If something can go wrong, it does. They take on too much, have too many irons in the fire, and can't organize the slew of self-inflicted demands and pressures clamoring for their attention. They seem perpetually in the clutches of acute stress. It is common for people with acute stress reactions to be over aroused, short-tempered, irritable, anxious, and tense. Always in a hurry, they tend to be abrupt, and sometimes their irritability comes across as hostility.
Interpersonal relationships deteriorate rapidly when others respond with real hostility.
The work becomes a very stressful place for them. Such personality characteristics would seem to create frequent episodes of acute stress for the Type A individual. Friedman and Rosenman found Type A's to be much more likely to develop coronary heat disease than Type B's, who show an opposite pattern of behavior. Another form of episodic acute stress comes from ceaseless worry. The world is a dangerous, unrewarding, punitive place where something awful is always about to happen.