How’s your stress level these days? If you said “high,” you’re not alone. A Gallup poll found that 44% of the global workforce experienced stress “a lot of the day” in 2022; in the US and Canada, that percentage rose to 52%.
Some of that stress is undoubtedly due to large stressors—a big project or product launch coming soon, company-wide change initiatives, or disruptions that require attention. Those stressors are often intense and time-consuming to manage while they’re going on, but they probably aren’t chronic or long-term. The stress should diminish once the product launches or changes are in place.
But there is another form of stress that hides within the typical rhythm of everyday life—microstress.
In their 2023 book The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do About It, authors Rob Cross and Karen Dillon examine the minor, pernicious stressors that often seem invisible or fleeting but tend to pile up and overwhelm over time. “Individual stressors seem manageable at the moment, but they accrue, and they can create ripple effects of secondary and sometimes tertiary consequences that can last for hours or days — and even trigger microstress in others,” they write for Harvard Business Review.
Cross and Dillon identify fourteen sources of microstress across three categories:
- Things that drain our capacity to get things done (e.g., unpredictable behavior from others, a surge in responsibility at work or home, misalignment with others on roles or priorities.)
- Things that deplete emotional reserves (confrontational conversations, lack of trust, political maneuvering, etc.)
- Things that challenge our identity (pressure to pursue goals out of sync with values, attacks on self-confidence, worth, or control, etc.)
Microstress may not register as stress because it is small and fleeting. For example, helping out a co-worker at the last minute may only take fifteen minutes, but the time you spend helping may ripple through the rest of the day in ways that cause more stress. Those fifteen minutes may result in being late to pick up a child or meet a friend, which may cause tension or resentment at home, impacting the evening routines, and so on.
Microstress causes second- and third-level ripples that cascade through our bodies and register as chronic, long-term stress.
There are two primary ways to deal with microstress:
1. Improve Resilience
Some microstress is unavoidable and just part of life. Family members get sick, bad weather disrupts travel, and work-related requests come in at inconvenient times. While we can’t avoid these microstressors, we can prepare for them. Here are some ways to improve resilience:
Take Care of Your Body
Sometimes, the old advice is the best! Get some exercise most days, eat a balanced diet that minimizes sugar, caffeine, and alcohol, and practice good sleep hygiene. Remember that your brain is part of your body, and every input impacts how your brain functions.
Relax and Rest
Besides getting seven to nine hours of sleep per night, build time for hobbies and relaxation into your schedule. Read, play an instrument, take up cooking, carpentry, or knitting—find something that allows you to put aside work and relax.
Build A Social Network
Make an effort to find connections in real life, away from work. Join a community organization, look into gatherings at your library or community college, or just strike up more frequent conversations with neighbors. People connected to others in real life tend to weather stress better.
2. Push Back on Stressors
Improving resilience is essential, but pushing back against stressors is vital to set good boundaries for long-term functioning. Here are some ways to reduce or eliminate stressors:
Analyze Your Circumstances
Think through where your microstressors are coming from. Is it one person who is chronically undependable or has constant last-minute requests? Do you have a problematic commute that might be different if it were just half an hour earlier or later? By pinpointing specific stressors, you may be able to change or eliminate them and take back your time.
Turn Off Screens
Log out of e-mail and social media, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Our brains process screen inputs in ways that don’t give us much rest. Force some rest by turning everything off.
Protect Non-Work Hours
The “always on, always available” culture is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to burnout. This is not to say you should never work in the early morning or late night—after all, one advantage of flexible work is the ability to get things done when life allows and when your energy is at its peak. Just be careful to set aside time every day when you are not available—and then protect that time! If you’re a leader, schedule your e-mails to go out during regular work hours or put a note in your e-mail signature that clarifies you do not expect an immediate response.
Improve Communication with Co-Workers
If a large portion of your microstress comes from others who don’t follow through on commitments or have too many last-minute requests, try pushing back against these stressors. Ask clarifying questions—maybe others don’t need those reports by tomorrow morning, or perhaps the project didn’t finish on time because of unclear communication. If the problems are chronic, set new expectations. It’s okay to say, “I’ll be able to do that tomorrow,” or “I have too many commitments to do that right now.”
While some microstress is unavoidable, you don’t have to live under a barrage of minor, chronic stressors every day. Such stress levels can lead to dissatisfaction and endless frustration at best and health problems at worst. Take charge of your work-life integration by pushing back on micro stressors and start building a sustainable work life.
Self-Check
- What is one microstressor that I could reduce or eliminate today?
- What is one way I can reduce screen time to help minimize microstress?
- What is one way I could build more resilience?
