5 Ways to Deal with the Micro-Stresses Draining Your Energy

Exhausted. Frayed. Languishing. Burned out. These are common words people use to describe how they feel professionally and personally. 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.

“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. These micro-stresses might seem manageable individually, but they take an enormous toll cumulatively.

The research on this topic is based on the book The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do About It. We leave you with the content of the study:

The research identified 14 sources of micro-stress, which are grouped into three different categories: micro-stresses that drain your capacity to get things done (e.g., a surge in responsibilities), micro-stresses that deplete your emotional reserves (e.g., managing others), and micro-stresses that challenge your identity (e.g., pressure to pursue goals out of sync with personal values).

The research initially focused on 300 high performers in multi-national organizations. Still, in the past year, we’ve also assessed a global sample of more than 11,000 individuals better to understand the most common sources of macro-stress. What’s become abundantly clear through this research is that micro-stress is not just the result of having a particularly bad manager or being part of a high-pressure workplace culture.

The problem is just getting worse. The technological advances and shifts in organizations to become more agile and less hierarchical have caused even more micro-stress that threatens productivity and overall well-being. Making matters more challenging is that micro-stress is just as likely to come from the people in our personal lives as those in our professional lives. However, our research suggests that if you can identify a range of these stresses, you can take corrective action that can materially impact your life.

Where Microstress Takes the Biggest Toll

Our follow-up research showed that micro-stress affects all of us at work at home. But some people suffer more than others. Our research shows a statistically significant relationship between education, hierarchical level, age, and macro-stress. At work, this makes sense: as we rise in our organizations, we are exposed to micro-stress-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 people’s personal lives were also more stressful due to escalated expectations of the provider role, negative interactions with family and friends, and challenges to identify 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 reported experiencing more stress from network disruptions.) 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 were selected as the first micro-stressor 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 challenge 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 simultaneously a source of significant stress.

What are we to do? So many of us choose to endure micro-stresses 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 build this capability successfully, 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 micro-stress.

At the start of week one, we asked people to select a source of micro-stress they would focus on addressing during the upcoming week and share a written plan for acting on it with us. 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 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 participating in the experiment as a source of peer support for navigating challenges. Then, on Friday, we asked them to email their steps and results. Our job during the week was to offer support and ideas for approaching the source of the micro-stress when issues or questions popped up. (If you’d like to try this experiment, 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. The world had not tilted on its axis — people had taken steps to reduce micro-stress 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.

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 micro-stress-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 almost all by week four. The tone in their emails became confident. Reflections on removing the earlier micro stresses 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 people’s lives. One participant who had focused on the micro stress 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 to shape the interactions in their daily lives to reduce micro-stress and live more fulfilling lives.

A Five-Step Plan to Reduce Your 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 micro-stresses 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 micro stress 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 assume that navigating stress requires us to build inner strength through sheer personal will. However, our research suggests that a complementary strategy is cultivating 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, create space to unplug, or even generate small doses of humor dramatically impacts people’s 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
• I joined the [company] golf league with one of my peers at the office, which allowed me to connect more personally with him instead of just focusing on work-related topics.
• Leaning into the charity whose board I am on
• I 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. However, they were also deliberate choices to engage authentically with various relationships that created resilience for her in small and large moments. For example, creating a more personal connection with one of her peers meant 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. These interactions created doses of resilience she hadn’t had without these connections.

Tackle two bigger microstresses.

Strengthening your resilience network often helps you take action on larger and more impactful micro-stresses. In our learning experiments, as people hit the four-week mark, they tended to have more confidence in shaping interactions and began to see the impact of tackling micro-stresses in their lives. This made them want to go bigger.

Here’s how one participant addressed one of her chosen micro stresses: “misalignment between collaborators on roles and priorities,” which had been causing him routine, ongoing micro stress:

• 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 and projects?
  • How can the above be introduced and implemented with the team?
• I partnered with others working on the micro-stress experiment to brainstorm about this work and discuss progress and setbacks.
• Took the initiative to schedule a kickoff meeting with business partners to discuss expectations.
• I suggested starting to put 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 you are concerned for other people.

In our experiments, people almost universally defaulted to looking for toxic interactions as their primary sources of stress. But midway through the experience, we saw a shift in how they began recognizing the source of their stress. It wasn’t just a “bad guy” at work; the most emotionally draining micro-stresses for many of our participants (and in our research) came 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 the family, significant others, and friends that they neglected their own self-care—forgoing sleep, time to recharge their 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.

Several steps can help you shape your interactions with people 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. Fight the urge to automatically provide direction or help, even though this may seem more efficient or make you feel good.

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 clearly understand 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 spent 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 the exact time and day undetermined until the last minute) for a 1.5-hour lunch with mom on Friday afternoon (after work early release). They reported that this was:

• I was successful in freeing up more time and keeping the weekend open for other priorities while still being able to connect with Mom.
• It was successful because the plan was made ahead of time, so there was less stress about the “unknown” (e.g., schedule implications and conflicts, etc.).
• I have continued spending time with/for myself in low-stress situations—dinners or drinks with “positive interaction” friends, concerts, and taking a vacation day to relax and see friends. I have continued this by grabbing food after work with coworkers as a new group to interact with; I have taken a few walks with a friend to just chat and catch up, and I took another unplanned vacation day from work to relax and see friends.

Addressing this microstress doesn’t mean you must 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 micro-stress in your life. That’s where an important conclusion from our research comes into play: Some micro-stresses affect us simply because we allow them to. We found that the happiest people could put some of the micro-stress in their lives in perspective more effectively than less happy people, largely 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 were minutiae, essentially inoculating them to the onslaught of macro stress. They helped people rise above that which they could not control.

We call this a “multi-dimensional” life. People living alone 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, by 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 worldwide 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 with 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 mitigate micro stress at work and home can have a material impact. But at its core, navigating microstress is a personal endeavor. You have to recognize the sources of micro-stress in your life that impact you most and find ways to push back.

The great news is that it’s possible. We have the ability to shape who we are and what we do in our personal and professional lives. We have just given up a little bit of control.

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