Personality type and lifestyle:

Personality type is frequently believed to be integrally related to the development of your lifestyle and health . Contemporary research continues to identify that how you live along with your personality type will have a significant effect on your health. Your health is affected by many factors such as whether you choose to smoke, the kinds of foods you eat, whether you exercise, or take part in risky activities such as dangerous sports. American psychiatrist Robert Cloninger discussed the specific personality trait called "novelty seeking" in which he concluded that people with an abundance of this trait are easily bored and constantly in search of adventure and excitement. They may indulge in risky activities such as driving too fast or skydiving. They may take up dangerous work such as repairing towers. Persons considered to have little of this trait will tend to be organized, preferring a daily routine and will likely stick with the same partner, job and circle of friends for long periods of time. These types of choices will probably have a lot to do with what many consider to be related to an individual's personality type.

Besides these and similar choices, there is probably no such thing as an overall "disease prone" personality type, just as there is not a lot of evidence to support the contention that happy well-balanced people live longer and enjoy better physical health than those with a nervous disposition or morose personality type. While you cannot generalize to a large degree, research has suggested that certain personality types are more prone to certain types of disease.

Personality type and disease

Why is it that certain personality types may be more susceptible to disease? Experts in such fields as psychosomatic medicine believe that personality type can affect the way you deal with stress, which will affect your immune system functioning and your cardiovascular (heart and circulation) health. It is known that in response to stress we produce the hormone cortisol, which if it remains in the blood system for too long it can trigger a buildup of fatty deposits in the inner walls of the arteries going to your heart, eventually leading to heart disease. Some specific personality types such as types A, B, and C, are believed to underlie several specific health condition such as heart disease and even cancer. You can read about those on the following page personality type A, type B and type C and your health.

Some information from Making the Most of Your Brain by The Reader's Digest