331: The Microstress Effect and What to Do About It with Karen Dillon

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So we tend to take out our feelings about microstress on the people we come home to when it's really it's not fair and it's also not proportional. But that's just the reality of how stress layers up in our body over the day. The body doesn't distinguish between different forms of stress. It's big stresses and small stresses still affect the body. Small stresses just take time to build up to the point where you sort of feel it. And it's often just when you're coming home that you're cups ready to overflow with stress.

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Welcome back Pivoters. Jenny Blake here. I am so excited to bring you today's guest who is the co author of a brand new book called the Microstress, How Little Things Pile up and Create Big Problems and what to Do About It. Karen Dillon is who we have here on the line. She's the author and former editor at Harvard Business Review magazine and and the co author of several books with Clayton Christensen, the New York Times bestseller How Will youl Measure youe Life, the Wall Street Journal bestseller Competing against luck and the Thinkers 50 Breakthrough Idea, the Prosperity Paradox. I'm such a big fan of Clayton's work and Karen, as I mentioned, just co authored the Microstress Effect with Rob Cross. Karen, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jenny. I'm really glad to be here.

Longtime listeners know that I've been talking about my micro guilt for a long time, especially as it relates to communications with other people. Because I didn't rob a bank. I don't have macro guilt. I have micro guilt that sits on my head or on my heart kind of like in little bits all day, every day. So you can imagine When I saw the email saying that this book was coming out, I leapt out of my chair to say yes. And I'm so grateful that you and Rob have put a word to the more subtle, pervasive, what you call invisible and relentless, unrecognized epidemic of microstress. So first, I just have to say thank you for this book.

You're very welcome. And that phrase micro guilt is perfectly aligned. It's part of microstrust. So this is a great conversation to have.

Well, we read each other's minds. Because the aha moment that I had as soon as I started reading Microstress is that a lot of what creates microstress are other people. People pleasing our connections to other people, our worries about other people. And right away, I was able to draw that line to my micro guilt because it involves other people and letting down other people. So can we start by you just giving us the definition of how you define microstress? What is it?

You're right that there wasn't language to talk about this. And we came up with this term because it was something we started to see in our research in a really interesting way, where we had done sort of deep dive interviews with 300 high performers. And originally our research was focused on just looking at how they leveraged the relationships in their life to be so successful, because these were people who had been identified by their companies as high performers. So we thought they were kind of the perfect class to study. They were equal number of men and women in organizations all around the world thinking, what can we learn from what they do better than the rest of us in terms of how they leverage their relationships? But what we started to find was something different than we had gone looking for, which was that many of these people, the vast majority of these people, were actually kind of hanging on by a thread. They were just getting through the day. They were being successful in the eyes of their organization, but kind of emotionally. And as you started to unpack what happened to them in a day, a week, a month, we realized they were flooded with a kind of stress that we didn't have language for. It was seldom one big thing or really toxic person. It was dozens of really tiny things that individually sound small and stupid to talk about, but cumulatively, they have a really big effect. We define this term for our research this way. Microstresses are tiny moments of stress that are created in everyday interactions with other people that you're close to at work or at home that are so small and so brief, your brain literally barely registers it, but at end, the, eventually the toll, the cumulative toll of all these tiny moments is really, really significant. So microstresses, you almost don't know they're happening to you. You forget about what happened, but you're fried at the end of the day and your body's kind of taking note, even if your mind isn't. So it's a term that we thought would be helpful to people to understand and put language to something they were feeling, but maybe didn't really know how to talk about yet.

You say very powerfully in the introduction that of those high performers you were interviewing, many of them were powder kegs of stress, but most of them didn't recognize the state that they were in. Can you give some examples? And I have so many that I'll be able to bring as well. But can you give us a few examples of microstress? Because we've all been riding the waves of macro, macro stress of a hundred year pandemic, you know, like one that no one of our generation has experienced since a hundred years ago. So it's like the pandemic launched this tsunami of macro stress. What would count as micro?

