Health Report: Your personality affects health
Restless? Impulsive? Pessimistic? Watch out, your personality will affect your health
New research says your mental state can influence your
choices and make you ill. Leah Hardy looks at how to make healthy
changes...
And it would be wonderful to
be able to really keep up with my six-year-old daughter as she
charges ahead of me at the park, laughing as she calls out,
"Oh mummy, you are so slow!" It's simple - all I want
is to get slim and fit, and stay there.
So what's stopping me? I blame advancing age, lack of time and my taste for wine and chips with mayo. But it appears my problem may be my personality. I'm quick-tempered, impulsive and messy - what Dr C Robert Cloninger calls a 'novelty seeker', and that might be the key reason I can't shift those pounds.
Psychiatrist Dr Cloninger is a professor at Washington University and invented the Temperament and Character Inventory to define various human traits. While studying links between weight and personality, he discovered that not only did 'novelty seekers' lose less weight on diets, but they also tend to have higher BMIs generally. "Novelty-seekers," explains Cloninger, "give in to their cravings and appetites."
But this isn't the only trait that signals diet success or failure. Another researcher, Hitomi Saito at the Doshisha University in Japan, has found others. And it seems the stereotype of the jolly, extrovert fat person may be true. Some of the traits that lead to slimness include 'neuroticism', a tendency to worry and feel stressed plus a lack of 'agreeableness', the desire to please people and be influenced by them.
Optimism will also make diets fail. Why? Researchers have suggested neurotic worriers, unlike optimists, take notice of health warnings about heart disease or diabetes. And while 'agreeable' people would hate to upset anyone by turning down a biscuit or meal, perhaps the most successful dieters either didn't care, or never really got invited anywhere!
Lastly, people who were rated as a 'self monitoring' personality type, which means they are cautious, sensible and objective, are also able to lose weight more easily, probably because they read calorie counts on packaging as well as set themselves sensible exercise schedules.
But dieting is not the only area where personality can impact on your health. Perhaps the ultimate mind-body problem is stress. And neurotic people, while they may be able to slip into a smaller frock, can be prone to its health-damaging effects. A recent study from the University of London showed a link between raised cortisol and the clogged arteries that lead to heart attacks. Stress also damages the immune system, which leaves you vulnerable to infections. You may become depressed, your digestive system may play up and, if you're a woman, your periods go haywire.
Stress can even trigger asthma attacks, says Dr Marie-Claire Wilson, a well-being and hormone specialist from www.bodyprogresscentre.com. She says her most stressed clients "may drink too much to 'medicate' their stress levels, suffer mood swings, can't concentrate and rarely take the time to eat healthily. And this all has consequences for their health."
People used to think that stress and heart attacks were problems associated with the so-called Type A personalities - ambitious go-getter types. But recent research has pinned the risk on a more specific personality trait - anger. In a study published last year, researchers from the National Institute on Aging in the US found people who were regularly angry and aggressive had up to 40 per cent more thickening of arteries in the neck and the arteries of the heart - key risk factors for causing a heart attack or stroke, compared with people who were more easy-going.
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