The high-pressure personality

It’s funny how certain ideas worm their way into popular consciousness, without us ever really thinking about what they mean. How many times have you heard someone say (or maybe heard yourself say) something like

“Being stuck in traffic makes my blood pressure rise.”

or

“Just being around him really puts my blood pressure up!”

Are these just colourful turns of phrase – another way of describing the feeling of being stressed or annoyed – or is blood pressure genuinely affected by our emotions?

Now, unless you’re a Zen monk, your blood pressure will spike temporarily when you get scared, angry or extremely happy. No problemo. It will just sink back to its usual level when you calm down (unless you’re eating the typical high-salt, high-fat, low-fibre Western diet, in which case it will almost certainly inch up over the course of your lifetime, leaving you with a 90% chance of being hypertensive if you make it past 85 (1)… but that’s a story for another post!).

But certain personality traits may put you at higher risk of developing sustained high blood pressure, because of the influence these traits exert on how you think and feel about everyday occurrences.

Back in 1985-86, 5115 black and white American adults aged between 18 and 30 were recruited into the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study (2), to investigate the early-life development of cardiovascular disease – a disease which is still the leading single cause of death in both the US and Australia.

At the beginning of the study, 3308 study participants were assessed on a number of psychosocial factors. They were then followed up through to 2000-2001 to see which factors were associated with an increased risk of developing high blood pressure. The factors studied were:

• Time urgency/impatience (always feeling in a hurry, compulsively doing more than one thing at a time, resenting delays);
• Achievement striving/competitiveness (being ambitious; wanting to advance one’s position in relation to self and others);
• Hostility (feeling angry and acting aggressively toward others);
• Depression; and
• Anxiety.

Over the course of the 15-year study, 15% of participants developed high blood pressure (defined as blood pressure consistently greater than 140/90 mmHg). After the researchers adjusted the
data for known hypertension risk factors such as smoking and obesity, they found that participants who had higher rankings on the time urgency/impatience and hostility scales had a greater risk of developing high blood pressure than those with lower rankings on these scales.

Specifically, compared to those with the lowest scores for time urgency/impatience and hostility (0 out of 4), risk of developing high blood pressure increased by a whopping 84% in those who scored 3-4 on either of these scales.

The researchers did not find any consistent patterns linking depression, anxiety, or achievement striving/competitiveness with high blood pressure.

They concluded that

“Among young adults, TUI [time urgency/impatience] and hostility were associated with a dose-response increase in the long-term risk of hypertension.”

In other words, the more time urgency, impatience and hostility the young adults in this study showed, the more likely they were to eventually develop high blood pressure.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ve probably have heard of ‘Type A’ behaviour – a syndrome first described by cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman in the 1950s, which was believed to cause heart disease. Type As are characterised as ambitious, rigidly organised, hostile, impatient, self-involved, always in a hurry, obsessively striving toward poorly-defined goals, and with a burning need for advancement and for recognition by others. The stereotypic Type A, as described by Friedman and Rosenman, is a high-achieving ‘workaholic’, always taking on more than they can handle, constantly multi-tasking, and pushing themselves with deadlines (3).

Subsequent research failed to prove a connection between Type A behaviour and heart disease risk, however, calling the whole theory into question. It certainly didn’t help the credibility of Type A theory, that the tobacco industry became the primary funders of research into how personality factors might affect cardiovascular disease risk. Cigarette companies invested heavily in this research, in order to counter emerging concerns about the effect of smoking on heart disease risk, among other health issues. In fact, tobacco giant Philip Morris was the chief funding source of the Meyer Friedman Institute, which was established to conduct research on the purported link between personality type and cardiovascular disease risk (4).

However, the studies that didn’t find a link looked at the Type A syndrome as a whole, whereas the CARDIA study separated out the components of Type A behaviour (as well as other unrelated
psychosocial factors) and studied their effects individually. The outcome of this approach was to show that striving to achieve goals does not raise blood pressure, and nor do being anxious or depressed, but the sense of always being in a hurry to achieve things – whether goals, or everyday life tasks – and feeling hostile toward others, does.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Am I constantly trying to achieve a hundred and one things a day?
• Am I frequently juggling multiple tasks (eating lunch while working or driving, talking on the phone while checking the emails) in order to ‘save time’?
• Do I get hot under the collar every time I have to wait in a queue or in traffic?
• Do I harbour angry feelings toward others, or fantasise about taking revenge on those who’ve wronged me?
• Do I experience road/shopping trolley/surf rage on a more-than occasional basis?

The more of these questions you answered ‘yes’ to, the higher your risk of developing high blood pressure -even if you eat a healthy diet, exercise and don’t smoke. The good news is that these risky personality traits can be changed.

I use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT, commonly known as ‘tapping’) to help my clients identify damaging habits of thought and behaviour, understand the origins of them and develop more
productive, beneficial patterns of feeling, thinking and acting.

Structured relaxation – whether through yoga, meditation, tai chi, or self-hypnosis – is also extremely helpful for ‘unhooking’ you from bad habits.