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Recognizing the Type A Personality

Before envying this Type A people with their ostentatious new cars, assured lifestyles and the apparent ease with which they have risen in their careers, take a good look at them. Satisfying their own and their parents' ambitions have inevitably brought untoward difficulties. They probably have gestures and tics that betray the stress that is boiling up within them.

Type A people also need to dominate. Not only do they need to lead and rule at work, but they also need to control their home and social surroundings. Other people can't get a word in edgeways in a dinner-party conversation; if they are forced into silence from time to time as they eat the next mouthful and draw breath, they are never listening while others are talking, but are already planning their next bon mot. If silent while with a group of friends, they are probably preoccupied with their own thoughts - usually about how they can bring the conversation back to that which interests them and allows them to dominate and to shine.

The Type a personality can also be recognized in the supermarket. While this is not a favourite habitat for evolving executives or rising politicians, both successful and unsuccessful Type As have to use supermarkets occasionally. The Type A shopper rapidly calculates which queue at the checkout is moving fastest, and how much those ahead of them are carrying in each basket; trolleys are avoided. If their calculations are wrong, their impatience shows and they are mortified.

Similarly, Type A people in a motorway traffic jam are forever diving from one lane to another. When they have made it into whichever line of cars they hoped would be the fastest, they spend time checking the other vehicles to ensure that they haven't made a mistake - that someone else isn't doing better.

The key to understanding Type A people, as well as to helping them reduce the stress that plagues their lives, lies in understanding the motivation that drives them onwards and upwards into the chairman's seat - possibly with the occasional visit to the Priory Clinic thrown in. Type A personalities never seem to have enough time, and although they are doing several things concurrently, they are usually running behind schedule as they juggle their complex lives. Doctors who treat boardroom patients (or those who aspire to the boardroom) have a favorite question that assesses someone's stress level: they ask Type A people how many appointments they were late for or have had to cancel because they were overbooked and running behind schedule.

Unless stress is brought under control, the stressed Type A person is likely to become a patient, and furthermore, one who is prone to suffering from an overtaxed immune system, high blood pressure and heart disease, not to mention the likelihood of the metabolic disorder. The probability is that these problems will have been exacerbated by a life which has been so hurried or harried that they will have taken too little exercise, or exercise of the wrong sort. The ills determined by this level of activity (or lack of it) will have been compounded by a lifestyle that also ensures the sufferer is likely to eat and drink too much. As the waistband expands, so, too, do the chances of an early death.

Any Type A personality who wants to live to enjoy the material possessions and advantages brought by the hard-earned successes of early life must learn to control the stress that goes with it. These people must beat stress before it destroys them. They must learn to live with their personalities - just as anyone who has bought a wildly exuberant but potentially successful dog must learn to live with the dog's personality by training it so that it acts to its owner's advantage.

If people understand their own personalities, they will also understand the need to escape from them from time to time. They deserve and benefit from breaks when they can do things that provide relief from the treadmill to which they have sentenced themselves. Thus, every Type A with a hectic schedule needs to make opportunities to have a change of scene and pace. The long weekend is underrated as a therapeutic, stress-relieving respite. The secrets of the long weekend are to be away for at least three days and nights. If it is a two-night weekend, Saturday is spent worrying about what happened on Friday, and Sunday thinking of the best way to deal with Monday and the week ahead. Take Friday off, and the chain is broken.

What any relaxing weekend break for a Type A personality definitely should not include is an opportunity to sweat it out in the competitive atmosphere of a gym. In a modern gym, the corporate tyrants and obsessively ambitious have simply swapped their office desks for gymnasium equipment. Now, grim-faced and staring, they are either competing against others who are equally ambitious - or if their particular machine doesn't permit competition, they strive to beat their earlier performances. Each time they attend the gym, they will feel a failure unless they turn in a better performance than they did on the previous visit.