Isabel Briggs Myers grew up in Washington D.C. where she was home-schooled by her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs. Her father, Lyman J. Briggs worked as a research Physicist. Briggs Myers had little formal schooling up until she attended Swarthmore College, where she studied political science. During her time at Swarthmore College, she met Clarence "Chief" Myers who was studying law. The two married in 1918 and were together until Clarence's death in 1979.

The novel Murder Yet to Come, published in 1929, won the National Detective Murder Mystery Contest for that year. It applies her ideas about personality type into a murder mystery.

Briggs Myers' second work of fiction, Give Me Death, published in 1934, revisits the same detectives from Murder Yet to Come but also describes personality type as racially determined. In it, a Southern family commits suicide one by one after learning they may have "Negro blood".

In 1945, the dean of the George Washington School of Medicine allowed Briggs Myers and Cook Briggs to apply the MBTI to first-year undergraduates. This included about 5,500 students and Briggs Myers studied it for years by looking at patterns among dropouts and successful students.

In 1962, the Educational Testing Service published the MBTI for research-only purposes. In 1975, 1977 and 1979, three national MBTI conferences were held at the University of Florida, Michigan State University, and Philadelphia respectively. In 1975, Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc. published the MBTI as a tool for helping people.

In 1975, Briggs Myers co-founded the Center for Application of Psychological Type with Mary McCaulley. CAPT is a non-profit organization which maintains research and application of the MBTI. It also exists to protect and promote Briggs Myers' ideology. Its headquarters are in Gainesville, Florida and its motto is “Fostering human understanding through training, publishing, and research”.

In the July 1980 edition of MBTI News, Briggs Myers attributed another reason for creating the MBTI to her marriage to "Chief" Clarence Myers. Their differences in psychological type (she was an INFP and he was an ISTJ) inspired her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, to keep studying differences among people and their actions. Cook Briggs came upon the work of Carl Gustav Jung and introduced it to her daughter who then started studying the psychological types.

Saunders, F. W. (1991), Katharine and Isabel: Mother's Light, Daughter's Journey, Davies-Black Publishing, U.S. ISBN 0-89106-049-9 (biography of Briggs Myers and her mother)

In the 2000s, the MBTI is now taken by more than two million people per year and is translated into 16 languages.