- Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the small hassles and burdens that pile up in your daily life? Do you wonder how they affect your health, happiness, and productivity? If so, you might be suffering from microstress, a new form of stress that is quietly stealing your life. In this video, you will learn what microstress is, how it impacts you, and what you can do about it.
- If you want to discover how to build resilience and purpose, and how to cultivate positive and supportive relationships, you should watch this video. You will find out how to identify and manage the most common forms of microstress, and how to remove some of them from your life. You will also get practical tools and tips to help you cope with microstress and live a more fulfilling and meaningful life.
Table of Contents
- Recommendation
- Take-Aways
- Summary
- Microstressors are small experiences of stress whose cumulative effects can have profound adverse health effects.
- Significant sources of microstress include inefficient communication and draining professional interactions.
- To reduce the effects of microstress, limit negative interactions and engage in healthy activities outside of work and family.
- About the Speakers
- Genres
- Review
Recommendation
In this Talk at Google, Rob Cross and Karen Dillon discuss the findings of their book, The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems – and What to Do about It. They delve into the harmful effects of microstressors: the small sources of modern-day stress that can accumulate to undermine your health and performance. The authors discuss strategies to manage microstressors, like prioritizing your well-being, limiting negative interactions and mitigating collaboration overload.
Take-Aways
- Microstressors are small experiences of stress whose cumulative effects can have profound adverse health effects.
- Significant sources of microstress include inefficient communication and draining professional interactions.
- To reduce the effects of microstress, limit negative interactions and engage in healthy activities outside of work and family.
Summary
Microstressors are small experiences of stress whose cumulative effects can have profound adverse health effects.
People have no trouble dealing with the tiny, momentary stresses that come during the routine interactions of daily life – microstressors. But humans aren’t neurologically designed to face the sheer number and intensity of microstressors they encounter today. Microstressors can build up and ripple out to create harmful stress levels and overload, sapping productivity, energy and health. Combined, microstressors become like an anaconda, slowly squeezing out your vitality, productivity and joy.
“People are struggling in a much deeper way than we have traditionally seen…It’s the accumulation of small that’s hitting us.” (Rob Cross)
Microstressors often create a cascade effect. Constantly shifting goals and responsibilities at work can significantly harm your performance and health. Some microstressors force you to work harder, distracting you from healthy activities and compromising your ability to deliver quality work. For example, when a manager changes your work tasks late in the day, a ripple effect occurs: You may need to send additional emails, work later or miss family dinner.
Usually, you don’t even notice when you’re experiencing microstressors. But their effects persist and layer on as time progresses, draining your energy and potentially leading to burnout, even as you may forget the original stressors over time. It’s the cumulative toll that you notice. But if you learn to identify microstressors as they occur, you can better shape the interactions that cause them and their negative impacts.
Significant sources of microstress include inefficient communication and draining professional interactions.
Research shows inefficient communication is the most common microstressor. Collaboration overload offers one example of ineffective communication, where the sheer number of technologies and platforms people use to interact becomes overwhelming. It’s not uncommon for workers to use up to nine communication modalities as organizations push for networking, agility and delayered information flows. Leaders in many organizations don’t realize how large their company’s collaborative footprint has grown.
“Once you name it, you can figure out what is actually exhausting you, and you can do something about it.” (Karen Dillon)
Professional interactions also represent a significant source of microstressors. Negative interactions at work can exhaust you and lead to burnout. This category of microstressors includes encounters with “really toxic people or people who are real jerks that are actually out to get you,” which can erode your self-confidence and create anxiety. These interactions can infect you, making the stress challenging to shake off at the end of the day.
To reduce the effects of microstress, limit negative interactions and engage in healthy activities outside of work and family.
In interviews with people from companies with great cultures, 10% of top performers maintained high performance and a positive emotional state in the face of microstressors. Studies revealed these people manage microstressors in two constructive ways. First, high performers stay proactive in their interactions, shaping them to mitigate negative aspects. According to research, removing a negative interaction has a three to five times greater effect than adding a positive one.
“If we’re not taking the opportunity to shift the negative interactions we’ve let ourselves drift into, then we’re leaving some of the highest leverage opportunities on the table.” (Rob Cross)
Second, these “10 percenters” often participated in group activities outside work and family, like a running club. Hobbies help combat stress and increase meaning and connection.
To start taking action, identify sources of microstress in your life and choose three or four systemic ones to work on. Notice where you’ve become bogged down in minutiae, spending too much time worrying about things that don’t merit so much consideration. Pay attention to the ways you might be creating unnecessary stress. Make small but impactful changes, and focus on removing negatives. Increase meaning and structure in your life. You won’t be able to eradicate microstressors – they’ve become a fact of modern life – but you can build in antidotes to their detrimental ripple effects.
About the Speakers
Rob Cross is professor of global leadership at Babson College. Karen Dillon has co-authored three books with Clayton Christensen and is the former editor of Harvard Business Review.
Genres
Self-help, Psychology, Health, Wellness, Productivity, Leadership, Business, Education, Communication, Sociology
Review
The video is a talk by Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, the coauthors of the book “The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do about It”. They explain what microstress is, how it affects our well-being and performance, and how we can manage it by building resilience and purpose. They share stories and examples from their research and personal experiences, as well as practical tools and tips to identify and reduce the sources of microstress in our lives. They also emphasize the importance of relationships and how they can either amplify or buffer microstress.
The video is an informative and engaging presentation that offers valuable insights and advice on how to cope with the challenges of modern life. The speakers are credible and relatable, and they use humor and anecdotes to illustrate their points. They also interact well with the audience and answer their questions. The video is well-structured and easy to follow, and it covers the main concepts and implications of their book. The video is relevant and timely, as it addresses a common and often overlooked problem that affects many people in different ways. The video is also inspiring and empowering, as it shows how we can take control of our microstress and improve our quality of life.