60–80 Percent of Disease Is Related to This, and Your Personality Type Shows It

That your emotions—and ability to process emotions—have an impact on your health is more than conventional wisdom. It's a detailed area of study

NK-cell destroys a cancer cell. Alpha Tauri 3D Graphics/Shutterstock

Editor’s note: There are many personality typing systems, and those various types generally fall into these four categories. We have summarized the emotional pitfalls of each “type” and explained their causative relationship with disease; it is possible to identify with traits across types, as well as the respective ailments. Read on for an in-depth explanation on the generation and material nature of emotions, and tips on how to process them in a healthy way.

We are exposed to more and more toxins in our daily lives. In addition to physical toxins (e.g. radiation), chemical toxins (e.g. plasticizers, pesticides and benzene) and biological toxins (e.g. viruses and bacteria), there is another type of toxin, namely, emotional toxins.

Emotional toxins can be even more harmful than physical or biochemical toxins, because they are always within us.

A Harvard Medical School study conducted as early as 1964 revealed that 82 percent of male patients and 87 percent of female patients sought help for symptoms related to emotional distress. Notably, depressive emotions were the most frequently reported issue, affecting approximately 60 percent of all patients.

The 4 Personality Types Are Related to Health and Disease

The first Western medicine doctors to suggest a relationship between emotions and diseases were American cardiovascular doctors Meyer Friedman and Ray H. Rosenman.

They discovered that negative emotions can cause many common diseases, including hypertension, coronary heart disease, peptic ulcers and even cancer. Their findings have led to the development of a new field, “psychosomatic medicine” or “mind body medicine,” over the past few decades.

Psychologists have summarized the personality types into four categories.

Type A Personality (Achiever): Prone to Heart Disease

The Type A personality is emotionally characterized by a strong desire to win, ambition, dominance, irritability, impatience, and hostility.

Many studies have found that the hostility and anger components of the Type A behavior pattern are more sensitive predictors of cardiovascular diseases. These people are prone to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and high blood cholesterol. Mentally, they are prone to anxiety, depression and sleep disorders.

Anger can lead to excess catecholamine release and subsequent increased cardiovascular reactivity, leading to acute sinus tachycardia, hypertension, decreased coronary perfusion, and cardiac instability.

Their sympathetic nerves are often in a state of excitement, resulting in a faster heart rate, increased myocardial oxygen consumption, increased cardiac output, higher blood pressure, and higher blood glucose. The liver tends to synthesize triglycerides in order to supply more energy, which in turn causes lipid disorders.

Hostility has also been conceptualized as a chronic negative effect, and it increases one’s tendency to experience distress.

Chronic negative effects have also been found to be associated with the risk of developing serious illness and premature mortality and affect the quality of life in those individuals with chronic medical illness.

Moreover, due to Type A’s competitive and ambitious mental status, they are often in a state of mental stress, resulting in a higher level of stress hormone in their bodies.

Furthermore, according to a study published in the Indian Heart Journal, Type A’s are more likely to demonstrate high-risk behaviors such as smoking and drinking, and are also used to coping with stress in unhealthy ways. These are the reasons contributing to why type A personalities are more likely to develop cardiovascular diseases.

In addition, some people with type A personality have specific genes in their bodies that make them prone to type A emotional characteristics and cardiovascular diseases.

Type B Personality (Relaxed Extrovert): Less Likely to Develop Cardiovascular Diseases

On the contrary, Type B personalities are easy-going, relaxed, patient, and not easily stressed or anxious.

Facing stress, they often say “So what?” Their unique mode to decrease or absorb the stress without negative impact on their mental or physical health helps them a lot to protect themselves from stress related syndrome.

Their attitude toward stress is protective of their health. Therefore, Type B personality is also known to have “cardioprotective” personality traits.

Type C Personality (Restrained and Repressed Individual): Prone to Cancer

Emotionally, Type C personalities are passive, submissive, repressed, overly concerned about other people’s opinions, and not good at expressing their own emotions.

This type is prone to cancer and are more likely to develop mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

A study in the European Journal of Personality mentioned that scientists tracked 1,341 subjects and analyzed the causes of death of those who passed away over a 10-year period. It was found that about 30 percent of those with a personality similar to Type A died of coronary heart diseases; and about 45 percent of those with a personality similar to Type C died of cancer.

Why are Type C personalities prone to cancers? One possible reason is that this type of person is in a highly depressed and stressful state for prolonged periods. At this time, the body mobilizes stress hormones, the most representative of which is the glucocorticoid secreted by the adrenal glands. This hormone suppresses immune cell function and inhibits the natural healing and anti-cancer mechanisms of the immune system.

A paper published in the journal Brain, Behavior, Immunity summarized 20 years of research on depression and reached a similar conclusion as the above study. The article mentions that people who often feel depressed have decreased lymphocyte proliferation and an overall decreased function in the body’s anti-cancer and anti-viral immunity. This leads to greater susceptibility to cancer, as well as to infection when exposed to viruses and bacteria.

A large-scale retrospective cohort study involving 235,404 patients, published in 2023, found that individuals with depression have an elevated risk of developing cancer, with this risk ranging from 10 to 40 percent, depending on the specific type of cancer.

Type D Personality (Distressed and Unhappy): Prone to Chronic Pain

Type D personalities are emotionally characterized by fear of rejection, pain, loneliness, and sadness. This type is prone to chronic pain, asthma, and also cardiovascular diseases.

How on Earth Are Emotions Generated?

The expression of various emotional states requires cognitive processing in the brain. Anxiety, panic, and alexithymia (significant difficulties with emotions) are all related to emotional processing disorders. Only by understanding the mechanism of emotional processing can we effectively control emotions.

