How Personality Affects Health
Your Personality Traits Affect Your Body & Immune System
Your personality affects your health and ability to bounce back from illness. Here's how personality traits such as hostility affect your body and immune system.
Your personality affects your health more than you may realize. Your personality traits not only affect your body and immune system, they can also speed up or slow down how quickly you recover from illness.
How Your Personality Affects Your Health: Does Personality Cause Cancer?
Your personality affects your health because your personality traits dictate how you handle stress. If you are a “nice” person who doesn’t express anger or frustration appropriately, you could damage your health. Some doctors call this the "cancer personality" because personality affects cancer cells. If you're too nice, you may be repressing negative emotions, which affects your health negatively. Heart disease or even cancer can develop from a suppressed immune system, which can be caused by not making waves and being polite at all costs. Certain personalities are more prone to certain diseases.
How Your Personality Affects Your Health: Men Versus Women
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that negative personality traits increase the risk of coronary heart disease. These negative personality traits include anxiety, hostility, anger, and bouts of depression. The traditional risk factors of heart disease are high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, and extra weight. Each negative personality trait by itself is associated with heart disease; together the traits are the best predictor of your risk for developing heart disease. These researchers encourage doctors to diminish negative personality traits in an attempt to promote long-term health. Being aware of how your personality affects your health can add a few years to your life.
Interestingly – here’s a twist – this Duke study included males only. Studies of women have found that long-term hostility does not make women more vulnerable to heart disease. Women can be equally as hostile as men, but their heart health isn’t affected. Perhaps because women express feelings more openly? Hostile men are twice as likely to have poor heart health, higher cholesterol, and heavier BMI’s than men with low hostility. Women's health affects personality differently than men's health does.
How Your Personality Affects Your Health: Stress Levels
Both men and women who are easily stressed, moody, and nervous tend to have less protective immune systems. Your personality affects your health negatively if you take life too seriously - and you'll report more symptoms of disease, too. People who are more vulnerable to stressful situations are also more vulnerable to various illnesses; this makes it clear how important it is to deal with stress! If you don't deal with stress effectively, your personality will affect your health negatively.
How Your Personality Affects Your Health: The Mind-Body Connection
Harvard University Psychologist Ellen Langer found that many exercise benefits are due to the placebo effect. She studied 84 female housekeepers from seven hotels; approximately half the women were told that their work was enough to meet the requirements for a healthy, active lifestyle while the other half weren’t told anything. After a month, the first group lost an average of two pounds, lowered their blood pressure, and were significantly healthier as indicated by their body-mass index (BMI) than the second group. Langer concluded that health is significantly affected by mind set. So, your personality affects your health negatively or positively depending on your mindset.
How Your Personality Affects Your Health: Express Yourself
Expressing your emotions and releasing toxic energy is important in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and dodging disease. Expressing yourself appropriately includes pinpointing feelings, communicating honestly, and being physically active to release tension. Your personality affects your health, and it also dictates your energy levels and activities. To get healthy you may already know what relaxes and energizes you, or you may need to experiment a bit!
If you found How Your Personality Affects Your Health interesting, you might like to read:
- Big Five Personality Traits
- Dealing With Anxiety
- Letting Go Of Your Past
- Signs of Depression
- Does Personality Cause Cancer?
