Color Your Health Green: How Your Personality Could Bring You Good Health—or Future Problems

When Carol Ritberger, PhD, sees people, she doesn’t see faces or figures. She sees bright colors and hidden health problems.

The behavioral psychologist groups human personalities into four colors. She says Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other hard-charging leaders are reds. Hypersocial peace seekers like Bill Clinton are oranges. Workaholic visionaries like Bill Gates are yellows. And impulsive fun-lovers like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson are green, green, green.

Ritberger’s colorful approach may cause scattered snorting, but the medical community is giving it a hard look—and wondering if she may be onto something.

The California researcher has spent years studying the neurology of personality. The result is a visually compelling system that purports to detail personality quirks and health vulnerabilities.

Behind this multihued system is Ritberger’s belief that our stress reactions shape our body chemistry in subtle yet profound ways. When we are nice and chilled, our bodies tend to remain in good working order. But major stresses—“the common denominator of all illnesses,” she says—knock us out of neurologic balance and into a body-punishing world of fight or flight. In severe cases, unremitting stress prevents us from springing back to our natural restorative state. Things quickly spiral downward from there.

Ritberger, who’s authored many books, including What Color is Your Personality? Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, says her system can aid physicians. By pinpointing where she believes illnesses originate and primary and secondary symptoms later appear, Ritberger says general practitioners can shift their focus from symptom relief to treating health issues at their earliest stages—or preventing them entirely.

Why a color-coded system? Simple. Labels judge and intimidate, she says. “Color is a nonthreatening way to talk about our differences.”

Red: Meet the Type-A Control Freak

Think red, think the take-no-prisoners entrepreneur, corporate big wig, or politician. “Hillary Clinton is a definite red,” Ritberger says. “She’s very aggressive and unrelenting. When she gets her mind focused on something, there’s almost an obsessive-compulsive behavior.”

The red personalities tend to be unwavering, straightforward traditionalists. “Reds want predictable, organized environments,” she says. “Reds need to control everything—both their environment and the people around them. Red people do not like change and any time they’re not in control, they tend to get anxious.”

Health issues: Reds may appear invincible but aren’t. Their need for total control in an uncontrollable world opens them to hypertension, heart disease, and lower back issues. Reds seek escape from the daily grind and the unrelenting storm inside their minds. As a consequence, “Red personalities are prime candidates for compulsive shopping, gambling, sex, and overeating,” Ritberger says. “Red males have a higher predisposition toward prostate cancer than any other color.”

And then this footnote: Red people tend to engage in activities that strain their lower backs, golf being the number one culprit—among men and women, she says.

Early stress warnings: Driven and focused like lasers, reds have trouble recognizing rising internal stresses. “When reds start getting lower back pain—or especially pain in their legs or feet—that’s a clear sign they are stressed,” Ritberger notes.

Rejecting the popular image of former vice president Dick Cheney as the avuncular, laid-back technocrat, Ritberger points to his chronic heart problems and rumored fiery disposition. “Cheney is a classic red—classic,” she says.

Orange: Enter Bill Clinton’s World

“Orange personalities like Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey tend to be very social,” Ritberger says. “Orange people tend to be outgoing, easygoing, and basically nice. They are often our caregivers who put the emotional needs of others before their own.”

Orange people also crave security and stability. They shrink from conflict and suppress their emotions for fear of stirring waves or burdening others. Oranges can be either the quintessential team player or uber-leaders. “Bill Clinton was famous for wanting to keep the peace and seeking consensus,” Ritberger says. “He used committees to solicit people’s opinions.”

Health issues: Even the nicest folks have tempers. Keeping powerful emotions under wraps may be a savvy career move but is corrosive on body, mind, and soul. “Strong emotions can fester into resentment and anger,” Ritberger says. “Cancer is called ‘the disease of the nice people.’” While orange females are at elevated risk for breast cancer, their male counterparts need to watch for diabetes.

Ritberger says orange people also often struggle with addictions. A stressed orange is prone to eating disorders or abusing drugs, she says. Other vulnerabilities: depression and bipolar disorder.

Orange personalities also tend to have issues with their small intestines, hyperthyroidism, hypoglycemia, and a high predisposition to diabetes.

Seeking relief, stressed oranges may self-medicate with food, even if full-blown eating disorders don’t develop. “Since they don’t have much sweetness in their lives,” Ritberger says, “they may reach for carb-packed comfort foods,” which further imbalances their body chemistry.

