The Secret To Low Stress: Control
A new study reveals that the leaders of the nation’s political, military, business and nonprofit organizations are a pretty relaxed bunch, writes Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times. Compared with people of similar age, gender and ethnicity who haven’t made it to the top, leaders pronounced themselves less stressed and anxious. And their levels of cortisol, a hormone that circulates at high levels in the chronically stressed, told the same story. The source of the leaders’ relative serenity was pretty simple, says Healy: control.
“Compared with workers who toil in lower echelons of the American economy, the leaders studied by a group of Harvard University researchers enjoyed control over their schedules, their daily living circumstances, their financial security, their enterprises and their lives.
‘Leaders possess a particular psychological resource — a sense of control — that may buffer against stress,’ the research team reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
‘It’s clear that having a sense of control is protective against stress,’ said Nichole Lighthall, who researches stress and its effects at Duke University and was not involved in the new study. ‘People in a company at all levels may be affected by the market and its unpredictability,’ she said. But while rank-and-file employees may worry about being laid off, chief executives can pretty much rest assured that ‘they’ll keep their position in society, their superiority, their lifestyle and their income’ even if the organization over which they preside suffers, she said.
The results showed that compared to non-leaders, leaders’ sense of control and propensity toward anxiety were lower. So were their cortisol levels, providing physiological proof that they were less stressed. When the researchers focused on differences within a group of 75 leaders, they found that the larger the pool of workers an individual managed, the lower he or she scored on measures of stress and anxiety.
Samuel Barondes, director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry, said the study didn’t reveal whether leaders became less stressed as they climbed toward the top or whether they were less prone to stress in the first place, facilitating their ascent. He suspects it’s a combination of both, but either way, ‘once you’ve made it and are not at the whim of capricious meanies above you in the hierarchy, you are less stressed,’ said Barondes.” Read more here.
I wonder how we could find ways to give workers—and students—more control over how they spend their time and how they allocate their efforts. The evidence suggests that better learning and better work would be the result, not to mention healthier, less-stressed people.
Many educational environments such as Montessori already give students complete autonomy over how they spend their time. The results are already showing up in research and I think the autonomy and control that students have in such environments will continue to show enormous benefits.
Why the rest of the educational world doesn’t look more to these models continues to confuse me.
Sadly, it is because those at the top of the educational food chain feel the need to be in control of other peoples’ time and efforts. (says the public high school science teacher)
There is a subject that could be taken as a mere semantic issue althougt it isn’t so: The thing is not about ” feeling in control” but “feeling secure”. To be in control is just a congnitive interpretation over a more deep dimension, a emocional one, which is feeling secure. Fear causes stress. Being secure is the opposite driving force. So, this is not that leaders have less stress because they are in control on their lives. They “feel” (perception) and “have” (biochemical) less stress because they feel more secure about what future will bring to them. When they loose security althougt they still have the control, they will feel and have more stress. So, Ben Assar is still in control over Siria, but surely he is not feeling secure. He is stressed. So, to comment The Puzzle School reply, educational environments that promotes autonomy are better because they give students not only control but security. So, finally what I am saying is that control is just one of the multiple forms that the basic feeling of security can be percibe.