The Self-Healing Personality: Why Some People Achieve Health and Others Succumb to Illness

by Howard S. Friedman

With breakthroughs in understandings of the disease prone and self-healing personalities Dr. Howard S. Friedman gives his answers to important questions. Why are certain people more likely to achieve health than other, seemingly similar, people? How can one increase their chances of preserving their health? What are the health effects of our chronic mood states? How are heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and other diseases related to personality? How can the disease-prone personality be altered? The answers to these questions are emerging from an exciting new interdisciplinary health science, and The Self-Healing Personality is the authoritative source for understanding state-of-the-art findings that can allow you to enhance your capacity for a long and healthy life. "A really important book! We must empower individuals to preserve their own health. This book should be read by everyone wanting an elegant, understandable explanation of the latest scientific findings." —Dr. Margaret Chesney, President, Health Psychology Division, American Psychological Association

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Health

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Howard S. Friedman is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Riverside, California. For three decades, Professor Friedman has studied personality predictors of longevity, developing a scientific understanding of the "disease-prone personality" and the "self-healing personality." His latest book is "The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study."

His scientific work on health and longevity has drawn wide attention in the scientific community and has been featured in popular media worldwide. In 2008, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) awarded him the James McKeen Cattell Fellow award, citing his research and ideas that are "changing how we think about the nature of health." Dr. Friedman is also the recipient of the career award for "Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology" from the American Psychological Association (Div. 38). Professor Friedman is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the American Psychological Association (APA); and the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

Dr. Friedman is the Editor of the scientific journal called the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. His research on nonverbal expressiveness and personal charisma has been widely applied in health promotion, leadership training, medical education, and viral marketing. The winner of several teaching awards, Friedman writes his books in an easy-read style, with the earnest learner in mind. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, Friedman received his doctorate from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed the beginning chapters of The Self-Healing Personality, about stress and how negative emotions affect health. Although the personality types were oversimplified by today’s standards, these personalities, groundbreaking in 1992 when the book was written, are still valid measures for assessing how likely an individual is to stay sick. Friedman is careful to point out that environmental factors as well as personality factors contribute to wellness. But his focus is upon Type A vs. Type B vs. Pseudo-Type B; and the classic four temperaments: choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine. Although this is a bit simplistic, assessing one’s own attitude towards life and illness can be helpful in knowing what to change to become a self-healer. Another strength of the book is that the author cites actual research to back up his theories.

Friedman then goes on to discuss many ways in which to treat the psychological aspects of illness. A number of these seem commonplace or dated these days. Though numerous methods are given, none are explored with enough detail for me to enact a permanent change in my life as a result of reading them. Both self-help and professional help methods are outlined.

Some of my favorite take-away ideas:

The healthiest people are not the most optimistic, nor the most pessimistic. They’re in the middle, calmly accepting their diagnosis and staying open to possibilities. Extreme optimists are often unable to believe their spoken optimism at a mental or bodily level.

It’s not enough to “make up one’s mind” to be happy, one must have a sense of choice in one’s own life, a reasonable amount of social comfort, some challenge and excitement, and a sense of creative self-fulfillment to achieve the will and confidence to survive.

A challenging event is not necessarily stressful, unless one interprets it as excessively dangerous. A person can learn to think in ways that make a stressful life event less important or less traumatizing. Part of developing a self-healing personality involves reframing of such events to make them less stressful. (Note: the reframing process is unfortunately not well-described.)

Social relations are important self-healing helpers. People with social networks cope with stressful events more easily than those who are isolated.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I own a version from 1992 and I think some of the information is dated, so that's probably relevant to my review.

There was a lot of good material in this book and it especially got me thinking about how much we can affect our health, either in positive or negative ways. The concrete examples that the author gave of people who had stunning recoveries or none at all were eye opening. His references to studies of the subject were helpful, too. For all of those reasons, I recommend this book.

The reason I didn't give it a higher rating is because I feel there are a few issues with it. The author referred to four groups: cholerics, melancholics, phlegmatics, and the sanguine. (Based on classifications by the Greek physician Galen.) I didn't identify with any of the four groups, so it was difficult for me to know where I fit into his theory. In general, I think these labels are too limiting to be useful. The author also claimed that meditation is not helpful to everyone, which seems to be incorrect based on more recent studies.

I think this book either in an updated version or a book with similar goals (that is, to show how much we can affect our health by our thoughts) would garner five stars easily. The information is extremely important to all of us and there is solid research to back up the theories, but this book didn't deliver what I'd hoped.

[A.soorianarayanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personality also matters in being disease prone and prescribing the ways to better health should take the personality into account. It describes in detail the self healing personality and how to achieve homeostasis by developing a self healing personality.