Two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, coined the term Type A in the early 1960s to describe a collection of traits that they found in some individuals. They didn’t describe these traits in terms related to stress (for example, defining Type-A people as those who responded to neutral or ambiguous situations as if they were stressful), although I will attempt to do that reframing below. Instead, they characterized Type-A people as immensely competitive, overachieving, time-pressured, impatient, and hostile. People with that profile, they reported, had an increased risk of
...more
