DEADLY EMOTIONS CAN SHORTEN YOUR LIFE
We all know the type-the person who stands at the elevator door and jabs at the button three, four, even five times when the car fails to arrive quickly enough. In conversation, this individual finishes your sentences for you or glances constantly at the time. People like this feel that they’ve got the world to conquer. And you’re very cautious about what you do or say with them, because they can ignite like firecrackers into anger.
Thirty years ago, scientists first identified such individuals as exhibiting “Type A” behavior: in a hurry, impatient, often angry. They also found persons with “Type B” behavior: laid-back, calm, slow to anger, good listeners.
The researchers found that Type A’s more often fell victim to heart attacks; Type B’s less so. But the researchers could not figure out how the personality connected with biology. What was there about Type A behavior that killed you? They had no answer, then.
“We have strong evidence now that hostility alone damages the heart,” says Dr. Redford Williams. One of the researchers who helped pinpoint the destructive effects of hatred, Dr. Williams is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
“It isn’t the impatience, the ambition, or the work drive,” Dr. Williams says. “It’s the anger. It sends your blood pressure skyrocketing. It provokes your body to create unhealthy chemicals. For hostile people, anger is a poison.”
Psychologists and psychiatrists have always told their patients to “let anger out” because, they said, if you hold it in, you can become depressed or develop ulcers. Dr. Williams gives quite another prescription: Avoid feeling angry in the first place, and you won’t need to suppress your anger.
Bruce T. Bowling, publisher of Fire-house magazine in New York City, clearly exhibited Type A behavior.
“I couldn’t catch up,” Mr. Bowling says. “I’d walk into my house, the Chinese food in one hand, mail in the other, scanning it as I went to the bathroom. I felt if I could do four things at the same time, I’d save time.”
Mr. Bowling meted out large doses of hostility to those around him. “Waitresses were never fast enough,” he says. “Taxi drivers drove me crazy. I would purposely under-tip them. New York City, I used to think, will do me in.”
In 1988, all his hostility took its toll. Just back from a firefighters’ convention, Mr. Bowling felt the classic pains in his shoulders, arms, and neck. At the hospital emergency room at 3 A.M., they told him: heart attack. He was lucky. He survived. Each year, half a million Americans don’t.
Dr. Meyer Friedman is a cardiologist at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and one of the co-discoverers of Type A behavior. He contends that hostility, impatience, and anger powerfully affect your body. Dr. Williams, on the other hand, says you can be impatient with impunity, so long as it doesn’t lead to anger. It’s the anger that gets you. The issue is not settled, but more and more experts agree that both anger and hostility can be hazardous to your health.
Originally, Dr. Friedman and his collaborator, Dr. Ray Rosenman, identified three parts of the Type A behavior:
1. Intense striving toward many poorly defined goals
2. Preoccupation with time and an obsession with getting things done faster
3. Free-floating hostility
To be hostile means that you want to hurt or punish somebody. Anger, Dr. Friedman says, can be the same thing or less – a feeling of displeasure toward yourself. Both hostility and anger rile your heart and body. To have “free-floating hostility” means that you are angry, or on the point of anger, much of the time, with or without major cause.
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GENERAL HEALTH