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Do You Have a Hostile Heart?
It takes a long, probing examination to determine whether you are a hostile person (people do hide such truths, from others and themselves), but Dr. Redford Williams of Duke University has three questions that will raise a warning flag for you. In edited form, they are given here. Circle the word that best describes your behavior:
1. When anybody slows down or stops what I want to do, I think they are selfish, mean, and inconsiderate.
Never___ Sometimes___
Often___ Always___

2. When anybody does something that seems incompetent, messy, selfish, or inconsiderate to me, I quickly feel angry or enraged. At the same time, my heart races, my breath comes quickly, and my palms sweat.
Never___ Sometimes___
Often___ Always___

3. When I have such thoughts or feelings, I let fly with words, gestures, a raised voice, and frowns.
Never___ Sometimes___
Often___ Always___
If you answer “often” or “always” to two of these questions, you are in a high-risk group. You have a hostile heart.

How to Have a Trusting Heart
The key to reducing hostility may be a trusting heart, says Dr. Redford Williams.
Hostility begins when you mistrust others. Dr. Williams suggests these 12 steps for acquiring such feelings of trust:
1. Monitor your cynical thoughts by recognizing them.
2. Confess your hostility and seek support for change.
3. Stop cynical thought.
4. Reason with yourself.
5. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
6. Laugh at yourself.
7. Practice relaxing.
8. Try trusting others.
9. Force yourself to listen more.
10. Substitute assertiveness (firmness) for aggression.
11. Pretend today is your last day.
12. Practice forgiveness.
If you cannot do it on your own, seek help from a psychologist, psychiatrist, or member of the clergy.
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The protective measures suggested so far in this section are for specific poisons and toxic or harmful substances in your environment. When you know that you are, or will be, subjected to these specific poisons or health-destroying influences, the suggested measures can help you to protect your health against their damaging effect. The information on these specific, harmless vitamin and food substances that you can use to minimize or neutralize the effect of poisons in your environment, can be of great value if you are subjected, or expect to be subjected, to these specific sources of toxic or health-damaging assault.
But the most serious problem, for most of us, most of the time, is not the isolated poisons but the continuous total toxic assault from all directions. We are all subjected to radioactive substances and hundreds of poisons and toxic chemicals every day of our lives. The air we breath, the foods we eat, the water we drink – even the clothes we wear and the beds we sleep on – all are filled with poisons that none of us can possibly avoid. Even those who most conscientiously and meticulously attempt to live poison-free lives and eat only organically grown foods, are nevertheless subjected to many poisons. Even organically grown foods are grown in polluted air and are watered with polluted, chemicalized water. And the air, just about anywhere in the United States, is now seriously contaminated.
We can also be sure that the poisons in our environment are here to stay for a long time. Even if not a speck of new pollutants were added to our soil, air or water beginning from today, the existing pollutants would be here for decades to come, some for centuries.
Therefore, those of us who are aware of the graveness of the situation, should make an everyday effort to do everything there possibly can be done to protect us against the killing environmental poisons, which none of us can actually avoid.