It's a very good question because macrostress is real and we're affected by it. So we're not saying that doesn't exist, but we have these layers of microstress on top of that that just can actually be the thing that sort of drives a person over the edge. The people who are sort of really just not doing well over time. And it's kind of the frog in the boiling water, right? The microstresses come in so slowly and in such tiny little drops in your pot of water that you may not notice that it's really heating up until it's so hot that you have to get out. And a great example, I think is the guy we start with. We gave an example in the beginning of the book where a guy who was really physically fit, he was really conscious of his physical health. He was like a peloton fanatic. He was in good shape. But he woke up in the middle of the night thinking he was having a heart attack. And he sort of panicked and got himself to the emergency room. And it turned out there was nothing wrong with him. And it was probably some kind of a panic attack. And he was sort of talking to us about, you know, I couldn't really figure out what happened. I even know my resting pulse and I, you know, I'm really in good shape. It was so weird that this happened to me. But as we started to talk to him about a day, a typical day. We could see a life that was pulsing with microstress. So I'll give you examples of it from this guy and then in general from our research. So it would be everything from the second he wakes up and rolls over and looks at his phone. He's already got three emails that he's supposed to be following up on or that he forgot to or new news. You know, you start your day flooded with sort of stuff you're supposed to be doing and you already feel behind. And then he would get a call from the assisted living facility where his parents lived that his dad was experimenting with his medication and meant that he was sleeping funny hours and they were worried about him falling in the middle of the night. And he was getting ready that day to go to bat for his team. He was a manager to. For their bonuses. And he felt like he had lost out on the kind of discretionary bonus pool last year to another more savvy manager who got more bonus pool for his people. And so he really wanted to go in and do really well for them. And just a series of small things that are typical day in the life, things of anybody who juggles a lot of responsibility that individually would sound silly and talk to complain about. Right, that I have to worry about my dad taking the right medication. We can figure that out. There could be a nurse or some solution, but you have, you know, 20 of them or 30 of them in a day, and they start to layer up. So. So we put them in our research into three broad categories, and I'll give you an example of each one. The first category is microstretches that drain your personal capacity, meaning your ability to get things done. And in my life, it's the sticky notes all over my laptop, all the stuff that I'm supposed to remind myself to do. I'm behind undoing the way I put flags on my email and I have to follow back the whole chain. Just any kind of communication overload or having a surge in responsibilities at work. And a very common example of this is we work in teams or work with other people. Not uncommon. That one of your colleagues. Same thing. Overwhelmed, not getting through the day. Super well, just under delivers slightly on something you're working on with them just a little bit, not a ton, but let's just say it's 5% less than you expected them to do. Now you're faced with do I do it? Do I have to do it? Do I have to make up for it? It will reflect on both of us. My daughter called me from college the other day. The great example of this, she was upset because she was working on a joint academic paper with someone el else and the paper had come back to her back and forth after edits and the last person had not seen or incorporated my daughter's edits. So she was do I have to go back and put them all in again? It's tiny. It's a micros trust, but again, it's one of dozens that will happen. So that's the category of things that will drain your personal capacity to get things done. The ones that we start to get into when we're talking about the micro guilt are microstresses that deplete your emotional reserves. So again, we all start the day with kind of the energy for the day, the plans for the day, and then little things can kind of chip away at our emotional reserves that just leave us exhausted by the end of the day. Really good example of this for a lot of us is what we call in the book secondhand stress. So it may not be something that you're directly worrying about, but someone you work with is really upset and worried. They're sort of spraying the stress all over the place and then suddenly you sort of pick it up, even though it's not exactly your direct concern. I think lots of us have worked with people who take up a lot of the oxygen in the room. You know, worried and complaining and worst case scenarioing and chicken littleing. And so you pick it up and the expression I feel your pain is actually literally true. There's been research that shows that the mirror neurons in our brains, if we're in the room with someone we care about who is feeling physical pain, our brains will process that as if we are feeling physical pain too. So secondhand stress is a good example of a microstress that depletes your emotional reserves. And the last one also falls into your category really well. Microstresses that challenge your identity. So things that basically just make you feel like they're not the best version of yourself and the one that has come up most commonly in the sort of post our initial research and now we've been doing some sort of added on research. The one that most people check off as draining or negative interactions with family and friends and this is not horrible toxic relationships, this is every day things don't go perfectly. You snap at someone when you don't want to. You just are not your best self with someone, they're not the best self with you. And it doesn't make you feel good about yourself. I'm not a good sister, I'm not a good mother, I'm not a good sibling. Whatever it is, the little tiny interactions, we aren't our best self with someone else that we care about can actually really be a significant microstress in all of our lives.

