For centuries, ayurvedic practitioners have held the view that an individual's personality type can affect his/her health. They believed that states of mind affected immune function and that there were several spots in the body where the mind and body exchanged information. Now Western medicine appears to be converging to this line of thinking. Studies suggest that slow accretion of damage from personality traits such as hostility and anger, pessimism, shyness, cynicism, and repression, plays a significant role in the state of ones health.

The news isn't all bad, though. Much of your personality is genetically determined, most researchers agree, but your temperament is also affected by upbringing, environment, and the decisions you make. And that means you can work with yours to keep yourself healthy. "Our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and hopes are nothing more than chemical and electrical activity in the cells of our brains," says Vanderbilt University psychologist Oakley Ray, PhD, who recently reviewed 100 years of research on how personality can affect your health. "As experiences change our brains and thoughts, we are changing our biology." Read on to find your potential trouble spots, and how to change them for the better.


The term Type A became part of the popular lexicon after a 1975 study found that people who were hostile, impatient, and competitive were at greater risk of heart disease than more placid souls. Since then, much research has suggested that hostility is the real cardiac troublemaker. A hostile personality is defined not just by anger but also by cynicism and aggression - by the attitude that other people can't be trusted and the tendency to lash out. What's more, a belligerent person is more likely than others to get depressed.

These personality traits are unlikely to win you many friends, leading to another risk factor for heart disease: social isolation. A study out of Finland found that being hostile, depressed, or socially isolated doubles your risk of getting or dying from heart disease; having two of the three traits triples the risk; and hitting the trifecta quadruples it.

Why? Most people have felt the way adrenaline surges during flush of anger and make your blood pressure spike. But in someone with a hostile personality, blood pressure and adrenaline levels go higher, and elevated stress hormones move cholesterol into blood-vessel walls. Blood platelets start to stick to each other, which can increase the chances of a dangerous clot. What you can do: It's not a question of suppressing negative emotions or letting them pour out, but finding a way to manage them.


Try these five steps next time you feel yourself boiling over:

* Assess the situation dispassionately; focusing on facts rather than interpretation.

* Decide how important the matter is to you.

* If the answer is "very," ask yourself if your reaction is appropriate.

* Then ask if there's a way to change the situation.

* Decide if the fight is worth it when you balance your needs against others'. If not, resist the urge to whack your head against a brick wall.


A heightened reaction to stress can ride shot-gun with any temperament and cause problems for all of them. It can have particularly nasty effects on people with chronic conditions. For example, studies show that in individuals with multiple sclerosis symptoms typically worsen 2 weeks after a stressful event.

Experts believe this pattern extends too many other autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel conditions. How you react to stress may also predict your risk for Alzheimer's disease. Data from the Religious Orders Study that is following more than 1,000 Catholic nuns, priests, and brothers as they age suggests that those men and women who tend to be most anxious and to get upset by negative events are up to twice as likely to develop dementia as their calmer peers.



Just how can stressful emotions create or hasten disease? Stress, whether repressed or expressed through ranting, is known to get your juices going along something called the HPA axis, a chemical pathway that links your hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands. Those glands release a cascade of chemicals that flow to other organs. One of the most important results: The level of a stress hormone called Cortisol jumps sharply. High levels of Cortisol depress immune function — increasing your susceptibility to infection and reducing your body's ability to detect and dispose of the nascent cancer cells that are always forming.

Psychologists at the University of California, San Francisco, looked into the question of why chronically stressed people tend to look prematurely aged and run an increased risk of certain diseases. They collected blood samples from a group of mothers, some of whom were caring for a child with a serious, chronic health condition, and others whose children were healthy, and analyzed their white blood cells.

These immune system gate keepers looked markedly different in women who reported the most stress. Researchers could see it in the cells' chromosomes: They're capped at either end with what's called a telomere, which gets shorter every time the cell divides; when the telomere gets too short, the cell dies. In the women who reported the most stress, the telomeres were tiny, looking as much as 17 years older than those from the least stressed women.

Interestingly, the DNA aging seemed to stem more from perceived than actual

hardship. Women who said they felt really stressed showed cellular signs of aging even if their children were healthy. And caregiver moms who rated their stress as low had "young" DNA. In other words, it was the coping styles that made the difference as whether a person would get sick or not.

What you can do: Meditation and other relaxation techniques can have profound physical effects. They can bring down heart rate and blood pressure and slow brain waves. One small study found that biotech workers who took an 8-week course in mindfulness meditation had more robust immune responses when injected with flu vaccine.