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Dr. Williams says hostility has three stages, and he gives this example: You are in an express line at the supermarket checkout with a sign saying, “No more than 10 items.”
Stage 1: You distrust others. You count the items in the baskets of the people in front of you. You expect somebody to cheat and thereby take advantage of you.
Stage 2: You feel angry when you find somebody cheating. The guy in front of you has 12 items.
Stage 3: You show the anger by saying something nasty to the “cheater.”
According to Dr. Williams, all three stages can damage you. In one study, high levels of hostility found in healthy men at age 25 were seen as predictors that they were up to seven times more likely to get heart disease or die by age 50.
In another test, young men with and without high hostility levels worked on a complex mental task. Blood pressure in both groups rose at about the same rate. At one point, a psychologist began to harass the test takers. In the non-hostile men, blood pressure remained steady. In the hostile men, however, the pressure went through the roof.
Other studies show that hostility can spur the release of a hormone called epinephrine, which makes your heart beat fast and your blood pressure rise. High blood pressure leads to damaged arteries and heart attack.
Dr. Williams says those who cynically mistrust other people are most at risk. Dr. Friedman says hostility comes from unbridled greed, low self-esteem, or insecurity – feelings that you will be hurt, might fail, or won’t be loved. Whatever its source, doctors agree that hostility is a factor in heart attack.
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We all know the type-the person who stands at the elevator door and jabs at the button three, four, even five times when the car fails to arrive quickly enough. In conversation, this individual finishes your sentences for you or glances constantly at the time. People like this feel that they’ve got the world to conquer. And you’re very cautious about what you do or say with them, because they can ignite like firecrackers into anger.
Thirty years ago, scientists first identified such individuals as exhibiting “Type A” behavior: in a hurry, impatient, often angry. They also found persons with “Type B” behavior: laid-back, calm, slow to anger, good listeners.
The researchers found that Type A’s more often fell victim to heart attacks; Type B’s less so. But the researchers could not figure out how the personality connected with biology. What was there about Type A behavior that killed you? They had no answer, then.
“We have strong evidence now that hostility alone damages the heart,” says Dr. Redford Williams. One of the researchers who helped pinpoint the destructive effects of hatred, Dr. Williams is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
“It isn’t the impatience, the ambition, or the work drive,” Dr. Williams says. “It’s the anger. It sends your blood pressure skyrocketing. It provokes your body to create unhealthy chemicals. For hostile people, anger is a poison.”
Psychologists and psychiatrists have always told their patients to “let anger out” because, they said, if you hold it in, you can become depressed or develop ulcers. Dr. Williams gives quite another prescription: Avoid feeling angry in the first place, and you won’t need to suppress your anger.
Bruce T. Bowling, publisher of Fire-house magazine in New York City, clearly exhibited Type A behavior.
“I couldn’t catch up,” Mr. Bowling says. “I’d walk into my house, the Chinese food in one hand, mail in the other, scanning it as I went to the bathroom. I felt if I could do four things at the same time, I’d save time.”
Mr. Bowling meted out large doses of hostility to those around him. “Waitresses were never fast enough,” he says. “Taxi drivers drove me crazy. I would purposely under-tip them. New York City, I used to think, will do me in.”
In 1988, all his hostility took its toll. Just back from a firefighters’ convention, Mr. Bowling felt the classic pains in his shoulders, arms, and neck. At the hospital emergency room at 3 A.M., they told him: heart attack. He was lucky. He survived. Each year, half a million Americans don’t.
Dr. Meyer Friedman is a cardiologist at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and one of the co-discoverers of Type A behavior. He contends that hostility, impatience, and anger powerfully affect your body. Dr. Williams, on the other hand, says you can be impatient with impunity, so long as it doesn’t lead to anger. It’s the anger that gets you. The issue is not settled, but more and more experts agree that both anger and hostility can be hazardous to your health.
Originally, Dr. Friedman and his collaborator, Dr. Ray Rosenman, identified three parts of the Type A behavior:
1. Intense striving toward many poorly defined goals
2. Preoccupation with time and an obsession with getting things done faster
3. Free-floating hostility
To be hostile means that you want to hurt or punish somebody. Anger, Dr. Friedman says, can be the same thing or less – a feeling of displeasure toward yourself. Both hostility and anger rile your heart and body. To have “free-floating hostility” means that you are angry, or on the point of anger, much of the time, with or without major cause.
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The disease-producing bacteria are not as the sea sands, but I think that almost everybody will agree that there are too many of them. It would be futile to try even to mention them all. My medical dictionary takes about four pages to list them. What I should say are the most common, or at least best-known, ones are the staphylococci and streptococci. The first are so called because they are found in clusters like bunches of grapes; and the second, in strings. As a working rule the first may be expected to form local lesions such as abscesses, and the second are more likely to spread rapidly. This distinction is not to be relied upon, however; any of them may run wild at times. If we see pus collecting about a fingernail we presume that it is due to staphylococci. If a surgeon pricks his finger with a needle while operating and a few hours later little or nothing is to be seen where the needle point went in, but red streaks are running up his arm and tender swellings are to be felt at his elbow or armpit, we fear that he has streptococci infection. The red streaks are due to infection and inflammation along the lymphatic vessels and the tender lumps are the lymph nodes attempting to stop the infection there. The first abscess may be opened and pus freed, with relief. Surgery will probably accomplish nothing in the latter case.
But all the infectious organisms have their own characteristic ways of attacking us. Typhoid goes at our intestines; pneumococci usually settle in the lungs; and diphtheria causes a membrane to form in the throat. All these villains cause acute conditions, but others, such as tuberculosis or syphilis, go slowly about their evil ways. We may not even know when they first attack us, but later, when fully established, they reveal themselves as difficult or even impossible to banish.
Nowadays these diseases are treated often with considerable efficiency; and many of the treaters talk much of curing them, for probably the most popular idea about overcoming infection in the human body is that the giving of some medicine will kill the infection. If there are potato bugs on your vines you sprinkle on Paris green and this kills the bugs. If there is infection in the human body you give medicine and this kills the bacteria. There are many troubles about this latter procedure.
Medicines which are supposed to kill off bacteria often do not do too much good to the life of the body. Many diseases are insidious in onset and do much harm before we realize what we are fighting. There are many bacteria and they do not all respond to the same antibiotics. Even different strains of the same kind of bacteria are affected by different antibiotics. Now we are finding out that the bacteria are learning how to resist the antibiotics and we are not always so successful in killing them off as at first.
It is not at all certain that any of these wonder drugs kill off infection by hitting the bugs on the head, as it were. The forces of the body itself probably do the actual destruction. According to this theory, all that penicillin does to the streptococci is to make them more digestible so that the body devours them more successfully. The best chance for man to survive disease is to have an immunity. We are not so smart as we thought we were in licking disease after it has been established in our bodies.
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