A Type A result means you answered toward the high-urgency end: time feels scarce, waiting is expensive, and most situations quietly acquire a scoreboard.
It describes a behaviour pattern, not a personality type and not a medical finding — the famous coronary link from the 1960s did not survive later replication attempts, and the part that has held up best is hostility rather than drive. Read the result as a description of tempo and its costs. The drive is genuinely productive; the impatience and the hostility are the components with a real downside.
Strengths
- Things ship. Whatever else is true, work that passes through you gets finished
- You compress timelines other people treat as fixed, and are often right that they were not
- Standards are stated rather than implied, so nobody has to guess what good means
- You are the person who moves first when a situation needs someone to
- Ambiguity gets resolved quickly, because you would rather decide than wait
Growth Edges
- Urgency is contagious, and the people around you did not choose it
- Speed is treated as a virtue in itself, including where it is not one
- Rest gets framed as lost time, so recovery only happens involuntarily
- Impatience shows in small ways — interrupting, finishing sentences — that cost more than they seem to
- Winning becomes attached to situations that were never a competition
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Type A personality bad for my heart?
The evidence is much weaker than the reputation. The original claim came from a 1960s cohort study, and subsequent research largely failed to reproduce a link between the overall Type A pattern and coronary disease; historians of medicine have also documented tobacco-industry funding inside parts of that research programme. Later work narrowed the association to hostility and anger rather than urgency or ambition. This questionnaire measures none of that clinically and predicts nothing about your health.
Which part of this is actually worth changing?
The hostility, not the drive. Being fast, competitive and demanding of yourself is not the component with a documented downside — irritation with other people is, and it is also the part that damages relationships and teams. Separating them is the entire game: keep the tempo, drop the assumption that whoever is slower is failing.
Why do people say I am stressful to be around?
Because urgency transmits and other people cannot see its source. Your clock is internal; what colleagues experience is a deadline that keeps moving and a sense that they are behind on something nobody named. Saying explicitly which things are actually urgent — and which are just your default speed — removes most of that without slowing you down.
Can I stay Type A and avoid burning out?
Mostly by scheduling recovery rather than earning it. The failure mode at this end is not effort, it is that rest is treated as something to be justified, so it only occurs when you are forced. Booking it in advance — where it competes with nothing, because nothing has been planned yet — is the version that actually survives contact with a busy quarter.
Is this the same as being a workaholic?
No, though they overlap. Workaholism is compulsive engagement with work specifically — an inability to disengage, with guilt when you try. Type A urgency shows up everywhere, including queues, traffic and conversations that are going too slowly. You can be Type A with a strict finishing time, and you can be a workaholic while appearing perfectly relaxed.
Is the Type A / Type B test a clinical assessment?
No. It is a 12-item educational self-report adapted from the Type A behaviour pattern described by Friedman and Rosenman, not the validated Jenkins Activity Survey or Bortner scale, and not a cardiac-risk assessment. It screens for nothing and should not be used to make decisions about anyone.
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Results Library content is educational, not a clinical assessment.