Openness to experience
lit sign in window surrounded by plants that reads ‘we’re open’
As we begin the new calendar year, there’s a huge push to get yourself in order, now. Yet year after year people fail in their efforts to change because they haven’t set the proper foundation. It’s hard to build on unstable ground if you would like your work to remain standing. So to start out this calendar year I thought we could talk about what makes one capable of change.
Openness to experience is about how you approach new experiences. Thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, all of it. When functioning healthfully it allows you to approach what life throws at you with curiosity, wonder, and excitement rather than with fear, anxiety, apathy, or avoidance. Someone who is open to experience displays a willingness to try new things. This ends up being a powerful advantage that has ripple affects that can be felt in one’s life throughout space and time.
mug that reads ‘life is good’
Openness to experience has been studied time and time again. The results are about as conclusive as it gets. Higher intelligence, higher creativity, and more enjoyment of novel things accompany openness. Openness to experience is correlated to everything from higher wages to higher life satisfaction. From less suffering with change to increased satisfaction with their social lives, people who are open to experience are living their best lives because they aren’t afraid to chase it. They are secure in their understanding that it is okay to fail therefore it is okay to try. You live a better life if you are open to experience.
metal fence with barbed wire
So if its that easy, when why isn’t everyone open to experience? Who is intentionally putting off this magic key to better living? Well, it turns out that being open isn’t always in our control. It has a lot to do with how we were brought up, what we have experienced, and the work we have done to make ourselves into the people we want to be.
The two most common things that stand in the way of openness are upbringing and trauma. With upbringing, people can be taught to be fearful of or just closed off to the world. Authoritarian parenting can make everything outside a narrow bound of options seem dangerous and that permeates through the psyche impacting adult behavior in ways that are hard to unravel. With trauma, sometimes people struggle to gain their footing in the world again and just slowly lose their openness as symptoms set in and negative experiences pile up. It is hard to be open when your brain is only supplied with the chemicals that take you to the darker places.
wood board that reads ‘fuck you fear’ lined with string lights
Openness to experience is a complicated topic for me being AuDHD and having a thick history of childhood trauma centered around authoritarian parenting, being open didn’t always come easy to me. I have a whole system of ways to amp myself up to get ready for things I know will be difficult but will be worth it. It’s possible to get to a better place no matter where you start, and that makes it worthwhile to try. Now I just chase what I want without fear that it won’t work out, because something always does. Trauma messes with your ability to properly identify fear, and that needs to be addressed if you want to be happy with your life. You need to get it straight.
Now that we know what openness to experience is and how it can help, we’ll cover what happens when you’re closed off, what is the right amount of openness, and how you can improve your openness to experience.
worn street sign that reads ‘narrow road’
Openness to experience is a spectrum that can be taken to unsafe extremes in both directions. People are responsible for considering themselves, their place in life, their capacity, their ability, and everything else relevant to them when deciding what is the right amount for them. You are looking for balance and growth while considering safety, other than that, explore at will.
There’s a whole series of research on how people with lower openness to experience are generally from authoritarian households who held bigoted views. Both of those things are associated with high disgust reactions which manifests in character as being exclusionary and putting other people down, othering them, and mistreating them as they are no longer viewed as equal or worthy of basic decency and protection. From there, it is easy to see why they would shut down to the outside world. But we know that’t not an okay way to be because it hurts people in addition to limiting the self, and that is not a way to be or live. What’s the point is choosing that?
And yes, everyday you do not heal, you have chosen not to do the work to heal. Choosing not to make a choice is making a choice. If the choice is left unmade it generally means less experiences, lower income, lower life satisfaction, poorer health,
The right amount of openness - and to what types of experience - is highly dependent on you, your support system, your economic freedom, and much more. Healthy risk for you depends on what is available to, or could be built to support you if you fail. Failing without proper resources and support leads people to be less open to experience. In order to be balanced, you have to make thoughtful choices that let you succeed more often than not, or at least, not be destroyed by our failures if they are frequent.
There are as many ways as there are stars in the sky to open yourself up to the majesty of life and the universe. Some lean towards the clinical and others the spontaneous. Sometimes growth is sought and sometimes it is thrust upon us by the flow of life. I have always found it better to go at it head first with an almost maladjusted sense that everything will end up okay - internally that is - externally I let my body have the experience it is going to have and I just try to surrender. I have become very practiced at focusing on only right up to the point of no return after which I have to jump and don’t have time to consider all the things that our more annoying human parts might think to throw at me.
A huge part of whether or not someone is naturally open to the world is if they had a safe upbringing or if they have worked through not. Attachment is critical to openness because security trains you to trust you can leap. If you do not have secure attachment, you might need more caution, but redeveloping or developing openness for the first time is a critical step to healing from trauma. Embarking on this process with a trusted friend or a professional can help you make faster and more impactful progress as you can have someone who sees you from the outside noticing things you wouldn’t so you can tackle them with efficiency. Also doesn’t hurt to have someone around who has done it before ;)
Remember, there’s no prize for boxing yourself in and struggling, so you might as well live and be well while you do it.
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ferns surrounding a waterfall over rocks
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