The Itch That Wanted a Diagnosis
The trouble with an itch is not the itch.
The trouble is the internet.
A few months ago, I noticed a recurring itch in my hand. Nothing dramatic. No swelling, no rash, no plague sores shaped like medieval warnings. Just an itch. A regular, garden-variety itch. And yet my brain, which has never met a benign explanation it couldn’t aggressively reject, immediately remembered an article I once read about people with mysterious itches so unbearable they scratch themselves into ruin—tearing through skin, sanity, and, in some cases, life itself.
I thought, with the confidence of a man who has Googled before: That’s probably about to happen to me.
This is how my mind works. It does not stroll from A to B. It catapults from A to Z, pausing only to light the fuse.
I’ve been like this for years. Semi-regular episodes of panic, hypochondria, and emotional overclocking have been my steady companions since my teens, when I had my first panic attack and learned two important lessons:
- The human body is terrifying when you pay attention to it.
- My brain cannot be trusted with a microphone.
So it wasn’t exactly shocking when an online personality test informed me that I scored higher than 85% of people on neuroticism. Frankly, I was disappointed it wasn’t higher. If you’re going to be neurotic, at least be elite.
Neuroticism, for the uninitiated, is not “being a little anxious.” It’s excessive worrying, rumination, emotional volatility—the tendency to treat every stray sensation or awkward memory as a congressional inquiry. It is the personality trait most closely aligned with thinking something is wrong when, statistically speaking, nothing is.
The good news—if you can call it that—is that neuroticism does tend to dim with age. Mine has, somewhat. Not because I found enlightenment, but because I’ve been slowly jury-rigging coping strategies: less self-flagellation, fewer post-mortems of every social interaction, and a conscious effort not to replay conversations like I’m building a legal case against myself.
So when my editor offered me an assignment—would I like to try actively tweaking my personality using emerging research from psychology?—I said yes. Not because I felt ready. But because refusing would’ve required explaining why, which felt worse.
The scientific framework behind this experiment is the Big Five personality model: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. It’s not perfect. Critics say it flattens the human psyche into a spreadsheet. But it has one enormous advantage: evidence. Decades of it.
For a long time, psychologists assumed personality was fixed—locked in by age 30 like a badly chosen tattoo. But over the last few decades, that idea has softened. People change. Slowly. Predictably. We tend to become less neurotic, more agreeable, and more conscientious as life forces us to pay bills and apologise.
More interestingly, recent research suggests we can speed this process up. With targeted interventions—small, deliberate changes in behavior and thought patterns—people can achieve measurable personality shifts in months instead of decades.
I had six weeks.
I started with another online test, which confirmed what I already knew and added a few wrinkles. Alongside high neuroticism, I scored extremely high on openness. That one I liked. Openness is curiosity, imagination, receptiveness to ideas. I was happy to keep that.
My conscientiousness was also high, which sounds virtuous until you realise it shades easily into perfectionism. This is the trait that makes you re-read an email five times, spot nothing wrong, send it, then immediately see everything wrong.
Agreeableness was… fine. Right down the middle. I admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that I can be suspicious of others’ intentions and not especially forgiving. Extraversion, meanwhile, sat stubbornly low. I had long accepted that I was not, and would never be, the kind of person who “just chats” to strangers. I am the kind of person who rehearses ordering coffee.
Still, I wanted to change. Less neurotic. Slightly more extraverted. More agreeable. And—this felt dangerous—slightly less conscientious.
The interventions were simple, almost offensively so. Meditate. Write a gratitude journal. Say hello to cashiers. Assume irritating people might be having bad days instead of being villains. Do kind things. Leave work on time. Act like the kind of person you want to become.
This is the part where psychology sounds suspiciously like advice your aunt gives you at Christmas.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth the research keeps circling: personality isn’t just who you are. It’s what you repeatedly do. The brain is less a fixed portrait and more a running tally.
I won’t pretend I embraced all the exercises. Some filled me with dread. “Offer to buy a stranger coffee” felt like a fast track to being mistaken for a scammer or a TikTok stunt. “Start a conversation at a bar” would’ve required so much alcohol that any mental health benefits would’ve been immediately nullified.
Self-affirmations were even worse. Saying “I choose to be happy today” out loud felt like mocking myself in my own accent. I did it anyway, with a smirk sharp enough to wound.
But I did enough.
I started attending things again—meetups, classes, small social events I’d previously written off as exhausting. The surprise was not that they were pleasant. The surprise was that they weren’t ruinous. I didn’t need days to recover. The more I went, the easier it became. Exposure, it turns out, works whether you like it or not.
One evening at a yoga class, I caught myself doing something genuinely alarming: I initiated small talk. Unprompted. With a stranger. And lived.
Meditation was harder. At first, my mind behaved like a toddler denied sugar—loud, chaotic, and deeply offended. Thoughts raced, commented on themselves, worried about whether I was meditating correctly. Eventually, with a helpful metaphor from my partner, I stopped trying to eject the voice and just… turned the engine off. The silence didn’t kill me. It didn’t even itch.
What these interventions quietly target isn’t happiness. It’s tolerance. Neuroticism thrives on emotional avoidance and self-punishment. Learning to experience discomfort without panicking about its meaning turns the volume down.
Perfectionism, too, responds badly to scrutiny. I tried sending emails without one last check. I noticed errors afterward. The world continued. No one sued. The lesson wasn’t that mistakes don’t exist. It was that they don’t matter nearly as much as my nervous system insists they do.
After six weeks, I retook the test. I didn’t feel like a new person. But the numbers shifted. Extraversion rose. Agreeableness climbed. Neuroticism dropped—dramatically. Not to zero, obviously. I still worried. I still catastrophised. But I could see these thoughts for what they were: passing weather, not prophecies.
The most unsettling discovery wasn’t that personality can change. It was how mundane the process was. No breakthroughs. No catharsis. Just repeated, slightly uncomfortable actions slowly updating my self-image.
Which brings me back to the itch.
The itch didn’t kill me. It went away. Like most of the things I fear, it resolved without ceremony, while I was distracted by something else.
And maybe that’s the quiet lesson running beneath all this research: personality doesn’t shift when you argue with it. It shifts when you stop treating every sensation, thought, or feeling as evidence of who you are.
Most people say they want to change. Far fewer are willing to endure the mild awkwardness required to do it. When I told my partner about the results, he was impressed. “So I could change if I wanted to?” he said, thoughtfully.
He paused.
“I don’t feel like it though.”
Fair enough.
After all, the itch isn’t the problem.
The story you tell yourself about it is.