Thank you for outlining these three. It's again so helpful to have you tease them out and put language to it and say what's really going on. What are the different strains of this? Which is a good double entendre. What about for highly sensitive people? My husband and I were just talking about this yesterday that I often feel so raw and exposed to the world and it's as if an HSP will pick up 100 microstresses of a given day or whereas maybe somebody else who isn't quite so sensitive only experiences 10. Did that come up at all in your research?

It came up in a way in that one of the things we were trying to look at was are certain people better at dealing with microstress than other people? So I think a lot of us probably fall into the category of being a sensitive person. But one thing we found was that it was not necessarily related to that. Whether you are or not, it was the way you process that. Microstress had a lot to do with whether A you felt the ability that you could push back on some of them, and you did, and B, if you had put energy and effort into what we call the multidimensional life, meaning you did not allow yourself to become sort of a narrower and narrower version of yourself as the years went on, you focusing more and more just on work and home, both hugely important, obviously wonderful anchors for most of our identities. But we did find that the people who did not let micro stress bothered them as much were people who made the effort to have authentic connections with people, even in small ways outside of those two spheres. So outside of just work and home, they had other strings to their bow. It meant that the smaller microstresses that happened throughout the day just didn't bother them as much because in the grand scheme of their day, they had other things that brought them joy or made them feel good about themselves or gave them sense of purpose or helped them be resilient to that came from having a diverse life outside of work and home.

I'm glad you brought that up in the book. You call them 10 percenters because these were the 10%, the 1 out of 10 interviewees who successfully navigate their microstress in contrast to what you just said, which is the people who felt like a shell of themselves eventually because so much of their what brought them joy falls away as you kind of batten down the hatches and try to deal with all the macro and micro stressors. The big themes in the second half of the book that I really appreciated are you gotta keep connecting with people, see your friends, you gotta keep working out, get your exercise. You know, fundamental things that are often the first to go. When we experience stress, for some reason, exercise is the one that's so counterintuitive because on some level, we all know it will help with our emotional regulation. And yet our bodies, when they're under stress, it feels like, no, I don't wanna work out. Don't make me do that. Sometimes maybe if it's not something super joyful and connected like pickleball.

But that's a really good point. Again, the people, the 10 percenters, we started calling them, they were the roughly 10% of. They were all high performers, but 10% of the high performers just were better at this than the rest of the people we studied. And me too. But one of the things they did really well was they were able to still maintain their physical wellbeing because they connected it with other people, meaning it became part of their identity. Pickleball's a great example. It wasn't just that they were getting exercise right, because that can become lonely. It can be the first thing that you take off your to do list, whether you time crunch. But it was those moments of connection with other people provided their own source of joy. And it was part of their identity as a physical being. So the physical wellbeing came in part from forging it through other connections. So sort of never doing it alone. Finding some way, however small, doesn't mean you have to go out and train for a marathon. But there were people in our 10 percenters who played pickup soccer every weekend with other parents and kids. It was just part of the knockaround way to sort of both connect with their kids, connect with other adults, and feel good about their physical health. There was a woman who had been a really competitive runner all through college, and she had been a great solo runner. And she would decide that her success every year would be largely based on did she reach a new personal best, which again, as you get older becomes not a great goal. Is that because that becomes harder and harder. One point she woke up and said, you know, this just isn't so exciting and fun for me anymore. It's too narrow for me. And she decided instead to spend the same amount of time she had been spending running on her own. She wanted to start running with her daughter and another one of her daughter's friends, another neighborhood mom. And it became a very informal community of women runners. And that gave her so much joy. So her identity had become about being a kind of coach and mentor to people rather than just logging the miles. So the people who did it well connected their physical wellbeing, their physical activity with other people, and that made a huge difference in their ability to stick with it, the joy they got out of it, the sort of sense of self that they began to identify. And so that's a slight difference than the conventional advice that most of us try to follow, which is, you know, just set goals, stick with it, make it routine. We add the extra sauce of make it routine with other people, and that's gonna give you a much greater chance of sticking with it and actually it becoming a bigger part of your life in a meaningful way.

That reminds me of one of the things. I stopped doing both when I moved to a new neighborhood in New York City. And then the pandemic hit shortly, about a year after that. I used to go to yoga five times a week. I was in a studio surrounded by people. And you have the connections with that community and the connections with the instructor. And now I still do yoga every day, but it's 30 minutes through my peloton app in my living room. And reading your book and hearing you say it now, it's such a reminder that there is something lost. It's not just ticking the box. Did I do yoga today? There can be a way to reinfuse it with emotional nourishment by getting back out there, making a point to get back out there and do things with other people.

