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5 Ways to Deal with the Microstresses Draining Your Energy - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
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Summary.
Microstresses are the accumulation of unnoticed small stresses from routine interactions, and often are so brief that we barely register them. Individually, these microstresses might seem manageable, but cumulatively they take an enormous toll. How can you identify and reduce them? This article, based on research and experiments at several Fortune 100 organizations, lays out five steps that will help you identify where (and from whom) your stress is coming from, and how you can proactively reduce it without burning bridges.
Exhausted. Frayed. Languishing. Burned out. These are common words people use describe how they feel in their professional and personal lives. And it’s only getting worse. “Burnout is the primary driver pushing workers to look for relief in the forms of a new job, opportunities for advancement, more pay, and above all else, continued flexibility,” according to 2021 research from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, or i4cp. A staggering 67% of people surveyed at larger organizations (employing >1,000 people) cited burnout as the most significant driver of potential talent loss for their organizations.
It
might be easy to blame both pace and volume of work, but our research
suggests the real culprit often is a little more insidious. It is not so
much the workload that has gone up but the collaborations required
around our work that have exploded. This has created a new form of
stress that we documented in our recent book, The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems — and What to Do About it. “Microstress”
is the relentless accumulation of unnoticed small stresses from routine
interactions with people in our lives that are so brief that we barely
register them. Individually, these microstresses might seem manageable,
but cumulatively they take an enormous toll.
In
our research, we identified 14 sources of microstress which we grouped
into three different categories: microstresses that drain your capacity
to get things done (e.g., a surge in responsibilities), microstresses
that deplete your emotional reserves (e.g., managing others), and
microstresses that challenge your identity (e.g., pressure to pursue
goals out of sync with personal values).
What’s Driving Your Microstress?
Our
research initially focused on 300 high performers in multi-national
organizations, but in the past year, we’ve also assessed a global sample
of more than 11,000 individuals to further understand the most common
sources of microstress. What’s become abundantly clear through this
research is that microstress is not just the result of having a
particularly bad manager or being part of a high-pressure workplace
culture.
And
the problem is just getting worse. All of the advances in technology
and shifts in organizations to become more agile and less hierarchical
have caused even more microstress that threatens not only your
productivity, but also your overall well-being. Making matters more
challenging is that microstress is just as likely to come from the
people in our personal lives as those in our professional lives. But our
research suggests that if you can identify a range of these stresses,
you can take corrective action that can make a material impact on your
life.
Where Microstress Takes the Biggest Toll
What
became clear through our follow-up research is that microstress affects
all of us, at work and at home. But some people suffer more than
others. Our research shows a statistically significant relationships
between education, hierarchical level, and age and all forms of
microstress. At work this makes sense: as we rise in our organizations,
we are exposed to microstress-inducing interactions — for example,
misalignment with colleagues, responsibility for managing the
performance of teams, and confrontational conversations. But just as
notably, we found that these peoples’ personal lives were also more
stressful as a product of escalated expectations of the provider role,
negative interactions with family and friends, and challenges to
identity in what it means to be a “good” child or sibling helping family
members.
Women
in particular experienced greater stress across 13 of the 14 forms of
microstress. (The exception was that men report experiencing more stress
from disruptions in their networks.) Particularly notable gaps for
women existed in draining or negative interactions with family and
friends, confrontational conversations, and the volume and diversity of
collaborative demands. Respondents who were ethnic minorities also
experienced greater stress in certain areas: pressure to pursue goals
out of sync with personal values, political maneuvering, and uncertainty
about others’ reliability.
Notably,
draining or negative interactions with family or friends was selected
as the first microstressor almost three times as often as the next two
most selected (confrontational conversations and collaborative demands
that are diverse and high in volume). As one participant in a
subsequent learning experiment at a major retail organization shared
with us:
“I love my eldest daughter in a way you can’t describe. She is a core source of joy and meaning in my life. But I also worry about her. She has a low threshold to stress and often faults herself for or frets about whatever is happening in her life with her husband, sons, socially. Thankfully, she does talk to me about what she is going through at the time. I try my best to be helpful, however, it leaves me with the residual concern. There is no doubt in my mind that I carry that stress over to work. I am at times distracted or lack engagement because I am worried about her and whatever she is going through.”
