"Being organised, engaged, and helpful could not just make you more enjoyable to be around, it may even help you live longer according to new research. On the other hand, leaving everything until the last minute when stress levels are high, being frequently anxious or moody could be linked to a shorter lifespan. Writing in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, longevity experts said their findings could help doctors predict health risks based not only on tangible measures like blood pressure, but also on how someone tends to think, feel and behave."
"Professor Rene Mottus, an expert in ageing and individual differences and study co-author, said: 'Rather than looking at broad, catch-all personality types like extroverted or conscientious, we zoomed in on individual descriptions: the precise ways people talked about themselves when filling out standardised personality questionnaires.' They found that these mundane self-descriptions, that we often give little thought to, could be quietly predicting who lives longer."
"'The word 'active' was the most striking,' Prof Mottus told The Guardian. 'Participants who described themselves this way were significantly less likely to die during the study period-with a 21 per cent lower risk, even when age, gender and medical conditions were taken into account.' The traits of being energetic, organised, responsible, hard-working, thorough and helpful were close seconds."
Specific self-descriptive personality nuances such as being active, energetic, organised, responsible, hard-working, thorough and helpful associate with lower mortality risk. Participants who described themselves as active showed a 21% lower risk of death after adjusting for age, gender and medical conditions. More than 22,000 adults were followed across four major cohorts with follow-up periods of six to 28 years. These nuanced descriptors predicted mortality better than the five broad traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving could inform health-risk prediction alongside medical measures.
Read at Mail Online
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