By Isabel Romero

Let’s stop to think about how are we, what are we and what makes us be who we are. We go through a lot of changes along our lives, but our personality also changes throughout the day… why??

Our life obeys to a double movement: expansion and conservation or seclusion. With this two perspectives we can analyse the personality of any human. The first one is characterized by affectivity, sociability, humour, happiness, friendship, contact and the necessity of being within groups. While the second one has selectives friends, it’s more distrustful and prefers loneliness. The question is, are both these compatible the same person? Today scientists accept that the result of what we are is in our genetic combination, but that our features are not written in permanent ink and they can go changing. In this sense, scientists have discovered that the atmosphere in which we find ourselves has a strong impact in our personality, especially in our behaviour. The American Association of Phisicology ensures that there are many levels in the estructure of the personality and that the level that is working in each moment is sensitive to what happens around.  

So, can it be normal being a very shy, quiet, unpleasant and no sociable person in the morning, and then suddenly at night become a very open, talkative, friendly and sociable person? Yes, if we trust science. Is this a gesture of hypocrisy? Returning to the scientific explanation again, it doesn’t have to be a specific reason once the explanation can simply lie in the fact that in the morning and at night we are influenced by different aspects. For example people walk in a certain way in the morning to go to school or to their jobs (walking, by bus or in the elevator where nobody talks) and then, when the night falls, and their context changes, for example when going to a club, they move, dance and act in a completely different way to their previous behavior.  These aspects that influence our behaviour in the morning can be called “inhibitors” (that suspend transitorily an activity of the organism by means of a stimulus), and the ones that do that at night can be called “desinhibitors” (that make us behave spontaneously). Looking at the second group, we will also understand the first group; we can find the light that can be considered inhibitor and desinhibitor depending when it is acting. For example, without light, or in the darkness, people tend to get the hang and to be less shy. This also happens with drugs and alcohol (before getting to the depressive stage), people are open, want to talk, want to hug, laugh a lot, smile appears frequently, want to know everybody, make a lot of friends, tell them the story of their life and make things that in a normal state or in the morning they would never do. Noise in general and music in particular are also active in this process, getting us to a less realistic environment, where we are like “unreal” when compared to what we are in other occasions. This doesn’t mean that darkness, music, drugs and alcohol will always change or affect our behaviours. What I’m trying to show with this examples and with this excuses (morning and night) is how flexible, versatile and easily influenced the human society is, and how the movement of our personality is conditioned by different variables.How we are, what we are and what make us be who we are it’s already answered, now we have to find how control it.