Parenting while serving as a frontline leader is uniquely stressful, yet little is known about how family responsibilities shape physiological stress in these roles. We followed emergency physicians and tactical police leaders, comparing parents of young children with non-parents across four days: one critical mission day, two standard workdays, and one non-workday. Using wearable sensing, expert activity labeling, and daily debriefs, we inferred stress only in sedentary epochs via a normalized-heart-rate method, with an HRV-based index as benchmark. Parents showed higher stress on workdays and non-workdays, but not on critical mission days, where attentional narrowing and strict device policies appear to suppress parenting-related differences. We contribute: (i) in-the-wild physiological evidence that parenthood amplifies stress mainly under permeable boundaries, (ii) a pragmatic stress-labeling pipeline for safety-critical settings, (iii) a configuration-based account linking boundaries, attention, and parenting, and (iv) design implications for stress-aware boundary management systems, supported by an open analysis repository.

We investigate mental stress and relaxation patterns in professionals occupying leadership roles in emergency care and special police units. A key finding is that on days that involve critical missions, these individuals experience negative mental stress (i.e., distress) that escalates as the day unfolds. In contrast, on non-leadership workdays, mental distress remains relatively stable, while on non-workdays, participants exhibit positive mental stress (i.e., eustress) that subsides over time, facilitating relaxation. These findings stem from a four-day naturalistic study of$n=24$professionals, during which we collected physiological, mobility, and psychometric data. Using participant debriefings and sensor-based validation triggers (e.g., GPS, cadence), we labeled activities in 5-minute intervals and focused our analysis on sedentary periods. We defined stress during these periods as a normalized heart rate that exceeds two standard deviations above a personalized baseline, thus isolating mental stress uncontaminated by physical exertion. A logistic regression model based on this stress labeling method yielded results largely consistent with those obtained from Kubios' SNS Index, reinforcing its validity. In cases of disagreement, our method aligned better with participant reports and established literature, highlighting advantages in interpretability and specificity. Overall, our work makes three contributions: (a) to affective science, by quantifying the mentally stressful nature of leadership in high-stakes environments; (b) to affective computing, by proposing a wearable compatible method for estimating mental stress during sedentary activity in the wild; (c) to data science, by introducing a well-annotated, multimodal dataset suitable for machine learning benchmarking in stress detection.