It’s that time of year when the internet turns into a giant group chat about self-improvement. New year, new you. Better habits. Better boundaries. A year older, and maybe wiser.

Right on cue, the wisdom hucksters appear. They are the “one weird trick” crowd — the gurus with a microphone, a smirk and a promise of instant ascendance if you just buy the book, sign up for the training program, use their AI tool or subscribe to their Substack.

But there is no “enlightenment pill” that works overnight and never wears off. The evidence points the other direction: wisdom isn’t a permanent halo you wear. It’s a set of mental processes you can practise — and lose — depending on whether it’s a calm Tuesday or a stressful Sunday.

To understand why we often fail to be wise when we need it most, we must stop treating wisdom like a fixed personality trait.

What is wisdom?

In modern psychology, wisdom isn’t an ethereal, mystical quality. It’s made of specific metacognitive skills — mental processes that help us navigate the crazy uncertain world we live in. These include:

• Intellectual humility: Admitting you could be wrong or that your knowledge is limited.
• Recognition of uncertainty: Understanding that situations can unfold in many different ways.
• Consideration of diverse viewpoints: The ability to see how a situation looks from another side.
• Integration and compromise: Searching for solutions that balance competing interests rather than just scoring points.

These mental processes are ways of thinking that matter when life gets messy — whether dealing with interpersonal conflict, political disagreement or financial challenges. But here is where the “magic pill” story starts to collapse.

Wisdom isn’t a fixed personality trait

If you have ever successfully navigated a complex political disagreement at work on a Thursday, only to lose your temper over a broken dishwasher on a Sunday, you know that wisdom doesn’t work like a software update.

For a long time, psychologists treated wisdom as a stable personality trait, as something you have, like blue eyes or extraversion. The assumption is that if you measure a person once, you’ve basically captured who they are.

But major scientific advances, including a new yearlong study our team just conducted, suggest that this is exactly where the culture goes wrong.

We often use static snapshots to make big claims about how people change over time. This practice risks committing an “ecological fallacy,” which is the trap of assuming that what makes one person different from another (between-person differences) explains how a single person changes over time (within-person change).

Translation: Just because “wiser people” on average are doing better doesn’t mean each individual becomes wiser in the same way, on the same timeline or for the same reasons.

New research: Wisdom acts like a system

To test this idea, our team conducted a year-long, multi-wave study of nearly 500 North American adults. The results recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

We asked participants to reflect on real adversities — social conflicts, health scares, job losses — as they occurred over the course of a year.

Participants rated their use of four core wisdom features: intellectual humility, recognizing uncertainty and change, consideration of diverse viewpoints and searching for compromise.

The headline results are disruptive for anyone selling instant transformation.

First, wisdom fluctuates. While personality traits like extraversion or neuroticism remained stable, wisdom features fluctuated significantly from moment to moment. You can be wise on Thursday and a fool on Sunday.

Second, it’s a network, not a monolith. We found that wisdom is best modelled as a network of loosely interconnected skills rather than a single underlying “wisdom trait.”

Third, context matters. People were generally wiser when reflecting on social conflicts than when dealing with personal health issues or trauma.

Most importantly, we found that patterns between people didn’t match patterns within individuals over time. What predicts who is generally wiser doesn’t necessarily predict how individuals become wiser.

Therefore, if you’ve ever thought to yourself “I know what the wise thing is… why can’t I do it when I’m emotional?” — congratulations! Your lived experience is more scientifically accurate than half the pop-science advice market.

The good news about wisdom

If wisdom isn’t an update you install, is there anything you can actually do?

Yes. In our yearlong study, we found a specific predictor of growth. When people reported higher-than-usual self-distancing at one point in time, they reported higher levels of wisdom-related features three months later.

In other words, when people step back and view a difficult situation from a third-person perspective, they are more likely to reason wisely in the future, including by practising intellectual humility, searching for compromise and recognizing uncertainty and change.

That finding is correlational. But in a separate experiment published in Psychological Science, we tested whether training in distanced reflection changes wise reasoning.

For one month, participants kept a daily diary about the most important issues of the day. One group wrote typically (first-person), while the other group was trained to write about their daily challenges using the third-person (for example, asking “What did Chris feel?” rather than “What did I feel?”).

The result? The group trained in distanced reflection showed significant increases in wise reasoning about interpersonal challenges compared with the control group. This shift in language helped broaden their self-focus, breaking the egocentric cycle that often blocks wisdom.

How to practise wisdom (no app required)

So, what do you do practically when life gets heated? Based on this research, here’s a toolkit of repeatable practices for spiralling arguments, regrets or looming decisions in the year ahead:

1. Practise self-distancing. Instead of asking “Why am I like this?” try asking “What is [Your Name] missing right now?” It might feel awkward, but it helps with your mental geometry: you are widening the frame.

2. Ask the humility question. Ask yourself: “What would change my mind here?” If the answer is “nothing,” you aren’t reasoning but defending a position.

3. Allow two truths to coexist. Wisdom is rarely a knockout punch; it is usually an integration. Ask: “What is true on my side, and what might be true on theirs?”

Will this make you instantly wise forever? No. That’s the point. Wisdom is closer to physical fitness than a magic pill: it is trainable, context-dependent and annoyingly easy to lose when you’re tired, stressed or flooded with emotion.

The more evidence we gather, the clearer the message: if someone is promising enlightenment now, they aren’t teaching wisdom. They are selling false certainty. And certainty is often the opposite of what wisdom requires.

Author Bios: Igor Grossmann is Professor of Psychology and Jackson A. Smith is a PhD Candidate in Clinical Psychology both at the University of Waterloo