It can be difficult to feel satisfied with your life when you’re facing challenges — but it’s not impossible.
It turns out that whether or not a person is generally satisfied has more to do with their personality than their experiences, according to René Mõttus, editor of the European Journal of Personality.
People with higher salaries, great social fitness and satisfactory health “rate their life satisfaction slightly higher than those earning less, lacking strong relationships, or having poor health,” Mõttus wrote in an article for Psychology Today.
“But it is essential to realize that these factors are much weaker than many people may think,” Mõttus said.
There are some personality traits that are actually a better predictor of a person’s life satisfaction.
4 traits of highly satisfied people
People who have higher life satisfaction tend to be:
- Emotionally stable
- Conscientious
- Extroverted
- Agreeable
Researchers conducted a meta-analysis in 2020 to determine if there was a connection between the Big Five personality traits and life satisfaction, and found that the above traits closely aligned with greater life satisfaction.
This year, Mõttus and other researchers decided to test if the results would change if a person’s personality traits were defined by how they would describe themselves and how their close loved ones would describe them.
“Besides the Big Five traits of emotional stability, extroversion, and conscientiousness, satisfied people were characterized by feeling understood, excited, and decisive, while less satisfied people tended to feel envious, bored, used, unable, and unrewarded,” Mõttus wrote.
These findings indicate that our life’s circumstances don’t have to define our life satisfaction.
It’s possible to improve your emotional stability, become more conscious of your choices and embrace the other personality traits that lead to greater satisfaction with life.
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