From a psychological point of view, emotions have a process:

Before emotions arise, each of us have our own unique life experiences, concepts, and beliefs that we were born into, and stemming from educational background, family situation, and social and cultural environment. So we have different needs, motivations, and desires for the future.

When external stimuli, including a job switch, family change, social unrest, leads to different understandings, it will result in different modes of reacting, including manifestations of emotions and behavior.

Emotion also has a material structure basis:

When we hear someone say something unpleasant, which is an external stimuli, a message from outside, the brain analyzes it through the cerebral cortex and it’s transmitted to the emotional control center: amygdala. This will result in mental, physical, and behavioral responses, including rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, crying, frowning, hugging, hitting, etc.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped cluster of nuclei located deep in the center of the temporal lobes of the brain’s cerebrum as part of the limbic system. It takes an early and primary role as the integrative center for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation.

It receives information from different sources such as sight, smell, sound, etc., evokes past experiences, and quickly gives judgments such as like or dislike, happy or angry, and guides subsequent behaviors.

For example: upon smelling curry, one remembers the curry rice one’s father made for him as a child and the memory of the deliciousness that made him like curry, and then decides to eat curry rice.

Anger and hostility are also related to the amygdala. There is a metaphor that when we are controlled by our emotions, it seems that we are hijacked and controlled by the amygdala.

Dr. Karim Kassam from the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, has demonstrated the ability to identify specific emotions experienced by an individual at well over chance accuracy on the basis of the activation patterns of brain functional MRI (fMRI) scans. These results suggest a structure for neural representations of emotion, and inform theories of emotional processing.

Subsequently, in another Duke neurogenetics study published in PLOS biology in 2016, scientists were able to decode a person’s various types of emotions, e.g. agreement, entertainment, surprise, fear, anger, sad, or neutral through brain fMRI scans.

Decoding Spontaneous Emotional States in the Human Brain | PLOS Biology

Duality of the Spiritual and Material Nature of Emotions

The physiological structure basis of emotion production and the psychological process are intertwined. Inseparable and integrated, like two parallel worlds in play at the same time, two sides of the same coin, but expressed with two different sets of perspective languages.

In the picture below, do you see a vase, or the heads of two girls? If you look at the white part, it’s the vase; if you look at the black part, there are two profiles of faces. They’re all one whole picture, and they’re not divided.

How Should We Treat Negative Emotions?

Since negative emotions are a kind of negative substance, if we have negative emotions, and we are not able to treat them in a healthy way or transform them into positive substances, those negative substances will remain in the body and cause harm to our bodies–i.e., disease.

In fact, as aforementioned, suppressing oneself and accumulating stress can cause harm to the body. Many studies have also discovered that people who suppress their negative emotions such as anger are more prone to developing cancers or worsening their existing cancers. These people’s personalities are similar to type C.

The way to truly control emotions is not to passively suppress them, but to identify them and actively change them.

• Detecting negative emotions: Noticing that you are being bothered by negative emotions is the first step.
• Being curious: Ask yourself why you are experiencing negative emotions, and find out the real causes of your anger, resentment, impatience, jealousy, and other emotions, and at which kinds of situations.
• Healthy handling of emotions: 
  • Change our attention: Don’t blow things out of proportion by going over them repeatedly in our minds—this will exhaust our positive energy. Go outside, take a walk, exercise, or listen to relaxing music.
  • Rationality: Improve those real causes of these negative emotions. For example, rather than be angry with someone, think about the situation from another angle, put ourselves in their shoes, and try to perceive others’ behavior; try to cultivate our quality of forgiveness. Finally, if we repeatedly use positive thinking towards negative emotions, we develop the essential technique of transforming those negative emotions into positive substances.

Meditation Helps Our Ability to Control Negative Emotions

In addition to directly regulating emotions, daily meditation can also reduce negative emotions.

By the end of 1970, more than 1,000 academic papers had discussed the beneficial effects of meditation on the human body. Meditation has been scientifically proven to help alleviate pain, improve depression, addiction, and many other medical conditions, enhance concentration, enhance immune function, lower blood pressure, and suppress anxiety and insomnia.

Scholars from the University of Minnesota and the University of Toronto in Canada published a study in the journal Motivation and Emotion. At the beginning of the study, the subjects were shown unpleasant and pleasant pictures, and it was discovered that they had a significant increase in their galvanic skin responses, implying that they were experiencing emotions.

The subjects were then divided into three groups. The first group participated in seven weeks of meditation with positive thoughts (i.e. being actively aware that they were meditating); the second group participated in seven weeks of meditation with relaxation (i.e. not thinking about anything), and the third group didn’t meditate at all. After seven weeks, they were shown the same pictures again. It was found that the meditators experienced a significant decrease in emotional fluctuations when they viewed the unpleasant pictures.

Furthermore, when the people who meditated with positive thoughts saw the pleasant pictures, they also did not experience much emotional fluctuation. In other words, they were less prone to great joy or sadness, and were more able to maintain a peaceful mind in the face of stimuli, in comparison with the other groups.

Emory University also conducted a study in which subjects were divided into two groups: one group meditated with ordinary positive thoughts, and the other meditated with mindfulness and compassion. After comparison, it was discovered that those who added compassion to meditation had significantly lower depression scores and increased positive activation of the amygdala, a tissue that generates and regulates emotions.

The amygdala has a two-way effect on mood regulation. When a person suffers from depression, anxiety disorders, or post-traumatic stress disorder, the amygdala is impaired. However, when a person’s emotional control rises to a certain level, the amygdala is activated in a positive way, allowing for further emotional control.

This article is the start of a series on personality and diseases. We will go in depth about personality and disease in a number of future articles.