Experiences
like this pose a challenge to the conventional wisdom on well-being,
which urges us to focus more on building close, high-quality
relationships in our lives as a source of long-term happiness. Yes,
family, friends, and colleagues are an important source of purpose, but
they’re also simultaneously a source of significant stress.
What
are we to do? So many of us choose to endure microstresses because we
can’t simply walk away from the most important relationships in our
lives. The key is understanding that it’s not necessarily the
relationships that need to change, but the interactions we have within
them.
A Practical Approach to Fighting Back
People
need to become intentional in managing their interactions on a
day-to-day basis to create a habit of addressing microstress over time.
To test how to successfully build this capability, we worked with
several Fortune 100 organizations that each invited 20 high performers
(balanced across men and women) to engage in a six-week experiment to
reduce their microstress.
At
the start of week one, we asked people to select a single source of
microstress that they would focus on addressing during the upcoming week
and share with us a written plan for acting on it. People would
commonly select issues such as altering interactions with siblings
around caring for aging parents, approaching a leader who was rapidly
shifting expectations, addressing misalignment in goals with colleagues
on a cross-functional team, or counseling a team member on how their
stress propagates unnecessarily to others. We partnered them with others
inside their organization who were also taking part in the experiment
as a source of peer support for navigating any challenges. Then on
Friday, we asked them to email the steps they took and the results. Our
job during the week was to offer support and ideas for how to approach
the source of the microstress when issues or questions popped up. (If
you’d like to try this experiment yourself, our free app, “The
Microstress Effect,” can help.)
Initially,
people were nervous to take action. The tone of their first Monday
email was consistently one of anxiety about pushing back. Yet by Friday,
the feedback emails we received were almost all positive and the world
had not tilted on its axis — people had taken steps to reduce
microstress from an interaction baked into their lives by, for example,
talking to a sibling about how they are creating guilt around caring for
parents or pointing out to a leader how their shifts in expectations
cascade to others.
Read more
Yet,
as the second week began, our participants reported the same level of
trepidation they experienced at the start of the first week. People
again struggled to find the will to change their microstress-inducing
interactions and often felt that they could not push back or that
persisting with the status quo was the less painful route. Again, we
encouraged, bolstered and supported. By Friday, they saw the week as
another win.
Little
by little, we could see a transformation beginning — for some people in
week three, and for almost all, by week four. The tone in their emails
became confident. Reflections on removing the earlier microstresses and
adding positive interactions in their lives emerged. We could see an
evolution in their ability to spot microstresses, to have the courage to
act, and to have difficult conversations. Importantly, this created a
sense of control in these peoples’ lives. As one participant who had
focused on the microstress of “surges in responsibility” shared with us:
“I was proactive in setting expectation and determining others’ roles rather than letting ambiguity creep in and work to come back to me. I realized I have been taking on more than I can achieve versus holding folks accountable when it came to the activities and deliverables. As time passed, I found myself overwhelmed with all the additional work. Seeing this and kindly re-directing people in a way that built capability for them has had a stunning impact on the amount of work and stress I am absorbing now. In hindsight it is hard to believe I didn’t see this earlier. Just lost in the pace of it all.”
This
was the most exciting aspect of this work for us. By taking small,
concrete steps each week, people began to see their worlds differently.
They began to envision ways in which they could shape the interactions
in their daily lives to reduce microstress and live more fulfilling
lives.
A Five-Step Plan to Reduce Your Own Microstress
One
of the key insights of our experiment was that participants had to
slowly build up their willingness and ability to see and address the
microstresses in their lives. You can’t address everything, everywhere,
all at once. But based on our research and many iterations of this
six-week experiment, we have identified five key steps you can use to
begin to get your microstress under control.
Start small.
