The same type of personality aka. Type A personality. So listen here. There were these two cardiologists in the 1950’s, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman. They had a successful practice and a peculiar waiting room issue, a freak expense they didn’t count on – ruined upholstery on their chairs. Every month a few of chairs had to be redone since the upholstery on the armrests and the edges of the seat was completely torn and mangled. As their regular happy-to-know-them  upholsterer went on a vacation, another one came to fix the chairs and was stunned at their state having never seen chairs so destroyed in such a short time period and exact pattern.  He posed a question of what type of people inhabit the waiting room for that to happen. It took a few more years for Friedman and Rosneman to figure out that there was a personality pattern therein the waiting room and that the upholsterer was the one who saw it first. It was subsequently named type A personality and linked to increased chances of coronary issues though multiple studies. This means that who you are, how you handle yourself, life and its challenges and how you view the world and your role in it makes a difference on your health. Allowed to perpetuate this will manifests on physical level as illness. Friedman and Rosenman conducted an eight and a half year study and took healthy men ages from 35 to 59 and continued to follow them after the study was over and concluded that having type A personality gives you more than double chances of heart disease.

So what characterises type A personality? They are go getters, outgoing, ambitious, organized and status oriented, they are very much concerned with deadlines and time management. None of that is bad in itself, but combined with an overachieving mind-set of a workaholic that just goes through the joyless grind hating ambivalence, delays, being impatient, constantly anxious, stressed, hostile, short fused and triggered by minor events, extreme irritation to any kind of waiting that is “wasting their time” and competitiveness that puts achievements in the centre of their mentality and self-worth you have perfect storm. This storm is an inside one where strong emotions manifest in a physiological response that should be reserved only for extreme situations, but if you get stressed, irritated and even blindly enraged 40 times throughout the day at even the smallest unplanned occurrence what happens is you damage your cardiovascular system. You stress your blood vessels. Strong negative emotions spike the blood pressure and keep pounding at the blood vessel walls over and over again causing tears and damage which then get inflamed and plaque rushes to that place as a way of patching them up and lowering or containing inflammation and voila – you’re clutching your chest at 40. So plaques is not the cause but an early responder to a damaged area, and there you are at the cardiologist’s waiting for your results on what happened a few days ago when you felt an elephant sit on your chest. You’re there sitting at the edge of your chair, impatiently, fidgeting since you’re waiting for one more thing when you could be doing something productive in the rat race, you’re clawing at the armrests and getting pretty much pissed at the pace and incompetence of all around you who don’t understand you have more important thing on your daily to do list than wait. This is how Type A’s end up with a beaten up cardiovascular system. Janet Spence’s research has shown that the Type A archetype can be broken down into two main distinct factors: Achievement Striving (AS) and Impatience Irritability (II). The II is the more negative and damaging characteristic that account for more of the consequences. All the while their Type B counterparts are chilling They’re not lazy, complacent or inert but have a different axis on which they built their world view. They have continuously lower stress levels, don’t tie their self-worth so much to achievement and focus more on an experience of the challenge than the competition. They’re mostly interested in creative professions, ideas and concepts and, although Type A usually performs better on tests and certain tasks, type B may be a better one to make a complex important decision, since they can step back and calmly see the bigger picture, while Type A always has their nose to the grindstone and the fight is never over.

You may be one or the other. Most likely you’re not the extreme of either but  a mix of both, a Type B with a tendency towards Type A in some instances. We’re all different and this is just a rough grouping, but the correlations of dangerous games of constant anger, stress and pushing forwards with no way to release, relax and refocus are clear. The body reacts to the mind you don’t control and it reacts as if they were real. If you’re enraged by slow traffic it will not make it go faster but i will make your blood pressure rise and make a tear or two in your vessels. Anger is the poison that doesn’t kill whatever we’re angry at but ourselves. No matter if you’ve recognized yourself i either of the types, they both have pros and cons and as always the optimal operational truth is contextual  and somewhere in between. If nothing else you’ll need to redo your chairs less often if you chill here and there.