Dr LeCrone
03-24-2006, 02:08 PM
Do you know friends or associates who exhibit characteristics like these?
• They tend to finish other people’s sentences for them.
• They tend to eat in a hurry and usually finish before anyone else at the table.
• They hate standing in lines; therefore they stop at convenience stores even when they have a long grocery list.
• They tend to be highly critical and impatient of other people’s faults, even those of their own children.
• They have an exceptionally short fuse and their anger is triggered at the drop of a hat, frequently over small things.
• They turn situations of all kinds into competition; they do almost nothing for pure recreation and fun, instead they need to win all of the time.
• Being in a car with this person during rush hour traffic is like being caged with a wild animal. This person has never stopped at a yellow light. His knuckles turn white on the steering wheel while waiting for the red light to change.
• They almost never relax.
• While shopping at a mall their companions must run a foot race to keep up with them.
If you can identify anyone with these characteristics, you may know someone with the Type A behavior pattern. Two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, about 25 years ago noted that many of their patients with heart disease had a set of similar personality characteristics. They devised a structured interview to identify these patients by the way they talked, what they said and their daily behavior patterns. They found that these individuals had a much greater chance of having heart disease and heart attacks than Type B personalities.
Type B individuals are much less time-urgent and tend to be much more easy going. It takes longer to trigger their anger. Winning is OK for them, but it is not everything. They are certainly a lot easier to be around as noted by their family members, friends and professional colleagues.
More recently another cardiologist, Robert S. Eliot, coined another term – hot reactor. He found that not all Type A individuals are hot reactors, but those that are tend to react to stress by overreacting in ways that may damage their heart and blood vessels.
“Hot reactors burn a dollar’s worth of energy for a dime’s worth of stress,” Eliot points out.
Other recent studies have shown that Type A personalities tend to suffer from many other stress-related disorders besides heart disease. Unfortunately, society helps produce and perpetuate the Type A personality pattern by its rewards for achievement and accomplishment. In fact, many employers admit they love to hire Type A people for their productivity.
Type As say they are the way they are and they can’t change. I even know a few who are actually proud of the fact that they possess Type A characteristics. They boast that Type A has to be around to keep a Type B going.
What they don’t recognize is that people who are Type B can be quite productive and successful while diminishing the risk of harming their health. They are certainly easier to live with.
Some research indicates that people with Type A personalities acquire these characteristics by modeling themselves after their parents. Indeed I saw an example recently when one of my friends stopped for a traffic light and was amazed to hear his young daughter shout from the backseat of the car, “Go daddy, go. It’s green.”
Another example is the child who is very intent on helping a parent find the shortest line at the grocery check-out counter.
If these characteristics are learned and correlate with poor health, most of us would agree that we would not like to pass these habits on to our children.
Next week we will discuss how a person can acquire Type B characteristics if they are already a Type A personality.
Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1985
• They tend to finish other people’s sentences for them.
• They tend to eat in a hurry and usually finish before anyone else at the table.
• They hate standing in lines; therefore they stop at convenience stores even when they have a long grocery list.
• They tend to be highly critical and impatient of other people’s faults, even those of their own children.
• They have an exceptionally short fuse and their anger is triggered at the drop of a hat, frequently over small things.
• They turn situations of all kinds into competition; they do almost nothing for pure recreation and fun, instead they need to win all of the time.
• Being in a car with this person during rush hour traffic is like being caged with a wild animal. This person has never stopped at a yellow light. His knuckles turn white on the steering wheel while waiting for the red light to change.
• They almost never relax.
• While shopping at a mall their companions must run a foot race to keep up with them.
If you can identify anyone with these characteristics, you may know someone with the Type A behavior pattern. Two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, about 25 years ago noted that many of their patients with heart disease had a set of similar personality characteristics. They devised a structured interview to identify these patients by the way they talked, what they said and their daily behavior patterns. They found that these individuals had a much greater chance of having heart disease and heart attacks than Type B personalities.
Type B individuals are much less time-urgent and tend to be much more easy going. It takes longer to trigger their anger. Winning is OK for them, but it is not everything. They are certainly a lot easier to be around as noted by their family members, friends and professional colleagues.
More recently another cardiologist, Robert S. Eliot, coined another term – hot reactor. He found that not all Type A individuals are hot reactors, but those that are tend to react to stress by overreacting in ways that may damage their heart and blood vessels.
“Hot reactors burn a dollar’s worth of energy for a dime’s worth of stress,” Eliot points out.
Other recent studies have shown that Type A personalities tend to suffer from many other stress-related disorders besides heart disease. Unfortunately, society helps produce and perpetuate the Type A personality pattern by its rewards for achievement and accomplishment. In fact, many employers admit they love to hire Type A people for their productivity.
Type As say they are the way they are and they can’t change. I even know a few who are actually proud of the fact that they possess Type A characteristics. They boast that Type A has to be around to keep a Type B going.
What they don’t recognize is that people who are Type B can be quite productive and successful while diminishing the risk of harming their health. They are certainly easier to live with.
Some research indicates that people with Type A personalities acquire these characteristics by modeling themselves after their parents. Indeed I saw an example recently when one of my friends stopped for a traffic light and was amazed to hear his young daughter shout from the backseat of the car, “Go daddy, go. It’s green.”
Another example is the child who is very intent on helping a parent find the shortest line at the grocery check-out counter.
If these characteristics are learned and correlate with poor health, most of us would agree that we would not like to pass these habits on to our children.
Next week we will discuss how a person can acquire Type B characteristics if they are already a Type A personality.
Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1985