Our blog

Your personality will affect more than how you relate to people and what job you should have. It may also influence whether you are a healthy or an unhealthy person.

 

Learning more about your unique personality traits can be very helpful. It can help you learn better ways to motivate yourself and what you might enjoy doing. It can even help you choose the right job. But there’s an added bonus to learning about your personality. It can also help you to understand which health issues you’re more likely to struggle with. And this can help you estimate your overall health risk more accurately.

 

What are Personality Traits?

There are a number of different systems to describe different personality traits. One of the most popular and long lasting one is known as the Big Five. This system describes personality according to five different traits. These traits are:

 

• Extraversion, which refers to how sociable and emotionally expressive people are as well as whether they get energy from the external world or from solitude.
• Openness to experience, which refers to how open people are to new experiences, people and places.
• Agreeableness, which is how well people interact and cooperate with the people around them.
• Conscientiousness, which refers to how thoughtful people are of others, how well organized they are, and how good their impulse control is.
• Neuroticism, which refers to an individual’s emotional resilience and mood stability.

 

Each of the traits in this system covers a range from one extreme to the other. An example of this is extraversion, which ranges from extreme extraversion to extreme introversion. Most people are somewhere in between these two extremes. These traits also contain numerous other characteristics that make up an entire person.

 

Studying the Effects of Personality Traits on Health

There is a clear connection between health and personality. Most people, even without training, can recognize an unhealthy personality. However, this goes beyond mental and emotional health. There are certain traits that are more likely to lead to a healthy, happy life, whereas others may hinder the pursuit of that type of life.

 

A new study explores these five traits as well as 30 facets of these traits. The aim was to determine which traits lead to a healthy life and healthy behaviors. The researchers used data from personality experts to describe a healthy personality. This personality type scored high in extraversion, agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness, but low in neuroticism. The researchers then compared that model to the data gathered from the personality mapping of more than 3,000 participants.

 

The Health Risk of Personality Traits

Obviously, the participants who had healthier personality trait distributions seemed to have happier lives. They had higher self-esteem and optimism and avoided aggressive and antisocial behaviors. They also had better self-control, so they could regulate their own behaviors and establish and carry through with better habits.

 

However, the researchers also found an interesting connection between healthy personalities and traits usually associated with unhealthy personality types. Healthy people scored high in self-sufficiency and grandiosity, which are usually associated with narcissism. However, they also scored low on associated maladaptive traits. This includes exploitativeness, disinhibition, and blaming others for their actions. Basically, the test showed that healthy personalities enjoyed the best traits associated with unhealthy personalities, such as boldness and immunity to stress. And as an added bonus, they manage to avoid the related negative traits that would decrease the health of their personality.

 

The Takeaway

Obviously you can’t change fundamental parts of your own personality. However, the information from this study could help you more accurately calculate your health risk. Adding the results of personality tests to your health assessments at home would give you a more accurate picture of your overall health. And it may also highlight issues that could be a problem for your health in the future. This would allow you to make changes before those issues become serious health problems. And this would let you enjoy better health over the long term.

 

 

If you’re concerned about a health risk, try using HomeLab to keep track of your condition and any preventative measures you take. And if you see signs of a significant problem, you should check with your doctor as soon as possible.

 

 

Tags: health risk, personality