That’s a fairly recent discovery made with the help of functional brain imaging that lets researchers see what is happening inside a living brain. It’s also a reformulation of something people have known for millennia: If you dwell in certain mental states for long periods of time, they will shape your health.
Not long ago, medical scientists rejected traditional insight that linked disease states and mental states because they couldn’t quantify these relationships, nor provide explanations for how mind and body influence each other. That has since changed, and in the 1970s researchers began looking at patterns of disease among people of different personality types.
It turns out that people of some personality types, which are often characterized by certain emotional patterns, are linked to increased, or decreased risks for various diseases.
One branch of research looks at people through the lens of four different personality types: A, B, C, and D.
Type A people are those high achievers, ambitious, impatient—and prone to heart disease.
Type B people are the laid-back, social types. They’re fairly relaxed, and so is their blood pressure. No specific increased disease risk.
Type C people are the repressed types who hold it all in and do little to safeguard their emotional well-being. They’re prone to cancer.
Type D types are typically distressed and sad. They’re prone to chronic pain, asthma, and skin conditions.
That’s a very short-form summary of a fantastic article on this topic by Epoch Times senior medical columnist Dr. Yuhong Dong.
What’s also fascinating about this topic is how actively we are able to modify these disease risk factors. Type B people offer a revealing insight about the nature of disease—it’s attracted to stress and negative emotions.
That’s because, as researchers have come to understand, the mind and body are fully integrated. Every thought—or lack thereof—has a biochemical consequence in the body. And altering one part of the body always ends up altering something else. Human beings are fluid, energetic beings in constant flux.
Copy
