In Depth

Stressed to Kill

Stress is a torture chamber that can't always be avoided. Tortured most are executives with high accountability but low authority. Sound like anyone you know?

By Christopher Koch

September 01, 2003 — CSO — Only in the past 20 years or so has science arrived at the no-longer-startling conclusion that stress can make you sick. The New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 went so far as to declare that "managing the long-term effects of the physiological responses to stress is critical to survival." Stress may contribute to 85 percent of all medical problems, says Connie Tyne, executive director of the Cooper Wellness Program in Dallas, which counsels executives on stress reduction. Fifty-two percent of executives will die of diseases related to stress, according to Tyne. That's partly because stress affects nearly every major system in our bodies, creating a laundry list of health problems

among them diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, allergies, asthma and colitis.

The clearest sign that there's a stress epidemic can be seen in heart disease statistics. For example, a recent study found that people who get less than five hours of sleep twice a week or more are 300 percent more susceptible to heart attacks. Their overall rate of developing heart disease doubles.

Not surprising, stress has been on the rise in the past few years. With the economy gone bad, unemployment rising and the increased threat of terrorism, most Americans report feeling more stress today. It's even worse for executives.

Constant stress does more than damage your health. It destroys your judgment and distorts your decision-making process. Constant stress has been shown to shrink the hippocampus, a region of the brain that controls memory and concentration. "We all know anecdotally that when someone is under stress they don't have the clearest vision," says Tyne. "They don't have the patience to work through a complicated decision. They will have a tendency to abdicate or jump into a decision prematurely."

Business executives don't like to talk about how stress affects them. They are taught that stress is to be accepted, swallowed whole and its effects ignored. Admitting to, or worse, displaying stress is a sign of weakness, an admission of failure. Unfortunately, this belief is widely shared, at least at work.

"You have to carry off the position with dignity and a show of strength in public," says Jim Quick, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Texas at Arlington. "You have to reflect the strength and power of the organization even if as an individual you're feeling somewhat vulnerable."

This means that businesspeople need to deal with stress on their owna lonely and difficult struggle that few choose to face. Denial is easier. But denial inevitably extracts its own toll in health, relationships with family and friends, careers, and even lives.The Science of StressThe reason that stress, and our response to it, has so much power over us has to do with evolution, which as far as stress reaction goes, stopped 30,000 years ago when modern man replaced the Neanderthal. Our earliest human ancestor, Cro-Magnon man, needed to control his environment in specific ways to avoid starving or being eaten by predators. To survive, he needed help holding off saber-toothed tigers or bringing down a woolly mammoth for dinnerso evolution favored those who felt uncomfortable alone and sought out the company of others. Knowing the guy in the next cave increased one's survival chances, as did the drive to control one's environment by, say, developing a mental map of the hunting grounds nearby, or by stacking a pile of clubs and rocks near the cave's entrance for protection. Cro-Magnon man learned to hate uncertainty because in his world, surprises were usually lethal.