Speculation on the influence that personality and attitude can have on health crops up regularly in the media. But what are the facts behind the stories? Does stress inevitably make people ill? Are happy, fun-loving people less likely to suffer illness? Are some people condemned to ill health simply through personality? And is it possible to beat an illness through positive thinking?
This chapter surveys the hard evidence on the link between personality and health and attempts to sort out reliable facts from rumor and wishful thinking. Along the way, it reveals how certain kinds of thinking can have remarkable healing powers. Cures can and often do start in mind, it seems, and our behavior and lifestyle choices – many of which are influenced by personality – have a direct influence on our well-being.
Can Your Personality Affect Your Health
Research has shown that psychological factors play an important role in many diseases, from heart problems to catching a cold. Your physical health is often dependent on your state of mind. And this, in turn, is influenced – at least in part – by your personality. You might be upset if your doctor told you that your medical problem was psychosomatic, or worse, ‘all in mind.’ It would mean that the doctor could not find a physical cause and assumed a psychological cause. However, psychosomatic illness is quite real but is often misunderstood – partly because we are used to thinking of mind and body as separate entities. In fact, the word comes from the language of ancient Greece, where doctors understood that the mind (psyche) and body (soma) were intrinsically connected.
Emotions and health
Sigmund Freud revived the idea of psychosomatic medicine in the late 19th century. Atrus practice in Vienna, he treated many patients who had symptoms with no obvious physical origin and called this condition hysteria. His patients were often young women from wealthy families who exhibited dramatic symptoms, such as paralysis, loss of speech, and even epileptic fits. Freud was able to solve some of these patients’ problems through psychoanalysis, revealing and then resolving inner psychological conflicts that had, according to Freud, brought the problems about.
In the 1920s, the American physiologist Walter Cannon carried out research on how emotion affects the body. Lt was Cannon, who coined the term ‘fight or flight ‘ for the way the body reacts in response to a threat. This research led, during the 1930s and 40s, to the development of the psychosomatic movement in medicine, led by Helen Dunbar and Fran z Alexander. Dunbar believed that psychosomatic medicine could combine the treatment of physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering. Meanwhile, Alexander attempted to update Freud’s theories with the latest developments in physiology. He identified repressed aggression as a particularly important cause of psychosomatic illness. The hysteria of the type described by Freud is rarely diagnosed nowadays. However, there are still medical conditions, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, for which a physical cause is not evident. Furthermore, doctors are becoming increasingly aware that psychological factors can play an important role in many other diseases, such as asthma, eczema, digestive problems, and heart disease.
The personality factor
Your health is affected by how you choose to live – whether or ‘not you smoke, the kinds of food you eat, whether you take regular exercise, or take part in risky activities, such as dangerous sports. Some researchers, including American psychiatrist Robert Cloninger, talk of a specific personality trait called ‘ novelty-seeking. People who have an abundance of this trait are easily bored with routine and constantly search for excitement and adventure. They may indulge in risky behaviors, such as taking drugs or driving too fast. They may also take up dangerous sports such as mountaineering or parachuting. A person who has little of this trait will tend to be organized, married to a daily routine, and likely to stick with the same partner, job, and circle of friends. Personality plays an important part in making all these life choices.
Studies show that, beyond these choices, there is probably no such thing as an overall ‘disease-prone’ personality, just as there is no evidence that happy, well-balanced people live longer or enjoy better physical health than those of a more melancholy or nervous disposition. However, although it is problematic to generalize, it does appear that certain personality types are more prone to specific types of disease.
Why is this? The main reason seems to be that your personality can affect how you deal with stress, which, in turn, affects both your immune system and your cardiovascular (heart and circulation) system. It is known that in response to stress, we produce the hormone cortisol, which, if it remains in the body for too long, can trigger the build-up of fatty deposits on the inner walls of the arteries serving the heart.
Type A, type B, and heart disease.
There is an established relationship between personality and susceptibility to heart disease. You may be familiar with the idea of type A and type B personalities. Briefly, type-A people, who are more prone to heart disease, are typically driven, impatient, ambitious, and energetic. In contrast, type B people take life more slowly, are more relaxed, and are less likely to develop heart disease.
In the I950s, two American cardiologists, Friedman and Rosenman, were running a busy practice and wondered why the seats in their waiting groom wore out so quickly. An upholsterer came to fix the seating yet again and commented that it was odd the way the patients would sit on the edge of their seats, clutching at the armrests – as if they were anxious to be off as soon as possible. No wonder the seats kept wearing down in the same place. This throwaway remark about the unusual behavior of their patients led Friedman and Rosenman to uncover the link between a restless personality and heart problems.
However, the type A personality is composed of several different traits. There is no general agreement on which type of personality is most susceptible to heart disease, but some interesting studies have been done in recent years. A group of men and women were given a frustrating anagram puzzle to solve. When doing the puzzle, those who had admitted in a questionnaire to being more hostile and suspicious showed much higher rises in blood pressure than their more trusting peers. We all know people who get worked up over things that others take easily in their stride, and evidence suggests that reactivity in response to stressors may be significant in the development of hypertension – a major risk factor for heart disease.
‘Type C’ personalities
After heart disease, cancer is the leading cause of death in the developed world. But does your personality affect your chances of getting cancer? There is some evidence to suggest that it might, although the link is not nearly as strong as that between personality type and heart disease. Some psychologists have defined a ‘ type C’ (cancer-prone) personality, which may be characterized as someone who responds to stress with depression and hopelessness and mutes their negative emotions. Type Cs are also introverted, respectful, eager to please, conforming, and compliant. However, the studies that have been done have not taken into account how personality might affect lifestyle – for example, whether a type C person is more likely to smoke, which would increase the chances of developing cancer.
On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that your personality type can affect the chances of surviving cancer. Those sufferers who deal with the disease either with a ‘ fighting spirit’ or denial seem to do better than those, like the type C personality, who accept their fate passively. Davi d Spiegel of Stanford University in the USA discovered that cancer patients who joined a support group that fostered the fighting spirit survived, on average, 18 months longer than those not in such a group.
However, not only is the data so far conclusive but there are also pitfalls in over-emphasizing the influence of personality on disease. Taken to an extreme, it could result in patients feeling they were to blame for their illness, producing feelings of guilt that would only add to their problems. If personality type does influence disease risk, then it probably occurs through a weakening of the immune system via stress. This could undermine the body’s defenses and, in turn, make someone more vulnerable to infection. However, much research still needs to be done before the influence of personality on physical health is fully understood.
