three weeks, where somebody that was hyperreactive and greatly threatened by any stress, everything was potentially life or death stress level such that the heart rate would go up, the physical tension would be there, the muscular tension, the angry, the upset. It was hard to be around them. But yeah, they were doing this and they started retraining in their back to their peachy selves in a very large way. And they're preserving their relationships generally. And I'm telling you this because I'm encouraging you. Don't be afraid to try. Don't be afraid of wasting time. It's not a waste of time, because you are a worthwhile investment. And I'm telling you, I believe in you, I encourage you, and here soon, whenever the book's out. I want you to have that. And I want you to share it because this is something that our world needs now, not only at the children's level who were raising kiddos, but as adults, as parents, as teachers, as mentors, as bosses, employees, and employers, and and as friends, as peers, as other people out in the world that we live with. So this is my encouragement to you. Work on the double sniff technique, two double sniffs through the nose, extend it, exhale, and do that often. No one can tell you doing it unless you're telling you doing it, and that will start your steps into self-regulation and managing what it is that we call personality that we may mistakenly take as me when in actuality it's a stress-borne state that will pass. Work on that, take care of yourself, and whatever you do, walk well.