Health Discovery: Want to Live Longer? Personality Counts

Stay calm, busy and organized, and maybe you’ll live longer. People with those positive personality traits can generally look forward to a few more years of life than people who are anxious, depressed and angry, according to new research from the National Institute of Aging (NIA).

“People who are more physically and mentally active, more organized and better at managing their emotions do tend to live longer,” says Antonio Terracciano, one of the NIA team that has explored links between personality and longevity. “We don’t know what causes the longevity,” he added. “It’s just an observation.”

His team analyzed answers on questionnaires from 2,359 generally healthy people enrolled in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which began in 1958. The team examined specific personality traits in relation to the life spans of 943 people who died during the 50-year period.

People who scored above the average for activity (keeping busy as well as exercising), emotional stability (managing stress and not giving in to feelings of anger and anxiety) and conscientiousness (being well organized, competent in finding needed information, and able to stick to diets and medical regimens) on average lived two or three years more than people scoring below the average, the NIA study found.

The findings, published in the July/August issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, were independent of the influence of known health risk factors such as smoking and obesity. For people with cardiovascular disease, emotional instability was a significant predictor of earlier death, even among those who had smoked or were obese, the researchers found.

They detected few differences between the sexes, but among women, “assertiveness” was linked to a lower risk of death. Assertive people, Terracciano says, “won’t be shy about talking with a doctor. In a group, they’ll be the ones to ask questions, who push a little more to get what they want.”

The NIA study adds to other research over the past 15 years that has examined links between personal traits and longer life. “For sure, there’s a substantial body of literature showing that personality is an important characteristic in average life expectancy and, we suspect, for exceptional longevity,” says Thomas Perls, M.D., a geriatrician with the Boston Medical Center and founder and director of the New England Centenarian Study, the world’s largest research project on people who live to 100 and beyond. “Personality has a great deal to do with how people deal with their lifestyle choices,” he says.

Patricia Barry is a senior editor at the AARP Bulletin.