Even
small shifts can have a positive effect on our well-being. So, commit
to adapting one small, easy-to-address microstress a week for the first
two weeks to build confidence, a different mindset, and a sense of
agency. Don’t focus on the bigger (and more difficult and entrenched)
stressors that can keep you from acting on ones you can control. Here’s
how one participant addressed the microstress of “lack of trust with
your network”:
“I thought I was more open and vulnerable about my work and questions I had. I asked for help with something twice (which is rare for me) and had conversations with a few team members about what was on my plate for work that week. I also was sure to ask them what they were working on and how that was going. Overall, I think it went well. I even was able to have a conversation with my AVP about a question around something I was working on. I hadn’t been into his office to ask a question since I’ve started here! He was super nice and helpful.”
Shift your attention to positive interactions that help create resilience.
Many
people assume that navigating stress requires us to conjure up inner
strength through sheer personal will. But our research suggests a
complementary strategy is to cultivate what we call a “resilience
network” of people who can help you navigate challenging times. Our
research revealed that having people in your life who provide
perspective, help envision a path forward, offer help, created space to
unplug, or even generate small doses of humor has a dramatic impact on
peoples’ resilience. And quite often these interactions came from a
diverse network — not just a best friend or significant other. Focusing
on creating positive interactions can help strengthen your day-to-day
resilience in a range of ways that those in our experiment felt
immediately.
Here’s
how one participant worked to bolster her resilience network in our
experiment, describing some things she had been doing:
- Making time to golf with ladies at my club who I haven’t spent time with yet
- Joined the [company] golf league with one of my peers at the office — creating a more personal connection with him instead of just focusing on work related topics.
- Leaning into the charity whose board I am on
- Have been getting a lot out of mentoring a new attorney
- Making time for close family (girls’ weekend with my mom and sister)
All
of these activities were joyful and meaningful for this participant.
But they also were deliberate choices to engage authentically with a
variety of relationships that created resilience for her in small and
large moments. For example, creating a more personal connection with one
of her peers meant that she was more comfortable asking him to help her
make sense of politics at work. And it turned out that he shared her
dark humor about dealing with challenges at work. Both of these
interactions created doses of resilience she hadn’t had without these
connections.
Tackle two bigger microstresses.
Strengthening
your resilience network often helps you move to taking action on larger
— and more impactful — microstresses. In our learning experiments, as
people hit the four-week mark, they tended to have more confidence in
shaping interactions and had begun to see the impact of tackling
microstresses in their lives. This made them want to go bigger.
Here’s
how one participant addressed one of her chosen microstresses:
“misalignment between collaborators on roles and priorities,” which had
been causing him routine, ongoing microstress:
- Brainstormed with team members on a 1-on-1 level:
- How can we better define roles, responsibilities, and priorities at a high level for programs the team is responsible for?
- How can we better define roles, responsibilities, and priorities at a more detailed level for individual tasks/projects?
- How can the above be introduced and implemented with the team?
- Partnered with others who are also working on the microstress experiment to brainstorm around this work and discuss progress/setbacks.
- Took the initiative to schedule a kickoff meeting with business partners to discuss expectations.
- Made suggestion to start putting together some reference guides and procedure documents — this will set expectations, not necessarily for each member of the group but for individual projects and tasks that we have. Regardless of who is working on the item at the time, there will be consistency with the defined end goal and output in mind.
Pay attention to areas that create anxiety because of your concern for other people.
In
our experiments, people almost universally defaulted to looking for
toxic interactions as their primary sources of stress. But by midway
through the experience, we saw a shift in how they began to recognize
the source of their stress. It wasn’t just a “bad guy” at work; the most
emotionally draining microstresses for many of our participants (and in
our research) came at them from people they cared deeply about, and our
participants expressed significant anxiety around falling short and
letting others down. While this sometimes involved, work, our
interviewees recounted numerous examples of times when they were so
concerned with the well-being of family, significant others, and
friends, that they neglected their own self-care — forgoing sleep, time
to recharge their own batteries, or simply finding themselves consumed
with someone else’s problem. When people we care about are struggling,
we feel — and feel deeply — their anxiety, worry, and pain.
