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"Studies of primate communities show that higher-status monkeys have reduced day-to-day cortisol levels, are healthier, and live longer.
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status is a significant determinant of human longevity, even controlling for education and income. High status doesn’t just feel good. It brings along bigger rewards, too.
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An increase in status is one of the world’s greatest feelings. Dopamine and serotonin levels go up, linked to feeling happier, and cortisol levels go down, a marker of lower stress. Testosterone levels go up, too. Testosterone helps people focus, makes them feel strong and confident, and even improves sex drive. With more dopamine and other “happy” neurochemicals, an increase in status increases the number of new connections made per hour in the brain.
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Maintaining high status is something that the brain seems to work on all the time subconsciously. You can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter, funnier, healthier, richer, more righteous, more organized, fitter, or stronger, or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a “niche” where you feel you are “above” others.
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The ongoing fight for status has other downsides. While competition can make people focus, there will always be losers in a status war. It’s a zero sum game. If everyone is fighting for high status, they are likely to feel competitive, to see the other people as a threat. So fighting for status can impact relatedness, which means people won’t collaborate well. Clearly it would be useful to reduce status threats in the workplace.
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Another strategy for managing status is to help someone else feel that her status has gone up. Giving people positive feedback, pointing out what they do well, gives others a sense of increasing status, especially when done publicly. The trouble is, unless you have a strong director, giving other people positive feedback may feel like a threat, because of a sense of a relative change in status. This may explain why, despite employees universally asking for more positive feedback, employers seem to prefer the safer “deficit model” of management, of pointing out people’s faults, problems, and performance gaps, over a strengths-based approach. These two strategies—putting your status down and others’ status up—only help other people with their status, and may actually threaten yours. So where can you get a nice burst of confidence-inducing, intelligence-boosting, performance-raising status around here, without harming children, animals, work colleagues, or yourself? There’s only one good (non-pharmaceutical) answer that I’ve found so far. It involves the idea of “playing against yourself.” Why does improving your golf handicap feel so good? Because you raise your status against someone else, someone you know well. That someone is your former self. “Your sense of self comes online around the same time in life when you have a sense of others. They are two sides of same coin,” Marco Iacoboni explains. Thinking about yourself and about others uses the same circuits. You can harness the power of the thrill of “beating the other guy” by making that other guy (or girl) you, without hurting anyone in the process.
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To play against yourself you have to know yourself. And this requires a strong director, but it also builds a stronger director as you focus on how you are growing. And here’s a really big idea: one way you might play against yourself could be to work on improving your capacity to catch your brain in action. You could practice getting faster at things such as labeling and reappraising, reading other people’s states, or developing a quiet mind when needed. As you improve your skills in this area you raise your status, without risking other people’s status. You increase relatedness if you share what you notice; you even build your director. And of course you make better decisions, deal better under pressure, and collaborate better with others."
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