The Hidden Toll of Microstress.

Microstressors are small pressures that seem like mere bumps in the road—a vague, worrying text from your teen while you’re in a meeting, the sight of a colleague who always wants to vent to you, or having to tell your team that the project they’ve been grinding long hours on has been scrapped. But these microstressors aren’t as harmless as they seem. Because they’re so small and brief, they don’t trigger the normal stress response in our brains to help us cope; instead, microstress embeds itself in our minds and accrues over time. The long-term impact of this buildup is debilitating: It saps our energy, damages our physical and emotional health, and contributes to a decline in our overall well-being. Through hundreds of interviews with high performers from 30 global companies, authors Rob Cross and Karen Dillon have uncovered the science behind microstress, where it comes from, and how our bodies respond to it. They share the most common sources of microstress so that you can learn to recognize how they arise in your life, and include a downloadable diagnostic to help you identify which of the 14 sources of microstress have the greatest impact on you. Finally, they offer strategies to push back on microstress. These include everything from learning how to say no to small asks, to being aware of the microstress we could cause others, to keeping perspective so you can rise above. Most important, Cross and Dillon’s research suggests that people with more diverse connections with others have rich, multi dimensional lives that inoculate them to microstress’s effects. INSET: What's Driving Your Microstress?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]