While the image of the stressed-out executive or the politician under pressure has been firmly planted in the American mind, research increasingly suggests that it’s actually people lower down on the social scale — not those in leadership positions at the top — who suffer the worst health effects of stress. Now a new study of military officials and government staffers at a Harvard executive-training program confirms these findings, showing that as people climb the organizational rungs, their stress hormone levels and anxiety typically go down. “Being a leader, especially a high-ranking leader, is associated with lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol,” says study co-author Gary Sherman, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, noting that chronically high cortisol is a physiological indicator of stress. Indeed, while everyone needs some amount of cortisol to cope with short-term stress, having consistently high levels of the hormone has been linked to depression, obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and other major causes of illness and death. The new study found that cortisol levels were 27% higher, on average, in non-leaders compared with leaders. (MORE: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths) For the paper, two experiments were conducted. The first involved simply measuring cortisol and anxiety levels in 216 people, including government officials and military officers, and then comparing those levels to those in people recruited from the Boston area who did not hold managerial positions. The second study included 88 leaders and analyzed whether their sense of social control over their circumstances was linked to how stressed they felt. Previous research has found that even people in low-ranking positions don’t have overly high levels of stress as long as they have a perceived sense of control; but for those who don’t have a sense of power, even being at the top won’t protect them from hazardous stress. “When we compared leaders of different ranks and levels, we found that higher-ranking leaders reported a greater sense of control in their lives. This helped explain why they … Continue reading Why Being a Leader Is Less Stressful than Following