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For the Martha Stewarts of the world, life may be so perfect it makes them sick
AFTER GRADUATE SCHOOL I SPENT a few years doing research at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Califomia, a famously magnificent structure perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Next door was a hang-gliding center, the denizens of which would often glide past the windows of my upper-floor lab. For some reason, I had decided that the sport was idiotic, its practitioners a bunch of irritating cowboys. One morning, as I glanced up from perhaps my thousandth pipetting of the day, my eyes briefly locked with those of a passing hang glider. It occurred to me in that instant that we both were thinking the same thought: "No way in hell would I like to be in your shoes, buddy."
One person's pleasure, another's poison. The fool had paid good money to glide around the cliffs; I would pay to spend sixteen hours a day working on my science (please don't tell NIH; they're hard enough to prv funds out of as it is). And for each of us, the other's activity would probably count as a stressful misery.
As it is with life's peak experiences, so it is with the everyday challenges-traffic jams, mortgage payments, deadlines, relationship problems and the like. Depending on who you are, such stressors may represent profound psychological burdens-or trifles you barely notice. But the repercussions of those individual differences in attitude resound far beyond the borders of your emotional realm. Among other things, there are good reasons to think they help determine your patterns of disease: which illnesses afflict you and how quickly you recover from them.
In recent decades study after study has borne out the immensely important fact that people whose personalities fall into certain reasonably well established categories face an unusually high risk of developing some stress-related diseases. A burgeoning cottage industry has grown up in stress physiology and health psychology, exploring just what those personality types are and how they are linked to bodily health. Surprises abound. On inspection, correlations that everyone has taken for granted can change or even vanish overnight; new ones can appear. Recently an unsuspected and paradoxical stress-prone personality type has...