Type a Personality and Its Consequences

Type A Personality

The Type A personality is not so uncommon in society today. Fundamentally, this personality grows out of having had to earn acceptance rather than being bestowed with it unconditionally. This person, as a child, was probably given conditional love, had a role model who was raised on conditional love, or both. There was a standard to be met and if it was met there was acceptance and reward; if the standard wasn't met, then there was neither reward nor acceptance.

This personality type is constantly worried about time, money, disasters and complete failure. They often show signs of manic behavior, severe anxiety, and compulsive tendencies. Type A personalities have limitless problems with time. Type A's need to be on time, they need to avoid running out of time, they must always measure time, invest time, and measure the value of time spent. They also have esteem issues, as they don't base their value on solid ground but rather on meeting standards.

Typical characteristics of the Type A personality is the insatiable desire to achieve, competitiveness, the strong desire for recognition, the need to advance as much as possible in a normally unrealistic time frame, always rushing, easily enraged, constant apprehension of disasters, and severely impatient.

Type A personalities are susceptible to coronary heart disease, cancers, gastrointestinal disorders, hypertension, TMJ, excessive perspiration, insomnia, indigestion, heartburn, high blood pressure, stroke, and heart attack. There are many others physical consequences of this personality type - all resulting factors of high stress and excessive impatience in their everyday world.

Typically, these personality types tend to not take very good care of themselves. Many will often smoke, eat poorly, drink excessively and not get an adequate amount of sleep. As their stress level is in high gear all of the time, their bodies produce higher levels of hormones. With high levels of these hormones circulating in their system on a regular basis, blood pressure elevates. When blood pressure is consistently high, the heart and blood vessels have to work harder and will eventually wear out, making this personality a huge risk for heart disease