You're o Stoic Some cancer researchers have suggested a personality type that is repressed and unable to acknowledge negative emotions may have an increased risk of cancer. In reality, there are hints but no proof of a connection. There's more evidence however that if a person does develop cancer, his or her attitudes and personality can affect how fast the disease progresses.

In a study at Johns Hopkins University, women with metastatic breast cancer whose doctors rated them as the most uncooperative were the ones who ended up surviving the longest. Findings like these, suggest that a healthy dose of assertiveness is a good thing.

Willingness to deal with negative emotions also seems to help. In another study of women with breast cancer, researchers looked at the women's daily Cortisol rhythms. In healthy people, the level of this hormone rises and falls in a regular pattern through the day. This study found that patients with abnormal patterns died sooner than other patients. But people who let themselves express anger or frustration - even briefly - had more normal patterns.

What you can do: If you're a repressor, you may not know it, given the type's tendency to be unaware of emotional upset. You may deny feeling distressed even as your heart rate and blood pressure shoot up.

If you're not sure whether you're a repressor, think back: Has a friend or your spouse accused you of being unduly constrained? Let loose; try to come to terms with whatever emotion you're having when you're having it, instead of putting it aside to deal with later. So if your spouse tends to give orders, admit to yourself how much it annoys you. And tell him or her, too.


Researchers in the late '90s were puzzled by a sad fact: Closeted gay men with AIDS died much faster than their "out" counterparts. A team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently took a closer look at the phenomenon. They determined that closeted men were more likely to have shy, sensitive temperaments, but went a step further to find out how shyness could make someone more vulnerable.

When they subjected 54 men with HIV infection to discomfort — say, being introduced to a stranger — the shy introverts had much more pronounced physical responses. Their palms got clammy, their hearts started racing, and they showed other signs that their fight-or-flight responses had kicked in.

That heightened reaction may be a key to poor prognosis. Your nervous system releases several chemicals in the fight-or-flight response - adrenaline, for instance, which primes your body for quick response. Another is the neither neurotransmitter nor epinephrine. When the researchers added it to test tubes containing the HIV virus, they found it boosted the virus' ability to replicate. The more copies of virus in the body, the greater the so-called viral load and the more severe the disease.

When the researchers measured viral load in the men, they found that the "personality of their bodies" had a striking effect: The shyest had levels 10 times as great as those of the most extroverted, and responded least to drug treatment.

Introverts are also more vulnerable to other kinds of infectious diseases: Spray a cold virus into volunteers' nostrils, and shy types are more likely to end up sick. Shy children seem more likely than bolder playmates to suffer from allergies. Even rats don't get off: Recent research has shown that shy, timid rats die younger than their braver counterparts.

What you can do: People are born with a propensity to shyness or social ease, but usually outgrow these traits by mid-adolescence. Only 10 percent of people remain outwardly timid types. But the nervous system may still have a heightened response to stress, suggesting that while shyness can be overcome, that internal feeling of high tension is less easy to wipe out.

Still, there are ways to make your inner alarms less likely to go off. Socially anxious people tend to worry that they're constantly being judged, so it's important to develop a social network where you feel accepted. Experts advise parents of shy kids to gently encourage their child to cope with intimidating situations; a kid who's nervous about birthday parties could start with one-on-one play dates. Similar strategies can help a shy adult: If you're nervous about parties, focus first on interacting one-to-one. And remember: When it comes to social interactions, practice makes perfect — or at least makes an introvert more comfortable.

You're a Pessimist

Doctors have long known that emotional upsets can trigger asthma attacks, but the connection goes beyond that. A large Harvard University study found that optimists, compared with pessimists, kept significantly better respiratory function as they aged. In fact, the difference was comparable to that between smokers and non-smokers.

A rosy outlook also seems potent against heart disease. One study found that optimism brought a 23 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease. More broadly, in research that followed 99 Harvard graduates for up to 35 years, those identified as pessimists at the study's start had significantly poorer health or were more likely to have died by the time the research project ended.

It's not clear exactly how optimism translates into better health. But one finding that may be important is that the immune system may be suppressed in pessimists. Rose-colored glasses may also sharpen an optimist's view of his health habits. One study found that when people are given information on behavior that may be bad for their health, optimists pay better attention than pessimists do, and they remember the information longer.

What you can do: Optimism is often based on success. So one way to feed it is to focus on your victories, large and small. Remember, too, that birds of a feather fly together — and that if you run with wolves, you'll snarl right along with them. If you hang out with optimists you will become more optimistic.

Be patient; give yourself a chance to shift your focus. But if as time goes by, you see not just a half-empty glass but one with sludge at the bottom, it may signal that therapy's in order. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which emphasizes adjusting your thought and behavior patterns, is particularly effective in brightening people's outlooks.

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