Well, the pandemic robbed so many of us of those habits. Right. It just became, we had to, you know, we had to go inward and find ways to do things solo or do it on Zoom or whatever. You know, it did keep us going, which was great. But I think because it's been so long and we kind of got out of those habits, we haven't gotten back to some of the things that actually probably were most important to us in terms of our overall mental well being. And even the yoga class, maybe you can't go five times a week, but you could go two. And one of the things we recommend that we saw people doing is go five minutes early and chit chat or get dressed and walk to the subway or wherever you get home with some other people. Just make sure you make some human connections, however small, when you're doing whatever that activity is, and that's going to give it a kind of stickiness that's going to make you want to stay with it because you look forward to seeing so and so and whatever happened on that first date with so and so. And we're going to laugh together about how bad we are at that pose. It just becomes you feel part of something that's more than you and that's going to help you keep going with it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Funny story about this exact topic. I just recorded an episode for my other show, Freetime. I'll put the link in the show Notes. One day I was going to USPS to the post office. I had to mail a bunch of books and I was berating myself. Ugh, why didn't I just delegate this? I should have hired a task rabbit. I'm a business owner. I shouldn't be the one punching buttons at the post office. And when all was said and done, I had my rolling suitcase. I had one extra book. And who walked in the doors? Karen. But my favorite instructor from the peloton app, Krista McGee. It's as if I heard angels singing. There was like a halo of light around her because she had kind of saved me during the pandemic and because I had run this errand in person. There she was. And I got to say thank you. I had this one extra book magically that I got to sign to her and it was just such a meaningful interaction. Exactly as you said. Like from when you don't always have to do it, but you just get dressed anyway, get out of the house and go put yourself in the path of pivot and Spontaneity and serendipity.

That's a great story. And by the way, you probably also did something important for her, too. Gave her a human connection to the work she does. You gave her purpose in that moment. And that's one of the things that a 10 percenters did better, too, is they were able to find purpose in everyday life in some ways. So some of us think when you talk about purpose, it has to be this big, lofty thing, I'm going to write a concerto or I'm going to cure cancer. What we found the 10 percenters who dealt with microstress better, that's why I mentioned specifically, is they were able to find joy in purpose in just small moments. That. That reminds me of a story that we have in the book that I love where there was one of our 10 percenters in line at CBS to pick up medication or something. And it was right in the pandemic when everyone was sort of, you know, scared and wearing masks. And there was an old guy in front of her in line in his 80s who got up to the counter and said he wanted to sign up to get his vaccination shot. And they sort of brushed his head. We can't do it here. You have to go online. And he was clearly a little bit confused. And this person stepped out of line for a second and said, you know, let me see if I can help you. And she pulled them aside and they sat in the chairs and she went on her phone and she found an appointment that he could go to the next day at a convenient place. She made the appointment for him. She even said, I can come drive you. He said, I don't need that. But it took five minutes. But she was talking about that months later. It was just one of those small moments of connection that made her feel good about going into CBS that day and not just having your head down, finding a little way to connect with some other human being. And that was great. Similar. Great story.

I love what you said, too, about it being reciprocally beneficial. I had not thought of that until you said it. Until this moment, I just thought, how embarrassing for myself the way that I fangirled when I saw her. And I'm like, peak awkwardness in those moments. But I had never considered that so much of what she had been doing was teaching to an empty room as well. Because even though at Peloton headquarters, they can now fill the classes again with people. It is weird when you're speaking into the void. You and I know that even just recording this Podcast, we don't know who's listening. We can't see anybody. And sometimes when I'm delivering a webinar, an organization will tell me there's a thousand people online through the stream. But all I see is myself in front of me presenting this material. It's so awkward.

Well, I think it's very, very powerful for us all to remember that being on both ends of that. Right. That you probably gave her a little boost to kind of keep going and recognizing that the work that was probably hard for her to do in that time, as you said, doing it to an empty room really had meaning. And that gives a peloton instructor a very clear sense of purpose. And that's fantastic. And that you gave that back to her and now you both have that connection. So it could potentially build from there. You could see her another time. You could make a no to being in her classes. Things build from those small moments of authentic connection.

