When Small Stresses Lead to Big Problems

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's easy to see how big stresses at work or home -- like layoffs, illnesses, or even a complex and important project -- cause anxiety too spike. But sometimes the stresses that cause the most hard are the tiny, everyday ones that build up over time into a much bigger problem because we don't take the time to recognize and manage our reactions to them. Former HBR editor Karen Dillon and Babson College professor Rob Cross studied the most common types of "microstress" and the ways in which they impact individuals, teams, and organizations. They explain why, if left unchecked, microstress can lead to mistakes, burnout, damaged relationships, and poor mental and physical health. But they also offer advice for better handling it -- and helping others to do the same. Dillon and Cross wrote the book The Microstress Effect and the HBR article "The Hidden Toll of Microstress."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you want to go deeper on business strategy?
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0:08.4	HBR editors like me hand select the best strategy case studies and conversations from
0:13.6	across HBR's podcasts, videos and beyond.
0:17.1	Listen for free to HBR on Strategy wherever you get your podcasts, new episodes every Wednesday.
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review, I'm Allison Beard.
0:49.4	Do you ever feel like it's not one big thing stressing you out or getting you down, but a bunch
0:54.3	of little things piling up, a client complaint, a coworker missing a deadline, a call from
1:00.3	the kids' school, unexpected traffic, even your roommate's dirty dishes in the sink?
1:06.4	These are what our guests today call microstresses, small annoyances that can snowball into big
1:11.5	problems, per performance, productivity and physical and mental health without us even
1:16.6	realizing it.
1:17.6	They're going to explain why that happens and what we can do about it.
1:21.9	Karen Dillon is a former editor of Harvard Business Review, Rob Cross is a professor at
1:26.3	Babson College, and together they wrote the book The Microstress Effect and the HBR article
1:32.1	The Hidden Toll of Microstress.
1:34.2	Karen, Rob, welcome.
1:36.0	Thank you, Allison.
1:37.0	It's so good to be here.
1:38.0	Yeah, thank you so much.
1:44.3	Big picture, how do you differentiate stress from microstress?
1:49.3	This is something we recognize and we know, I'll call it macro stress for this purpose,
	...

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