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Posts Tagged ‘personality type’

If you really think about it, we all suffer from the same stressors and pressures on a day to day basis, yet some people do not seem to be affected by it while others become irritable, snap at their children and lie awake at night worrying over things.

Why is that? Why is it that some people can just seem to cruise through life without seeming to feel the heat (damn them!) while others can hardly cope?

The secret is that stress is not due to things that happen to us ? we all have to cope with demanding jobs, demanding and unreasonable bosses, lack of time, too little money! It is how we each, individually react to these things, these stressors, that make the difference. Some people are just more prone to stress than others. Whether these reactions are naturally born in or whether we learn them when we grow up is a good question, but the fact remains that different personality types react differently to stressors.

It is a well known fact that there are Type A and Type B personalities, where Type A personalities are driven, tend to become workaholics, and end up having heart attacks and nervous breakdowns, whereas Type B personalities are much more calm and collected and seem to take things in their stride without too much fuss and bother. What is not so well known however, is that the majority of people are Type A personalities, which mean that most of us tend to be too stressed for our own good!

What makes this personality type so much more susceptible to stress is exactly the fact that they are driven to perform. This often make them place undue pressure on themselves by taking on more and more responsibilities, or under-estimating the amount of time or effort a task will take, or over-estimating their own abilities. This inevitably lead to too little time, inability to complete tasks through juggling too many tasks at the same time, leading to irritability, inability to make decisions, suffering from anxiety, insomnia and feeling constantly tired.

But other personality traits can also lead to stress reactions. If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality profile (take the online test on www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp) you will know that people tend to have four major aspects to their personalities. These four axes have two dimensions each on the opposite end of the scale, and the four aspects, combined with two sides to the scale give 16 different personality types. http://www.e-mbti.com/

The four aspects are:
Where you draw your energy from and where you spend your energy. If you are on the Introversion side (I) of the scale, you draw your energy from within and you tend to focus on your inner thoughts and ideas. If you tend to the Extroversion side (E), you focus on other people and things.

How you perceive things or take in information to base decisions on: This is either Sensing (S) or Intuition (N). This indicate how a person prefers to receive data from the environment around him ? either through his senses, or through Intuition (”gut feel”)

How you make decisions : The two scales are based on Feeling (F) ? using your emotions when you make decisions, or Thinking (T), using rational thought, or logic, to make decisions

How you relate to the world around you and order your life: The two scales here are Judging (P) and Perceiving (P). If you tend towards the Judging side, you will typically like your world to be ordered and controlled. If you tend towards the Perceiving side, you would be more adaptable and flexible.

Please note that these are sliding scales. Each person has aspects of both sides of each scale present, in other words, you would never get someone who is fully Introverted or fully Extroverted ? somebody like this would definitely be classified as psychotic or insane. But most people have a definite preference for the one mode above the other.

It is clear to see now how some personality types might be more inclined to react stressed to certain situations where the opposite type might not find the same situation stressful at all.

Take the example of an Introvert who has to go a party where he does not know anyone AND make a speech in front of a completely foreign group of people. The Introverted person will probably suffer from severe stress and anxiety when confronted with this situation whereas the Extroverted type person would relish in the attention and the opportunity to meet new people.

Another source of possible stress can occur where people whose lifestyle tend to be more Judging, has to confront a change in plans or a change in lifestyle. These types of people like to have order in their lives, they like to plan ahead and they rather tend to be ‘control freaks’. For these people, a sudden change in plan such as holiday plans that have to be suddenly aborted, a flight that has been delayed, or a change in circumstances such as moving house is incredibly stressful.

How does this affect you? It is really a case of “know thyself”.

Most Type A personality types would not admit that they ARE personality type A, or that they are workaholics. If you know that you are more inclined to be a personality type A you can be aware of the fact that you are also inclined to take on too much work and tend to over commit yourself.

If you are aware of your Myers-Brig personality profile you will realize WHY you feel so stressed if you have to deal with a lot of people, or if you are a ‘J’, why you feel so anxious and irritable if plans suddenly have to change and you can consciously try and either avoid these types of situations or consciously try and deal with them through applying some stress management techniques.