That's so true. And I know that's a big theme of all this, which is that microstressors are tiny. And also we can start tiny in terms of addressing them. Let's come to the other side of this, the flip side of joyful interactions, which is when others drain our energy. There's a lot of talk about toxic people and setting boundaries, but as you mentioned earlier, the microstressors around our relationships are often not the obvious people, the bad boyfriend that you need to break up with, or some incredibly challenging family member that you've had to kind of figure out for someone's whole life. What are the micro stressors when it comes to other people draining our energy that we might not even be acknowledging? I know you said one of them, secondhand stress, but I'm curious what others resonate to share in this moment.

Well, a common one that we found, and I've felt it over my career, is managing and feeling responsible for the success or well being of other people. So just taking it at work, if you care about your colleagues and maybe you're in charge of them or managing them, we often think about the stresses of being a manager and again, the bad employees and whatever. But we have microstress from the people we care a lot about. You know, we want them to do well. We worry about how they're being seen by the higher ups. We're frustrated that they're not getting something and we have to train them again, but we want them to succeed in the way of caring almost too much. That's a kind of daily barrage of microstress. I was talking to one 10 percenter who said that the pandemic made it extra hard for her because she cared about her people so much, and she couldn't really get enough clues from just looking at their faces on zoom. And so for her, she worried all the time about how people were really doing. What am I not seeing on camera? Are they engaged? So she started doing something where she asked them in the pandemic to we're gonna do a walking meeting where we're both gonna just go outside of our houses, we're gonna put our phones and headphones on, don't bring anything with us, and we're gonna talk, and you'll remember what's important. But I want you to be not focusing on anything but our conversation. A way to get the people one on one. Because she hadn't felt like she was able to do that in the limitations of the pandemic. So that's a really good version of it. Or confrontational conversations. And again, not talking about toxic, horrible ones. Just ones where you and a colleague might be trying to get something different out of the conversation. Or I have them with my beloved sister all the time, which is, I love my sister. So many people that's closest to me in my life. But sometimes we're just coming at a challenge or problem. Parents who are in assisted living, that it's just frustrating that we see things differently, and somehow we end up not having the best conversation about it. And I end up hanging up the phone, feeling bad. And again, no one's ever really obnoxious or jerky to each other. It's just that subtle way where we're kind of confronting each other in some way, and it just worked into our everyday life. And that doesn't feel good. And that doesn't make me feel good about as a sibling either. What kind of sibling am I if I'm sort of being that not my best self with my sister? And I guess another simple example, a lot of people feel this at work, too, is that you feel like there's some political maneuvering going on around you, but you don't fully understand what's happening. You're not caught square in the middle of it. It's not attacking you in any way, but there seems to be some kind of agenda that you don't fully understand, and that can be really loaded with microstress. Because why are these people kind of having a dispute on email in front of us? Or who's in charge of this meeting? And am I supposed to be siding with one Person, not the other. Just that uncomfortable feeling of something's going on that I'm not fully aware of. And I don't think it's good that I'm even in the room with this, but I don't know what to do about it.

I appreciate all these examples so much, so many directions we could go on the people management front. This is probably, I mean, not even probably why I don't love managing people, because it's a big source of microstress for me. And no matter how much I've tried to work on it over the many years, I end up preferring a delightfully tiny team because in a way it minimizes the microstressor. I hate to say it, it's like. And I do try to still improve, but there are these lingering effects. And as you say, sometimes even the best intentioned managers create microstressors for their team because something's on a deadline or you give feedback that doesn't land so well. And I also really appreciate you giving the example with your sister because that strikes me as a second form of secondhand microstress where the conversation happens and it doesn't feel good no matter who it is, especially with our loved ones. And then there's a trail, almost like a boat leaving a wake of all the feelings that linger the rest of the day of feeling guilty. But there's my micro guilt again. How could I do that? And then I get really wild with my memento mori of what if they die? And that's the last conversation we ever have. And I have that almost every day, Karen. If I'm not being my best, most wonderful self, I get really down on myself that what if that's the last conversation you ever had and you were a jerk? And it's hard, it's a hard rest of the day to just shake it off even.

