The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems--and What to Do about It
Rob Cross & Karen Dillon
240 pages, Harvard Business Review Press, 2023
A few years ago, while doing research on 300 high performers in 15 different global organizations, we found something surprising. In spite of having been identified by their organizations as exceptional performers, the further we got into our interviews, the more it became apparent that many of them were struggling to hold it all together. Yet it was never any one big thing that was affecting them, rather, it was a relentless accumulation of unnoticed small stresses that drastically impacted their well-being. We came to call this phenomenon “microstress”: small moments of stress triggered by interactions with other people that happen so quickly we barely register them, but whose cumulative effect is enormous.
Microstress comes in many forms: microstresses that drain our capacity to get things done (such as facing a surge in responsibilities at work or at home), microstresses that deplete our emotional reserves (for example, being surrounded by “second-hand” stress from other people), and microstresses that challenge our identity (such as being part of an aggressive sales team when that’s not who you are naturally). But we also learned something important from the small number of high performers in our research who were better at mitigating the effects of microstress than most of us. They had just as many microstresses in their lives and careers as the other high performers, but they were able to navigate them better. That wasn’t because they were somehow inherently stronger than the rest of us, but because they were able to build resilience—not through individual strength and heroic effort but rather through their interactions with other people. This is a significant insight. For a long time, we assumed that resilience is something that can only be found when you dig deep to find some kind of internal grit during difficult times. But if you ask 300 people how they navigated difficult stretches in their lives and focus not on what they did but on how they tapped into relationships around them you see a series of specific ways connections in our lives create resilience (but only if the connections have been developed and if people know how to turn to them). In short, through this research, we learned that resilience is a team sport. Let us show you what you can do today.—Rob Cross and Karen Dillon
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An anesthesiologist we’ll call Michael was used to navigating the slog of everyday challenges he faced as head of his department at a highly respected hospital. Because he was responsible for several hundred doctors and nurses, his days were pulsing with microstresses: administrative priorities shuffled and reshuffled, misalignments of goals with other department heads, bureaucratic requirements draining his capacity to get work done, demands from big donors causing him to lose focus on his own priorities, and so on. But he could weather all these storms because he had built up an array of connections both in and out of the hospital, and these relationships helped him manage the microstress. And so on most days, he thrived while juggling the demands of his high-pressure work life. But all that changed during the pandemic. Because anesthesiology is not a specialty that could resort to remote telemedicine, Michael and his team had to turn up for work in an overwhelmed hospital day after day. The burden of being responsible for both a team he cared deeply about and the lives of a huge volume of patients affected by the pandemic was crushing. “For two months, I wasn’t sleeping at night,” he told us. “I was sending my team into battle with inadequate protection and not even really knowing how many of them would get sick.” Routinely putting in sixteen-hour days, Michael was having to determine how and when his team would work in these extraordinary circumstances. “There were nights and weekends when some [colleagues] called me crying on the phone,” he recounted. “Let’s face it, they were scared for their lives.”
But Michael was well prepared for such an intense period of stress. He had spent years building authentic connections with a variety of people who had helped him navigate the everyday microstresses of his work. So even when the stress was ramped up beyond what he had experienced before, he had a set of go-to people who could help take it down by removing some of the microstresses that were triggered when he and his team had to change the way they worked through the pandemic. Michael’s network offered support ranging from taking over tasks that would free up his time to lending his department extra resources to simply helping him think through how he could tackle each day’s challenges. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for my colleagues,” he told us. “I’m not sure I even thought about how much we help each other in everyday life until then.”
The pandemic was an important reminder for all of us of how our connections with others, both personal and professional, can be integral to surviving periods of extraordinary stress. Building your connections and tapping them in everyday life can help you become more agile for setbacks of any scale.
When resilience is baked into our everyday lives, it plays a critical role in our professional success and our physical and mental health. There’s ample research to suggest that resilient people are more successful professionally and have an edge when competing for jobs or promotions. Resilient people are better able to cope with demanding jobs and eco- nomic hardship. Studies have also shown that resilience protects people from burnout and is associated with higher levels of hope and optimism. And resilient people are also less likely to become physically or mentally ill during challenging times and tend to have higher levels of work satisfaction. When the environment around them changes and their skills become outdated, people with resilience are better able to learn new ones. We all need resilience to keep the daily battering of microstresses from derailing us.
The people in our research who were best at dealing with microstress—people we began to call the “ten percenters”—have shown that resilience can be nurtured and built-in small moments of authentic connection with a range of people in your life. It requires a kind of agility to reach out to the right people in your network in small but powerful ways for the right kind of support at the right time. For example, sometimes we need empathy, but then too much of it can lead us to wallow in self-pity and not take steps forward. At other times, we might need advice on a path forward, a new perspective, or just the ability to laugh at the absurdity of life. Small moments can reset us and keep us from spiraling into negativity.
What a Resilience Network Looks Like
Most of us count on close family and friends to support us during challenging times. But people outside our inner circle can also play a valuable role in helping us be resilient to the routine microstress we face. The ten percenters were particularly adept at building and nurturing their networks in ways that helped them navigate daily microstresses. And then when they were dealt more challenging setbacks, that preexisting network became critical to their resilience.
Resilience is found not just in having people to lean on when times get tough, but in the interactions themselves—the conversations that validate our plans, reframe our perspective, help us laugh and feel authentic with others, or just encourage us to get back up and try again. Here’s how you can find resilience in moments of microstress through reaching out to connections in your life.
