If Personality Is Partly Genetic, What Can Therapy Change?
Every now and then a piece of scientific news lands in a way that quietly closes a door for people. A headline about the genetics of personality is one of those. If who you are is written into your DNA, the reasoning goes, then there is not much point trying to change it, and certainly not much point working with someone to help you try.
It is a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a reassuring one.
The study itself
In early September 2026, the journal Nature published the largest study of its kind on the genetics of personality. An international consortium led by Ted Schwaba at Michigan State University pooled data from 46 research cohorts, covering between roughly 611,000 and 1.14 million people depending on the trait, and looked for genetic variation associated with the "Big Five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
They identified 1,260 genetic variants linked to those traits, 824 of which had not been identified before. The same genetic patterns also showed relationships with health, education and career outcomes, which is the part that tends to make headlines.
Here is the part that usually does not. Taken all together, those common genetic variants accounted for somewhere between about 5% and 13% of the differences between people on these traits, depending on the trait and how carefully it was measured. There is no single "personality gene", and the effect of any one variant is very small. The researchers were unusually direct about the limits of their own work, writing that the genetic scores they built "cannot predict an individual's future behaviour."
So the honest summary is that genetics is a real and measurable influence on temperament, but it is nowhere near the whole story. Most of what makes you you sits somewhere other than in those variants — in your history, your circumstances, your relationships, and in the patterns you have built over a lifetime of responding to them.
Temperament is not the same as the pattern built on top of it
Temperament is the raw material. Some people are wired to feel things intensely. Some are alert to threat, quick to notice what might go wrong. Some are quiet and need solitude to recover. Some move towards other people easily. These tendencies tend to be fairly stable across life, and yes, they are partly inherited.
What sits on top of that is different. A person who feels anxiety keenly might, over twenty years, build a habit of avoiding anything uncertain. Someone who reads a room quickly might learn to manage every interaction so nobody is ever disappointed in them. Someone who feels things deeply might have learnt, somewhere along the way, that showing it is unsafe, and go quiet instead.
None of those responses is in anyone's DNA. They are learnt, they made sense at the time, and they are the sort of thing therapy is actually for.
What therapeutic work usually involves
People often imagine therapy as a project to become a different person. In practice it is far more specific than that, and considerably less dramatic.
Much of the work is about noticing what you do when you are under pressure, and where you learnt to do it. It is about the beliefs underneath the behaviour, the ones usually formed early and rarely examined since: that rest has to be earned, that needing help is a weakness, that if you stop managing everything it will fall apart. It is about widening the gap between a feeling arriving and your response to it, so there is room for a choice where there used to be only a reflex.
It also involves practical skills, particularly with anxiety — how to stay with discomfort long enough that avoidance stops being the only option, how to sleep, how to have the difficult conversation you have been putting off for a year.
None of this is fast, and none of it is guaranteed. Different approaches suit different people, and how much changes, and how quickly, varies a great deal from one person to the next. But the material being worked on here is learnt material, and learnt things can generally be relearnt.
Why "this is just how I am" is worth a second look
It is one of the most common sentences said in a first session. Sometimes it is accurate. Plenty of people arrive apologising for traits that need no apology.
Often, though, it is describing something that was never fixed to begin with. The person who says they are just a worrier may be describing years of checking behaviour that grew slowly and could shrink again. The person who says they are just bad at relationships may be describing a specific pattern — withdrawing at the first sign of conflict, say — that has a history and a logic to it. The person who is just not a talker may have grown up somewhere that talking was not safe.
The distinction is worth drawing carefully, because the phrase can become a lid. It is worth asking, without any pressure to answer immediately: is this genuinely my nature, or is it a strategy that worked once?
Being introverted is not a problem to be solved. Neither is sensitivity, intensity, caution, or preferring three close friendships to thirty acquaintances. There is a version of self-improvement culture, well represented in Singapore's professional life, that treats every quieter trait as a deficit to be optimised away. Good therapy does not do this. A reasonable aim is not to become someone more marketable, but to be less at war with how you are built, and to stop paying an unnecessary price for it.
Often the change people notice first is that the same temperament costs them less than it used to.
How to tell whether it is worth talking to someone
There is no threshold you have to meet, and nothing needs to have gone badly wrong. A useful question is simply whether something is getting in the way: whether it is affecting your sleep, your work, your patience with the people you live with, or how much of your week you spend dreading (or dreaming about) something.
Another is whether you have tried to shift it on your own and found you could not, which is far more often about the pattern being well-practised than about any lack of willpower.
Our first session will be mostly conversation. You describe what has been happening, the therapist asks questions, and together you get a sense of what is going on and whether the fit feels right. There is no diagnosis on day one, no assumption that you will stay, and no requirement that you arrive with it all worked out. Most people come in able to say only that something is not working.
Your temperament came with you. What you have built on top of it, over years, in response to circumstances that may no longer apply — is far more open to change than a headline about genes would suggest.
If you would like to talk something through, you can read more about our therapists and how we work, or get in touch to arrange a first session at our Tanglin Road or CBD rooms, or online.
Source: Schwaba, T. et al., "Robust inference and correlates from genetic associations with personality," Nature, 2 September 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10992-9