That's definitely true, I can tell you. I used to feel that a lot as a mother, as a working parent, getting out the door with my kids, getting them off to school. I just sometimes would snap at them or, you know, not be my nicest self or just get in the car or whatever it was. And then it literally would kind of ruin the rest of my day. Was I functional? Yes. Was I too harsh? Are they going to be mad at me? How can we make up when we get home? Any parent or anybody who gets a text in the middle of the day and you look at it, it's maybe vaguely concerning. I didn't get invited to the party or something did go Wrong. The emotions will ripple with you for the rest of the day. That's one of the really hard things about microstress is whatever the original event is. It's tiny, right? I sat at my kids at 8 in the morning trying to get them in the car. But it ripples throughout my whole day. And that could affect other people as well. I'm not as focused in the meeting as I should be. Again, I'm there and present. I'm not crying in a bathroom. I'm just feeling not my best self. I'm not focused. I maybe don't communicate as well as I should with someone else. Or I'm looking at my phone too often to see if they responded to my apology text or whatever it is. Microstresses start in quick moments, but then they just, like, they ripple out to your day, to other people's day. You're going to bring it home at night. It's a pretty vicious cycle. So it's real. What you feel is real. And we all do that. It's very common. We all have those things, those microstresses that make us feel not our best self. But you can overcome them in some ways by just looking for the counter, micro connection or micro moment of authenticity. Someone used the expression to me the other day in talking about this book, Micro Joys. And I like that too. Just like small moments of being okay with someone. It's not forever. You can fix it. You just have to consciously think about getting back to that good place.

I love Micro Joys. That's great. Also the ripple effect of future tripping. Like, now is my kid gonna be in therapy? They're gonna talk about this moment in therapy 20 years from now, you know, and it just like projects so far into the future just from this one little thing.

We do bad things to ourselves. We do bad things to ourselves when we let that stuff run away.

Right, Right. And I'll link for listeners in the show notes. I did do an episode on future tripping and catastrophizing. And my friend Monica's mom gave her great advice that I also did an episode on called Don't Suffer Twice. So it's like whatever it is you're worrying about or even the micro guilt, even if you say something you don't want or in a tone you don't like suffering twice, three times, four times, five. That's what Buddhists call the second arrow. And the third and the fourth and the fifth. It's like there is a lot of that self talk that it's almost like there's micro joy and also Microsoft and Macro self compassion of no, I'm not perfect and I wasn't perfect today and I was tired and yeah, it wasn't my best self.

Let's move on. That's a great expression. Don't suffer twice. That's what we would call a ripple effect. But that's a really good way to stop it. You know, it happened. You felt bad the first time. You're gonna keep hitting yourself over and over again with the same guilt. That's not a good thing. So I think that's a great way to think about it. Don't suffer twice.

And you even say in the book that negative interactions carry as much as five times the impact of positive ones. And it's happening at such a micro level, as you said, we're not even noticing it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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We've talked about some of the antidotes. Is there one that we've missed that we've talked about? Exercise, connecting with other people, trying to find micro joy and just joy even in movement and getting outside of the house. Is there anything else that was a game changer for these 10 percenters and for the rest of us?

It might not be an antidote, but it's something to think about because it will rebound on you. And I think people don't think about this. So we talked about all the microstresses that happen to us, all the things that make us feel bad that linger in our day. We don't think enough about the microstress we cause other people and we all do it, and we all do it unintentionally. The point of microstress, and again, in our definition, is not people intentionally trying to be jerks. It's just life is so busy and so hectic. We unintentionally do these things, and it has a lasting effect, but we cause it too. And it's not just a good thing to do to sort of try to stop causing it for other people because it's a nice thing to do, but it's going to help you too, because almost always the microstress we cause other people rebounds back on us eventually. You're stopping some future microstress of yourself if you can start at least mitigating some of the microstress you cause. Others example is an employee that maybe you're pushing too hard. You're a key person. You love that person. They always come through for you, but you keep pushing them too hard over time. Eventually that person's going to want to not work with you anymore or move on or rebel and start dropping balls on purpose. It's going to affect you too. So it's really worth your time to take a kind of inventory of what microstress am I causing other people. In my personal and professional life as a parent, I think about this all the time now that I have the language to think about it. I cause my kids so much microstress by hovering and overly checking in with them and giving them too many things to think about at a time. And I have to try to be really conscious not to do that. As a colleague, I want to try to do that too. It usually comes from just busy people and busy schedules, getting up quickly from meetings, forgetting exactly what was said, too many things going on, figuring out what balls to drop. But we can do it to other people, too. And if you can stop doing at least a little bit of that, that's going to help you in the long run, too.

