Psychology says people who continue changing their minds as they age often share these 9 openness traits that protect them from becoming rigid

It’s easy to assume that the mind stiffens with age.

Somewhere in their sixties or seventies, plenty of people seem to — set.

The opinions stop shifting, the list of restaurants they’ll go to shrinks to about four, and every new thing is worse than the old thing, with a speech ready to prove it.

But it isn’t inevitable, and it isn’t really about age. Some people get to eighty more flexible and more interested than they were at thirty, and it has nothing to do with luck or brainpower.

It comes down to a handful of small habits — openness traits, broadly — that keep a mind from hardening. These nine show up again and again.

1. They stay curious about things that have nothing to do with them

The clearest sign is a curiosity that pays them nothing. They’ll read a whole article about how the deep sea works, or how a bridge gets built, or why a language died out — not because it’s useful, but because they want to know. It doesn’t have to connect to their job, their hobbies, or their life. It’s just interesting, and that’s enough.

People who lose this tend to narrow over time, until the only things worth knowing are the things they already know. The ones who keep it stay open. New information keeps finding its way in because they never stopped looking for it.

2. They’re fine admitting they don’t know something

Ask them a question they can’t answer, and they won’t bluff.

They’ll just say “no idea” — and usually follow it with “tell me.”

There’s no scramble to look smart, no vague non-answer to paper over the gap.

This sounds minor, but it’s doing a lot of work. The moment admitting ignorance feels like a threat, learning stops, because nothing new gets in while a person is busy defending the impression that they already had it.

The ones who can say “I don’t know” without flinching keep a clear runway for everything they’ve yet to find out.

3. They keep trying things they might be bad at

They sign up for the pottery class, the language app, the sport they’ve never played — fully expecting to be clumsy at it, and doing it anyway.

The point isn’t mastery. It’s the willingness to be a beginner again, at an age when most people have quietly decided they’re done being beginners.

This maps onto what personality researchers call openness to experience — the trait that has people seeking out unfamiliar situations instead of retreating into the tried-and-tested.

People low in it gravitate toward set routines and familiar comforts. People high in it keep wandering past the edge of what they already know, and that wandering is what keeps the edge from closing in.

4. They fill their lives with people who aren’t like them

Look at who they spend time with, and the range stands out — people a couple of generations younger, people from other countries, people who vote the opposite way, and people who believe wildly different things. They didn’t end up with a social circle that’s just a mirror.

This matters because the fastest way to harden is to only ever talk to people who already agree. A life full of differences means a steady supply of moments where their assumptions get bumped. They’re exposed, over and over, to the plain fact that reasonable people live very differently — and once that’s sunk in, it’s hard to un-know.

5. They listen to people they disagree with instead of waiting to argue back

In an argument, most people aren’t listening — they’re reloading, waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can fire back.

People who change their minds as they age do something different. When someone disagrees with them, they get interested in the disagreement itself — in what the other person is seeing that they’re not.

Researchers describe this as intellectual humility. It doesn’t mean caving — they can hold a firm position and still want to understand the other one. But that real hearing-out is what lets them occasionally walk away with a slightly better view than the one they came in with.

6. They don’t measure everything new against the good old days

When something new shows up — a kind of music, a way of working, a word that didn’t exist five years ago — they can take it on its own terms. They’re not running it through a filter of “this isn’t how we did it” or “things were better before.” Sometimes they end up liking it, sometimes they don’t. Either way, they gave it a fair shot.

The nostalgia trap is one of the main on-ramps to rigidity.

Once the past becomes the standard that everything else gets measured against, the present can only ever lose. People who skip that trap get to keep living in the current world instead of a remembered one — which, conveniently, is the only world that’s still going.

7. They don’t hold people to who they used to be

Most people file the others in their lives into fixed versions — a flaky friend, a difficult coworker, a younger sibling who can’t get it together — and then stop updating the file.

These people keep updating it.

They notice when the flaky friend has turned reliable, when the younger sibling has grown all the way up, and they adjust their read accordingly.

Its openness pointed at people instead of ideas, and it tends to run both directions: because they let others change, they give themselves room to change too. The ones who freeze everyone into an old version usually end up frozen in one themselves.

8. They’re comfortable when the answer is “it’s complicated”

Some questions don’t have clean answers, and these people are okay with that.

They can hold “this policy helped some people and hurt others,” or “he was a good father and a difficult man,” without needing to flatten it into one tidy answer.

Rigidity loves a clean binary — good or bad, right or wrong, us or them — because a binary means it never has to be thought about again.

Sitting with “it’s complicated” is more effort. It means keeping two true things in mind at once and not rushing to resolve the tension between them. But that willingness to stay in the gray is exactly what keeps their thinking supple instead of brittle.

9. They take advice from people younger than them

When they’re stuck on something — a new phone, a work problem, a question about how the world works now — they’ll ask someone half their age and take the answer seriously.

This is harder than it sounds, because it means letting go of the idea that age and experience automatically equal authority.

A lot of people can’t manage it; being advised by someone younger feels like losing rank. The open ones don’t read it as a loss at all.

They’ve worked out that good information doesn’t care how old the person delivering it is, and that the fastest way to stay fluent in the current world is to learn from the people who already are.

So they ask the 24-year-old, take the tip, and move on — a little more current than they were an hour ago, and not the least bit bothered by where the help came from.