Managing people brings a specific kind of stress distinct from individual work, responsibility for other people's performance and wellbeing, difficult conversations, and often less predictable demands on your time and attention, with its own effect on your gut.
Beyond the general workload stress that affects anyone, management roles often involve a specific kind of ongoing alertness, a constant awareness of team dynamics, performance issues, and the wellbeing of the people reporting to you, that sticks around even outside working hours for a lot of managers. This sustained background alertness, rather than clearly bounded task-based stress, may contribute to a more constant pattern of high stress hormones than more discrete, resolvable work tasks produce.
Difficult conversations, performance reviews, resolving conflict, delivering bad news, are sharp stress spikes within a manager's role, similar in character to public speaking stress, though often less anticipated and prepared for. Managers who have these conversations regularly without enough recovery time between them may experience repeated sharp stress activation stacking on top of an already high baseline.
A dimension unique to management exists too, genuine concern for your team's wellbeing, which adds a layer of stress beyond your own workload. This doesn't have a clean equivalent in individual roles and deserves its own mention.
Given the sustained, alertness-based nature of management stress, deliberately protecting genuine recovery time, time truly disconnected from ongoing awareness of team dynamics, matters especially for managers, arguably more than for individual contributors whose stress tends to be more task-bounded.
If you manage people, recognize that the sustained background alertness in the role may create a different stress pattern than individual work, even during stretches that don't feel acutely stressful moment to moment. Build in genuine recovery time protected from ongoing awareness of team issues. And if you have several difficult conversations scheduled close together, build in brief recovery between them where you can, using breathing techniques to reset your nervous system before the next one.
This content is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.