Directions: Here are six questions about your approach to life. Try to answer them as honestly as you can. You may find the results revealing.
l Are you hard driving and competitive?
l Are you usually pressed for time?
l Are you bossy or dominating?
l Do you have a strong need to excel in most things?
l Do you eat too quickly?
l Do you get upset when you have wait for anything?
If you have answer “yes” to most of these questions then I can make
a few predictions about you, base on a recent eight-year study of nearly 2,000 people who live the way that you do.
You probably find that life is full of challenges and you often
need to keep 2 or more projects moving at the same time. The chances are that you have been to college, that you have a management job and that you bring work home at night. You think that you put more effort into your job than many of the people you work with, and you certainly take your work more seriously than most of them. You get irritated easily, and if someone is being long-winded, you help them get to the point. You also have trouble finding the time to get your hair cut.
And there’s one other thing. You are about twice as likely to have a heart attack as someone who takes a more easygoing approach to life.
The mention of heart attacks probably makes you thing that surveys like this only apply to men. After all, men up to middle age in the US and Britain have about 4 times more coronaries than women do. But women suffer too, if they adopt this same hard-driving, competitive, time urgent lifestyle. Working women living this way are twice as likely to develop coronary disease as those who are more relaxed.
You might expect things to be different for housewives, since living at home should cause less hassle than going out to work, and as a group, housewives in this study were more easygoing. But some felt the same time pressures as women with outside jobs; the sense that thongs would get out of control unless they tried all the time to keep on top. Those who felt this suffered three times as much heart disease as those who didn’t, whether they looked after an office or a home. And women with children, who were married to blue-collar workers and were holding down clerical jobs at the same time, had the highest heart disease risk of all.
The beginnings of your hard-driving behavior go right back to childhood. In school you got recognition and perhaps prizes for being quick and bright, for being an achiever, for competing with others and for winning. You probably went on from school to get a series of increasingly better jobs against pretty stiff competition. They were jobs where you had to care about the results, where you constantly had to push things forward and get things done. In your present job you also feel some conflict, either with time or with other people. Some of those you work with don’t seem able to grasp the simplest ideas, and they often put a brake on what you’re trying to achieve. The conflict may not erupt every day. You pride yourself on being able to keep the lid on. But it’s always there, under the surface.