Temperament: Why Your Body Responds Differently.

Months of Research Condensed into a 5-Minute Quiz.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Understand Your Metabolic Type

From the perspective of the Galenic/Unani medical framework, everything from the cold hard earth to the hot fiery Sun has specific qualities.

Like all living things, we are somewhere in between.

The matter of our body consists of material/fluids which manifest these qualities to varying degrees. Just as the earth is enveloped by water, then air, and the Sun. So too our bodies consist of a core boney structure, surrounded by flesh (which is mostly water), and the vapors of these fluids (as well as the air in our lungs), driven by the fire/heat of metabolism.

This results in the manifestation of temperament throughout the body, from the smallest parts to the whole.

When we talk about a person’s overall temperament, we are referring to their dominant temperament. You can think of this as the average…or, maybe it’s more appropriate to call it the mode (the most frequently encountered number/state). It doesn’t really matter how we analogize it statistically.

For the last several months, I have been learning from different sources (ancient and new), including courses on Unani medicine, trying to get a sense of what is the most reliable and accurate way to assess a person’s dominant temperament.

I learned a couple of things along the way:

1. Determining a person’s temperament is most reliably done with a thorough 1-on-1 journey with a practitioner of a medical art which concerns itself with temperamental differences.

2. All of the self-assessments I found are terrible, for many reasons.

3. Much of the language used in both the explanations and the quizzes are archaic, and often time referring to habits/tendencies which are not of the modern world.

4. This makes it very difficult to select an answer confidently.

5. Which makes it even more difficult to take the result of these tests seriously.