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Work related stress probably contributes the most to stress these days since such a lot of our time is taken up by the world of work. Various sets of circumstances that are work related have been identified as being stressful. These include, for example, taking on a new role at work or changing jobs, losing your job, partner starts a new job.

All of these are easily identifiable, however, it is the insidious continuous stress-inducing events that is not mentioned on the scale that seems to be a major source of stress today. Examples are:
- Overwork : Too many of us take on too much responsibilities, either through choice (Personality Type A) or through major changes in the place of work such as ‘downsizing’, and slowing down of the economy. Lots of organizations, when the economy gets tough, save money through making people redundant. What this often means in practice is that the same amount of work needs to be done with less people. Often the staff who remain get saddled with the responsibility of doing their own, as well as their deposed colleague’s work. In fear of losing their own jobs, they often just knuckle under and start doing the extra work without complaining.
- Technological advances in the workplace: Technology is advancing at a rapid pace and new technological equipment and tools are deployed in the workplace on an almost daily basis. The employee is expected to keep up but lots of people are just not technically inclined and this leads to technostress - the inability to cope with technological changes in the workplace.
- Too much information. We are living in an information age, and the focus of the workplace is changing to working with information. A large portion of this is linked to the way that we can now access information in volumes unheard of previously. This volume of information is not necessarily a good thing since it places a strain on our abilities to process the information. Each piece of information such as a news bulletin, an advertisement, an email, a voicemail, a telephone call, an SMS, an Instant Message - all of these pieces of information must be assessed, processed and acted upon. This is placing a tremendous amount of strain on us with regards to the amount of time that we have available to get things done in day. Every piece of information that we need to process makes a demand on our time and interrupts out train of thought. Trying to do too many things at the same time is a typical symptom of extreme Type A type personality behavior, but frankly, with the way that our world is structured, it is difficult to avoid that. You get bombarded with pieces of information wherever you go - in the train and in the bus and driving to work you might listen to the news on the radio, be bombarded with giant advertisements adorning the sides of the roads, the sides of buildings and inside shop windows advertising new products and services, see a couple of TV commercials and news bulletins while waiting in a queue for coffee or in the bank, deal with two or three urgent phone calls that came through while you were traveling, as well as a couple of SMS messages informing you of a meeting that has been scheduled urgently that you need to attend. That is why one of the stress management techniques that can be applied is to limit yourself to the amount of information that you need to handle!
- Travel and commuting - not all of us can afford to live close to our places of work and some of us have to travel long hours to get to work. It can be tremendously frustrating to spend a couple of hours per day just traveling in adverse conditions - whether that be crammed together like sardines in stuffy and hot underground trains, or sitting in your car in a traffic jam with no end in site, knowing all the while that your kids are waiting to be fetched, the supper still needs to be prepared and you will have even less time for yourself.

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One of the biggest causes of stress is not having enough time to do everything that you are responsible for - or that you feel you are responsible for.

The problem is that some people, especially if your personality type is such that you are a ‘people pleaser’, or if you have a slightly low self-image and therefore crave the approval of other people, just cannot say ‘no’.

This could range from anything from favors asked by relatives - to babysit your awful nieces and nephews, or to act as taxi for your old aunt Edna and take her shopping for hours; to extra work dumped on you by your boss or by your co-workers.

This can lead to a major source of stress. You might feel taken advantage of, and the extra tasks might just be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, so to speak.

It is essential that you take a good look at the factors that are causing you stress, and if lack of time, or the feeling of being drained due to constantly having to pander to the demands of family and friends, are contributing to you feeling stressed, you just have to learn how to say no.

The funny thing is that you really do NOT need to explain your reasons, however, if you feel a bit daunted and feel that it would be incredibly rude to just say no outright, you could possibly try by saying that you cannot do XYZ right now, but you will think about it. That is a nice polite way of dodging the issue. The problem of course is that it has not really gone away and the persistent family member might just take you up on the ‘later’ bit, however, just be consistent and persistent in saying ‘no’ and they will soon get the message.

This might sound harsh, and believe me, I sometimes have difficulty in following my own advice, but lack of time and being over-committed on tasks are the major contributors to MY stress levels and mentally I realize that saying ‘no’ is one of the best ways of reducing stress levels.

Come on, be a bit selfish. It might just be the best thing for you to do sometimes.

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