Great point. Thank you for this reminder to look in the mirror. Because the whole point of microstress is that it's not intentional. It's like none of us are trying to be jerks or try to be tyrants. It's usually out of caring. And yet I love that you're pointing out, like, the nitpicking, the hovering, you know, the control issues. Speaking for myself, that might come into play. Or even like the state of our home and how cluttered or not. Like, I'm sure I cause microstress all the time. If I complain or ask Michael to move something one inch it's not in its proper home. You know, I'm exaggerating, but we all.

Do versions of it. We all have our own little quiet list. And here's the key thing I think to remember at a high level, which is really helpful. It's not the relationship that's bad or negative or it has to change, it's just the interactions. So that's where the microstress comes, is in the interaction. So it's not anything that has to be completely made over, completely rethought. You can shift some of those interactions in a small way that's gonna make a big difference to you. So even complaining about clutter or making the clutter, whichever side you're on, it's not. The relationship's terrible. You have totally different values. But the way you talk about it or the way you express yourself in some small way, that interaction can become a less microstress laden one that's going to take some of the microstress out because as you pointed out, just years and years of research that said that negative interactions have up to five times the impact of a positive one. So the good news about that is if you can remove one or two negative interactions from your everyday life, that's going to have a pretty big difference, more than adding five or six positive extra things to do. So we're asking you to find ways to take things away rather than adding more things that you're supposed to do to be better, to be perfect. Just take a few of the negatives away, both that you cause and that you feel. And that's gonna make a big difference on the kind of overall feeling of microstress in your life.

I'm glad you mentioned that on the relationship front because in a way, seeing clutter gives me microstress.

Right.

And so then it's like, okay, we both have the same goal, to enjoy the living room. Let's just brainstorm how to do that in a way that doesn't drive either of us crazy, but that doesn't create us layering on microstresses to each other for how one or the other demands it. So I love what you said. It's not the relationship itself, it's just how do we communicate about this thing and the higher value, the higher thing that we both want. It's like enjoy our space. Not precisely the way that that needs to happen.

Exactly, exactly. That reminds me of one thing I didn't mention, that the 10% is too better though, which is useful to sort of reinforce. So we talked about things that you can maybe recognize and push back on one or two. We talked about the idea of recognizing the microstrust that you cause people and trying to take a little bit away. But the 10 percenters were better at rising above a few. They just sort of picked a couple of things that are systemic. Maybe it's your clutter issue, maybe it's something else, but systemic. And just decided, I just have to rise above this. It's not important. Something bigger could happen in life that would put that all in perspective. It's just I'm going to actively choose to figure out one or two of these microstresses that are really getting under my skin and just make a conscious choice to not let that bother me. And they did that in part because they were able to have these more multidimensional lives, have other connections and things. No one thing was so significant in their life that it could hold all of the value for them. Also, they made a conscious choice to be like, yep, I'm just choosing that. I'm not gonna let that bug get under my skin anymore. I'm just gonna try to rise above that. And it sounds silly to say, but it made a really big difference to them to just actively decide these two things. I'm not gonna worry about it anymore. I'm just gonna let life go on.

On that topic. It made a huge difference for me. I think it was almost a decade ago I heard the Gottmans. I'm pretty sure it was the Gottmans.

Who said, yes, yes, Lias, you know.

What I'm gonna say? Most relationships have 30% or whatever the number is, that will never be resolved. And the sooner you could just realize that and accept it. Is that the tidbit you were thinking of?

Exactly. Exactly. And we saw it in our research, too. We saw that the people that could just choose to. Not to let go of some things just. Again, not because they're Pollyannish, it's almost because they're practical. We just accept that there's some negative that I can navigate. The world's not going to end. No one dies. You have to choose what those things are. But they made a conscious choice to rise above. And I think that's really a great bit of advice is just pick them and then live with it and see if you can choose to rise above.

