What is the relationship between stress and personality?

Question

What is the relationship between stress and personality? What aspects of personality might tend to increase stress? Decrease it?

Answer 1

Some personalities are more resistant to stress than others. Certain people have personality traits that cause them to over-respond to stressful events.

What characterizes stress-resistant people?
1. A clear sense of one’s values, goals, and capabilities, and a belief in their importance.
2. Active involvement rather than passive acquiescence. Hardy persons actively restructure and initiate desired changes in their personal worlds.
3. The ability to find personal meaning in stressful life events and to fit these events into one’s overall plans and priorities.
4. An internal locus of control. This is the feeling of being in control of stressful life events rather than viewing them as a function of fate, luck, or the actions of powerful others.
5. A good social support system, including close ties to friends and family.
6. High sensation seeking. This characteristic may have a sizeable genetic component and may be difficult to change.
7. A stable, even disposition.
8. A “Type B” personality: easygoing manner, low hostility, low competitiveness, and little feeling of time pressure.

Answer 2

Ah, so this is why you asked your later cryptic question about cortisol. Cortisol is made by the adrenal glands, not as a way of dampening down adrenaline but as a slower acting and longer lasting signal than adrenaline. The brain drives the adrenal glands through the hypothalamus, coordinating a daily cycle that has low levels of cortisol around midnight and rises abruptly around the time of our awakening. These variations make a single measurement of cortisol in your blood not worth much. It takes large studies of people to come up with the relationships between stress and mental health that you've heard. That metaphor that Barbara mentioned is a good one. Borderline, histrionic, and somatoform disorders are seen as a sensitivity people have. That can focus on one's body and physical symptoms or it can focus on one's mind and emotions or other mental symptoms. It can be both. It is a theory that stress causes normal brain mechanisms for dealing with "bumps in the road" to not work as well, because past stress has driven them too much, making us too sensitive, which winds up being a personality disorder. Treatment can work whether that theory is exactly right or not. The important thing is that you're having problems, and those problems have solutions.

Answer 3

You're asking a question that's the equivalent of a BS in psychology - or perhaps even a doctorate.

Search on "Personality Disorder" and you'll find a lot of what you want to know, assuming you have enough of a background to fully appreciate what's being said.

Answer 4

relationship stress personality