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

Page 4

For 50 percent of the people who get cardiovascular disease, death is the first symptom, according to the American Heart Association.Stress and Its AntidotesThough the evidence is still being assembled, many scientists now believe that learning how to short-circuit the fight-or-flight response may be as important to our health as exercise and diet. For example, a recent Duke University study of about 100 heart disease patients divided them into three groups. The control group just had regular medical checkups, another had supervised aerobic exercise classes three times a week for four months, and the third group received stress reduction education once a week for 90 minutes during the same period. After five years, the first group had experienced 12 heart attacks, the second had seven, and the third had three. Results such as those are slowly convincing doctors to take a hard look at the mental state of their patients.

The best antidote to stress is exercise. And viewed in the context of the chemistry of the fight-or-flight response, that makes sense. Exercise is simulated flighta chance for all the sugars and hormones in the bloodstream to be used for their intended purpose. Exercise also feeds our brains some feel-good drugs such as dopamine and beta-endorphinevolution's reward for safely escaping the tiger.

Avoiding the stress response itselffeeling less stress in the first placeis a lot harder. To understand how to control stress, you have to think yourself back to the caves. Three major psychological factors made cavemen's stress hormones flow: lack of control, fear and isolation. All three have modern correlatives.

The CSO role is tailor-made for feeling out of control. Something can go seriously wrong at any moment, CEOs can change their minds and stop funding your work, businesspeople can resist your risk assessments for no good reason. CSOs have a vast amount of responsibility but little authority for controlling outcomes. This is what psychologists call low decision latitude.

"This creates a sense of chronic powerlessness," says Scott Stacy, clinical program director for the Professional Renewal Center, which counsels executives on stress. "You can't have an effect on what you need to have an effect on to generate a sense of [internal] calm." This leads directly to health problems. According to a 1997 study of about 3,000 Canadian public-service executives, those with low decision latitude saw their risk of illness increase anywhere from 30 percent to 1,700 percent.

To see the theory in action, just ask a top CSO if he would like to report to, say, the head of audit instead of to the CEO. Put in stress terms, reporting to the head of audit reduces a CSO's control over the environment because it puts someone between him and the ultimate influencer over the company. CSOs also feel increasingly out of control as their workload grows and affects more people. That's more people the CSO can't control. Users don't have to do anything the CSO asks.