Type A's, hurry up and learn patience! Here's how

Herb Palmer admits to being a type A personality. “I was the classic angry guy in rush hour traffic beeping the horn. All lines made me mad,” says Palmer, a 40-something author in Morris Plains, N.J. “What I finally figured out was it wasn’t the traffic or the lines â€" it was me.”


If you have trouble waiting in line, become annoyed and swear at other drivers in traffic, and go ballistic when the person in front of you at the 10-item-or-less checkout counter has 12 items, you can relate. Patience anyone?
Maybe you’ve cataloged your lack of patience as a sign of being a high energy, hard charging, successful individual, and you’re probably right. But make no mistake; it comes at a price to your health.
“What we know from research is that these individuals are prone to heart disease, hypertension and more medical problems across the board than their more laid back counterparts,” says Dale Archer, a psychiatrist and author of the forthcoming “Better than Normal: How What Makes You Different Can Make You Exceptional.”
Called time urgency impatience, and typically characterized in Type A personalities, these people expect everything to be done ASAP. Basically it’s an obsessive concern for time. It stems from the false urgency that comes from being concerned about maximizing every second of the day. They likely look at the clock regularly, too. These are the folks punching the elevator button repeatedly as if that makes it arrive faster. 
When every minute is that sense of panic and rush, it triggers the classic fight or flight response, where hormones flood the body and brain, which is fine in a life or death situation, but not so good when it’s turned on all day every day. After a while, impatience leads to irritability, which leads to anger, which leads to clogged arteries down the road.
“Everybody thinking they don’t have enough time to do this or that that tells the brain, at least the primitive emotional hub called the amygdala, that every minute of the day is an emergency,” says Joe Robinson, a work/life balance expert and author of “Don’t Miss Your Life.”

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