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[couldbe]

Verbena's right, that I am kind of coming around to the idea.  It's hard to separate the worry about the stress levels from what might be the reality.  Were my previous stress-induced health problems exacerbated by other things going on in my life?  Sure.  Might I be ready to take on something big and, to me, scary?  Sure.  Am I better prepared to do so now than I was as a new assistant prof?  Sure. 

Might I end up with ulcers and a bunch of colleagues who hate me?  Yeah.

[nottooinlovewacademe]

Being chair is a learning experience, a hard one but also a rewarding one. What I have found out is that faculty who really want to be chairs are not the best chairs. Chairs who are aware that they are faculty temporarily in leadership positions do well as chairs, as a collaborative facilitator (or as herding cats). Go for it! Others deserve the break and you will find that besides being hard there are a lot of pluses about chairing a department. If you cannot stand it, your first job will be to get a line or recruit someone else to do it. Some folks will not like you as chair and others will praise you but you will also discover another dimension of the department and the university as a whole.
Yes, even if you negotiate time to do your own work, you will be interrupted and there will be emergencies. You will also get to know things that you really do not want to know about others. But, I guess this is all part of academia.

[deliajones]

I was chair for three years in a department where the chairmanship rotates every two-three years.  It IS a hard job, but it was rewarding; I got some changes implemented that I had wanted to see for fifteen years and they're still working out well. If chairmanships revolve fairly frequently, you end up with a lot of former chairs who understand how thankless the job is and don't give you a lot of Sh**.
BTW, to EVERY oral request, say ,"Please email it to me." Then only take care of those requests that you get via email. Unless your department has three or four members, you can't remember those things people say to you on the way to class anyway.

[losemygrip]

It can only stress you out as much as you let it.  Remember, their worst fear is that you'll resign as chair and one of THEM will have to do it.  So you always have the upper hand with the faculty.  The same club works to a lesser extent with the administration (except the administrators with personality disorders).  Your colleagues probably chose you because you're probably going to be good at it.  Don't let it freak you out; you'll be fine.

I was made chair after just three years while still untenured, basically because I was organized and knew what I wanted (mostly the first).  It all worked out, and I've basically become a professional chair since then.  (You couldn't do that in all departments--mine was small and unusually congenial.)