Leaders Eat Last

OXYTOCIN IS MOST people’s favorite chemical. It’s the feeling of friendship, love or deep trust.

definition of love is giving someone the power to destroy us and trusting they won’t use it.

This is the power of oxytocin. It actually makes us good people. The more good things we do, the more good we want to do.

It is also part of the reinforcing bond between athletes, for example, when they high-five, fist-bump or smack each other. It reinforces the bond they share and the commitment they have to work together for their common goal.

Oxytocin really is magical stuff. Not only is it behind the feelings of trust and loyalty, it also makes us feel good and inspires us to do nice things for others.

Oxytocin boosts our immune systems, makes us better problem solvers and makes us more resistant to the addictive qualities of dopamine.

cortisol is designed to alert us to possible danger and prepare us to take extra measures to protect ourselves to raise our chances of survival.

Cortisol is not supposed to stay in our systems; it is supposed to fire off when we sense a threat and then leave when the threat has passed. And for good reason. The stress on our bodies is serious.

The paranoia cortisol creates is just doing its job. It is trying to get us to find the threat and prepare for it. Fight, run or hide.

Whether the danger is real or imagined, the stress we feel is real. Unlike our rational minds, our bodies do not try to assess what the danger is. We simply react to the chemicals flowing through our bloodstreams to prepare us for what might be lurking. Our Paleolithic brain doesn’t care about understanding the threat. It just wants us to increase our chance of survival.

As social animals, we feel stress when we feel unsupported. That subconscious unease, the feeling that we are responsible for ourselves and no one else is there to help, the feeling we get that most of the people with whom we work care primarily about themselves, is, to our primitive brain, quite scary. And the problem is not with the people, it is with the environment.

cortisol actually inhibits the release of oxytocin,

Even though we can get used to living with stress and low, regular levels of cortisol in our bodies, that doesn’t mean we should.

Cortisol increases aggression, suppresses our sex drive and generally leaves us feeling stressed out. And here’s the killer—literally. Cortisol prepares our bodies to react suddenly—to fight or run as circumstances demand. Because this takes a lot of energy, when we feel threatened, our bodies turn off nonessential functions, such as digestion and growth. Once the stress has passed, these systems are turned on again. Unfortunately, the immune system is one of the functions that the body deems nonessential, so it shuts down during cortisol bursts.

Whereas oxytocin boosts our immune system, cortisol compromises it.

With trust, we do things for each other, look out for each other and sacrifice for each other. All of which adds up to our sense of security inside a Circle of Safety.

After the policy was implemented, his team started communicating much more openly. Mistakes and problems were pointed out more quickly, long before they escalated. Information sharing and cooperation increased too. Simply because his team no longer feared for their jobs, this group leader saw the performance of his team skyrocket.

It turns out, even when offered big titles and bigger salaries, people would rather work at a place in which they feel like they belong. People would rather feel safe among their colleagues, have the opportunity to grow and feel a part of something bigger than themselves than work in a place that simply makes them rich.

it’s not the nature of the work we do or the number of hours we work that will help us reduce stress and achieve work-life balance; it’s increased amounts of oxytocin and serotonin. Serotonin boosts our self-confidence and inspires us to help those who work for us and make proud those for whom we work. Oxytocin relieves stress, increases our interest in our work and improves our cognitive abilities, making us better able to solve complex problems.

It is because of the advantages an alpha gets in a society that we are always trying to improve our own place in the pecking order.