Seek Empathic Support So You Can Release Your Emotions and Stay Balanced
Sometimes when you’re going through challenges, you’re not necessarily interested in advice or guidance from others. Sometimes you just want someone who will help you feel heard and validated. This kind of support helps you keep your emotional balance. Many spouses have learned this lesson the hard way after offering practical solutions in response to their partner’s complaints, not realizing their spouse wasn’t looking for advice. When these conversations go right, people get what they need at the moment. “I’m free to vent and talk and feel what I feel,” one successful banker shared with us. “And then my husband will say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be OK.’ Of course, I know that’s not always true, but when he says that, it soothes me.”
Empathic support offsets microstress in three ways. It allows for emotional release. Getting angry in a safe space allows you to move to more-rational responses. It also provides validation. Someone else confirms that what you’re dealing with is hard or that your frustration makes sense. Validation cuts off the microstress of self-doubt or feelings of being in the wrong. And finally, empathic support demonstrates caring. Just knowing that someone is there for you can have a calming effect and give you the confidence that comes with not having to face adversity alone. One interviewee described the feeling he got from others in his church group when he’d been through a particularly hectic time at work: “It’s the power of presence. Folks didn’t even have to say anything. They would just sit and spend time with me, and that alone let me know that they cared about me.”
Empathic support with microstress isn’t exclusively about soothing yourself. You can use it as temporary support that will help steel your resolve to move through a difficult situation. For example, Gabe, a technology executive, relies heavily on his wife and a core group of friends for empathic support. His wife works at the same company, and they have what he calls “mutual bitch sessions” about work. Just saying things out loud seems to bring Gabe greater clarity and calm. His wife often reassures him that the issues he faces would be tough for anyone to handle and reminds him that he can be his own worst critic. Gabe also lets off steam with his diverse group of friends who range from IT people like himself to a professional cartoonist. When he’s with them, he feels he can joke around and be himself. “Just being able to commiserate with them recharges my batteries,” he explained. “There’s comfort in knowing you’re not alone in muddling through.” Even that little bit of perspective helps Gabe regroup and find a path through his challenge.
Find People Who Help You See and Pursue a Path Forward
Venting may feel good, but eventually you need a practical way to move forward. Relationships help in two ways. They give you actual models for moving forward—you can ask someone who has faced such a situation how they handled it. And good relationships motivate you to move forward; the other person motivates and may even hold you accountable for actually doing something rather than just wallowing in self-pity.
People who are more resilient take advantage of others’ ideas more expansively to envision alternative routes forward. And by doing this rapidly in small moments, they keep microstresses from magnifying. Im- prove your resilience by building ties with people who can help you break down problems into smaller and more manageable chunks, find new ways to make progress on challenging tasks, and motivate you to act.
Empathy can come from anyone who cares about you. A smaller subset of people in your network can help you see and pursue a path forward. Look for people who can speak to the specifics of a situation. They may know how the company runs, or they may have had interactions with the particular person who is causing your microstress so that their advice is specific and actionable. Seek people who can help you figure out what to do! The same person can fill multiple roles in your life—an empathic listener can also help you plan a path forward. But you need to make sure you have a variety of people in your network so that you don’t rely too heavily on any one person to play multiple roles.
Seek Perspective When Setbacks Happen
It can be easy to spiral into a panic when you’re faced with obstacles, but seeing events in a broader perspective can put them in a different, more positive light. This widening of our perspective is sometimes referred to as de-catastrophizing. But it can require heavy cognitive lifting to do this on our own. We tend to fare much better when we have others to help us step back, reframe, and see our problems in a broader context.
For example, when Charlie discovered that he had been cut out of an important meeting, he wanted to go raging into the director’s office. But recognizing his own rising anger, he instead called a trusted colleague who was not part of his group. Given that she didn’t have the same wounded feelings that Charlie did, she coolly helped reset his perspective. “Don’t do anything today,” she advised. “Your manager is juggling a lot of balls right now. There may be a good reason you weren’t included, or it may have been an oversight. Don’t go storming into his office until you know more about what’s going on.” That was exactly the right advice. A later conversation with the boss confirmed that he was trying to do Charlie a favor by not wasting his time on that meeting. Things are often not as bad as we fear—especially when we see the merit of overcoming challenges as part of reaching larger goals.
Ask for Help to Manage Surges at Work or at Home
Think back to a time when you experienced a sudden surge at work—a late-breaking request from a key client, a difficult period because your team was short-staffed, a high-pressure board presentation. How did you get through that rough patch? If you’re like many people, you probably resorted to heroic measures to get it done. You put in extra hours, allowed your concentration to toggle between work and home even when you were trying to be fully present with your family, or perhaps even canceled personal plans. But these extraordinary efforts come at a cost— working harder to survive surges in work (or at home) can throw everything off balance, undermining your sense of control over your life.
A more resilient approach is to ask for help from your network. Take Michael, the anesthesiologist we discussed earlier. Despite the demands of the moment, he wasn’t a solitary hero. What Michael did particularly well during this rough time was to ask for help in small but concrete ways. He told us that just knowing that he had reliable people stepping up to help “allowed me to focus on the most important things during that time.”
The Best Defense Is Preparation
A resilient network won’t materialize overnight. As we have shown, ten percenters cultivate and maintain authentic connections from many parts of their life—not only through work but also through athletic pursuits, volunteer work, civic or religious communities, clubs, parents they’ve met through their children, and so on. Interactions in these spheres provide critical dimensionality, broadening people’s identity and opening the aperture on how they look at their lives. We become more (or less) resilient through our interactions with others.
Just as you might be unaware of the dozens of microstresses bombarding you at any given time, you might also not recognize how important an antidote your relationships can be to them. It’s in the interactions themselves—conversations that validate our plans, reframe our perspective on a situation, help us laugh and feel authentic, or just encourage us to get back up and try again—that we become resilient. Being connected with others is not just a nice-to-have in our lives; it’s essential for our overall well-being.