by Rob Cross, Karen Dillon, and Kevin Martin

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).

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.