That's what they said, that there's going to be certain arguments you will never resolve, you will never agree on. And so the couples who did it, well, just recognize it sooner. Oh, we're in that Argument again. You know, it's funny. I just have to laugh because as we're recording this, I was out of town. So my husband moved our peloton bike out of a little closet under the stairwell in my office. And it's right behind me now in View and Video. Karen and I gratefully, happily turned video off to record. There's this big honkin peloton bike in my way as I come into my room. As we're on video, I'm a little embarrassed. Like, how does Karen think I'm living? This bike is behind me. But for now, I'm just letting it be there because let's see what it's like when the bike's out of the closet, funnily enough. So there it is. It's like, let me live with it. Let me see what it's like. Let me see how embarrassed I am on my video calls. And I would just see what the world is like. And you know what? It is breezier when you're not in a claustrophobic, tiny little closet trying to ride.

So, first of all, I didn't even notice it when we were on video before. So for one data point, it made absolutely no difference. Second of all, it would have logically fit into our conversation because you talked about how important that had been to you. So you bring a lot of baggage with that that I wouldn't be interpreting.

Right.

A good reminder that again, consciously choosing to put a couple things aside. But what I was going to say is the way microstress layers up throughout our day is that it starts when you wake up, and the first you look at your email, and then you both focus on work for the rest of the day, and then you come back home or get back together at dinner time. What happens is all the microstresses that have been layering up all day. I sort of liken it to a teacup that's, like, totally filled and one extra drop is gonna, like, spill it over. And so we often tend to see and feel and experience the microstress at home and aware that that's disproportionately sort of unfair because we've had all these other things happen and we're kind of. Our cup is almost overflowing with microstress. And it's the one thing that isn't really so huge in the grand scheme of things at home, but that's what happens to us. So we tend to take out our feelings about microstress on the people we come home to when it's really. It's not fair. And it's also not proportional. But that's just the reality of how stress layers up in our body over the day. The body doesn't distinguish between different forms of stress. It's big stresses and small stresses still affect the body. Small stresses just take time to build up to the point where you sort of feel it. And it's often just when you're coming home that you're cups ready to overflow with stress.

That's so true. And it's the safe space to kind of hit the release valve compared to like you can't just let loose on, you know, other than me venting here.

With you on our podcast recording.

Oh, my goodness. So, Karen, if you could leave Pivoters with one little experiment that they could try in the next week or two, what would it be?

I'm going to suggest something that we didn't come up with, but Rob Cross and I, my co author, have been doing ourselves. It's been really wonderful. It's something that comes out of the book the Good Life, which is by Robert Waldinger, who has studied human happiness. Basically, he's picked up a Harvard, ongoing Harvard study that's now, I think, in its eighth decade. But the power of human connection is central to that book as well. And so they suggested to reconnect with people that perhaps the pandemic has taken us out of being in good connection with. Or we just somehow let the ties dim a little bit, is suggest an eight minute phone call with a person and everyone laughs. When we did this, we went back to some of the friends that we hadn't talked to for a while and we said we're gonna do phone on zoom, so we're not gonna have any of the visual. You don't have to worry about what you look like. We're gonna time it. It's gonna be just eight minutes. But I just wanna catch up with you for eight minutes and let's see how much we can get to in eight minutes. And everyone laughs at like not eight minute 30, you know, not 10. What happens if I go over? But I've had a wonderful set of conversations with people that I haven't been able to be in touch with for a few years. And I've laughed with the same people. I've heard some personal stories that made me feel even closer to them. I've been able to reconnect after that. I suggest the 8 minute phone call because I think it's a really good way to reignite some of the ties that perhaps the pandemic dimmed a little bit for us and everybody can spare eight minutes and you can do, you know, one a week and you're going to start to feel good about the connections that you're again repolishing up in a wonderful way when you do that.

I love this homework. I love how specific it is and how tiny it is. Thank you for this and for the book recommendation. And it's funny, as you were saying it, we have precisely eight minutes left of our recording time, so time to jet, go make a phone call. Truly, this has been so wonderful. Thank you for this brilliant book, the Microstress Effect, and thanks to Rob, who maybe we microstressed with a few technical issues when we were first recording, but truly, Karen, this is a wonderful book and I so appreciate you and your time being here with us today.

Thank you Jenny. I love talking to you. I think we're singing from the same hymn book here and it was just really great too. You gave me some new language to talk about something too, which is wonderful. So thank you for sharing your ideas and I think they mesh really nicely and hopefully between us we can help a few people.

Yes, likewise. And big thanks to everybody who's here listening Foreign.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Foreign.

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