There
are several steps you can take to try to shape the interactions with
people who you are constantly worried about in a more positive way. For
example, you can coach for independence. Teach teammates to solve
problems themselves, rather than turning to you excessively. And fight
the urge to automatically provide direction or help, even though this
may seem more efficient or make you feel good in the moment.
You
can also go back to the basics. Start with your anchor relationship
(i.e., your partner): Make sure you have regular conversations, make
tradeoffs together, and be clear on what outcomes are important to you
both. For example, one of our interviewees had a quarterly “alignment”
conversation with his wife to ensure they were on the same page about
their priorities and how they had each been spending their time and
energy.
Another participant began to address “draining
interactions with family and friends” by trading a typical 2.5+ hour
commitment on Saturday or Sunday spent at their parents’ house chatting
(with exact time and day undetermined until last minute) to instead a
1.5 hour lunch with mom on Friday afternoon (after work early release).
They reported that this was:
- Successful in freeing up more time and keeping weekend open for other priorities, while was still able to connect with mom.
- Successful because the plan was made ahead of time so less stress about the “unknown” (e.g., schedule implications and conflicts, etc.).
- Continued time with/for self in low stress situations — dinner/drinks with “positive interaction” friends, concert, took a vacation day with sole purpose of relaxing and seeing friends. Have continued this with grabbing food after work with coworkers as a new group to interact with, have taken a few walks with a friend to just chat and catch up, took another unplanned vacation day from work to relax and see friends.
Addressing
this microstress doesn’t mean you have to eliminate contact with the
people you find draining — in many cases, they are relatives or
colleagues you can’t avoid. But you can shape the interactions you have
with them to limit the microstress.
Finish by pivoting to activities that help you derive a greater sense of purpose.
Even
with focused effort, it is impossible to eliminate all the sources of
microstress in your life. That’s where an important conclusion from our
research comes into play: One reason some microstresses affect us is
simply because we allow them to. We found that the happiest people were
able to put some of the microstress in their lives in perspective more
effectively than less happy people, in large part because they belonged
to two or three groups — outside of their professions and direct
families — involving activities that were meaningful to them. The
dimensionality of these activities and groups served the very real
purpose of helping them recognize when minutiae was minutiae,
essentially inoculating them to the onslaught of microstress. They
helped people rise above that which they could not control.
We
call this a “multi-dimensional” life. People living one continually
found ways, even in small moments, to connect with others outside of
work and home that helped reduce the impact of microstress. For example,
some people became involved in activities from their past that helped
slingshot them into new groups. Others reconnected with people with whom
they had lost touch, following the advice of Marc Schultz and Robert
Waldinger, authors of The Good Life,
with the simple act of scheduling seven eight-minute phone calls to
catch up. The key was that these people found meaningful connections
with others, even in small moments.
Here’s how one participant worked to build a more multi-dimensional life:
I think it’s pretty simple, find somewhere to volunteer. I grew up doing a lot of volunteer work and I miss it. After moving out of my parent’s house I got very caught up in my own day-to-day social life and work, and volunteering kind of took a backseat. Ideally, I’d love to work somewhere in my own community and help neighbors around me. Doing some basic research on groups in my area would be an activity that could lead me in the right direction.
. . .
Organizations
around the world are turning their attention to employee well-being,
and rightfully so. But many of these well-intended initiatives
(mindfulness, meditation, gratitude, and so on) are only providing
employees a part of the solution. These efforts focus heavily on helping
people absorb the stress of day-to-day life, and focus less on helping
them remove some of those stresses. Giving employees the tools,
language, and explicit corporate blessing to actively mitigate
microstress both at work and at home can have a material impact. But at
its core, navigating microstress is a personal endeavor. You have to
recognize the sources of microstress in your life that are having the
greatest impact on you and find ways to push back.
The
great news is that it’s possible. We the ability to shape who we do
with what with in our personal and professional lives. We have just
given up a little much control. Until now.
Was this article helpful? Connect with me.
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