Early stress warnings: Mid- or lower-back pain in the lumbar area, upset digestive tract, or bloating.

Reds may intimidate people, but beware provoking an easygoing orange, she cautions. “If reds are obsessive-compulsive, oranges are passive-aggressive.” Beneath their good-humored exterior may be a ticking time bomb. “Oranges reach a point where they can’t take the stress anymore and then they absolutely explode.”

Yellow: Tightly Wound Visionaries

Wimpy connotations aside, yellow is a power color associated with the personas of computer titans Gates and Steven Jobs, mogul Warren Buffet, and former president George W. Bush. The yellow personality is a challenger, a visionary, an unapologetic nonconformist who thinks outside boxes and defies convention.

“Yellows are very focused on what they do,” Ritberger says. “There’s a difference in the red and yellow workaholic behaviors. The red personality works to live, but the yellow lives to work. In fact, their work is their play.”

Ritberger, a research scientist, paints herself yellow. “I don’t have a lot of the female qualities that society would like us to have,” she says, “so I’ve learned to develop my green side. I find a comfortable balance between societal expectations and who I really am—without compromising my [health].” Pausing, she adds, “But I do know I’ve got to be a yellow at least some every day.”

Health issues: Yellows tend to be high-strung, making them vulnerable to “nervous stomachs, gastrointestinal reflux, hypertension in the intestinal area, adrenal burnout, and tired immune systems,” Ritberger says. “Yellows are so much in their own minds, they don’t pay attention to what’s happening in their physical bodies,” such as hunger, pain, or rising stress.

The yellow personalities may even forget to eat food, she says. “They get into their heads and just forget about everything their body needs. If anything, they might have the occasional glass of wine, but they are not in touch with their bodies.”

Early stress warnings: Stomach pain and acid reflux.

Green: Smile, Be Happy

Greens, as the name implies, are all about peace and balance. Think green, think Al Gore, former California Gov Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, or your garden-variety Sonoma yoga instructor or musician. If reds are rigid and driven, greens are impulsive, spontaneous, and just wanna have fun.

“The green’s mantra in life is to go with the flow and not get uptight about things, but they do tend to get uptight very easily,” Ritberger says. Because these quintessentially free spirits aren’t oriented toward time, deadlines, or detail, they often find themselves traveling the roads of Stress City. Greens need to watch out for getting bogged down with excessive details or responsibility. If they think they’ve hurt someone’s feelings, they become very stressed, Ritberger says.

Paradoxically, Ritberger sees many greens among emergency department personnel. “They keep very, very calm under a lot of stress. But when they get out of that situation, they kind of collapse.”

Health issues: Greens have a higher predisposition toward substance abuse, from alcoholism to recreational drugs. Stress settles in their shoulders. Ritberger notes that both green and red males today “are surfacing with breast cancer, which is very unusual.”

Early stress warnings: Tightness in shoulder muscles. Clinched jaws.

Summarizing, Ritberger says, “Reds need to control the people and environment around them, oranges need to control people, greens need to control their environment, and yellows don’t want to control anybody or anything.”

Prescriptions for Healthy Living

Ritberger has specific health caveats for each personality color.

Reds need to stop denying their health issues. “Don’t pretend you don’t have it; don’t deny it. Go get things checked out before they spiral out of control,” she says.

Oranges need to slow down and stop letting deadlines take priority over their health needs. Yellows need to accept that they cannot heal their bodies through sheer will power. And greens? Green people need to be more active in their healing process. Instead of “turning it over to other people,” she says, “they have to actively engage it head on.”

Ritberger says greens tend to be the happiest people while oranges are the least happy. “Both greens and oranges make decisions based on emotional judgment,” she says. “Greens are always looking for the positive; oranges are focused on the negative.”

Ritberger believes each person’s “neurological wiring” is fixed for life. When people who stay within their color parameters get stressed, she says their bodies are designed to reboot themselves and bring them back to a sound preset operating state. “But when you stray outside of your neurologic boundaries—meaning a green tries to operate as a red, in order to survive—the green person will develop red illnesses.”

Some observers may believe they straddle two or more personality colors, but Ritberger says this is rarely true. “The assessment tools in my book actually talk to the brain and force it to identify a predominant color,” she says. Pausing, she adds, “But the truth is, we all sometimes go outside our personality boundaries. We all are going to be a rainbow out of pure survival.”

— Matthew Robb is a freelance writer, a psychotherapist, and an outdoor enthusiast based in Washington, D.C.