A Secret to Rise Above Microstress

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Robin Dunbar popularized the idea of the Dunbar Number. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s the hypothetical number of people we can manage to maintain at any given stage of life. There are roughly 500 people we might recognize in the grocery store and smile and say hello, 100 we would invite to a wedding, 50 to a party, 12-15 over for a barbeque, 5 we call close, and 1.5 we will confide in. 1.5 because women often have two, and men frequently have one.

It turns out that if we can strengthen the relationships with the 500 more tangential people in our lives, we can build resilience to the micro-stressors in our lives.

You know what stress is. Stress is your partner loses their job, your child gets sick, you get a cancer scare. Or your house burns down. Sorry, that was a bit extreme. But extreme is often what we think when we think of stressful events. We overlook the micro-stresses in our everyday lives.

Microstress is a last minute edit from your client on the project that’s overdue. It’s realizing no one is picking up the boys after soccer practice, and you might have to rush over to transport six kids around town. It’s when your screen sharing app fails in the middle of your presentation. It’s when you can’t find your keys and you’re already late for the interview.

Microstressors are small, often overlooked stress-inducing events or interactions that occur in everyday life. They may seem insignificant on their own, but their cumulative effect can be substantial.

Because here’s what happens next: The 1st degree stressor is you pick up the assortment of kids at practice, and run around town for 40 minutes, yet then discover you don’t have the right ingredients for the meal you planned. You had an enjoyable evening of cooking planned with your family. So this makes you irritable, and you inflict a 2nd degree stressor on your partner with those vibes. The 3rd degree impact is you stay up late to work on the client’s last-minute changes, which disrupts your sleep, so you skip your morning workout. Not to mention the somewhat alarming emails you imposed on your colleagues at 10:30pm. So it goes.

“I’ve been just trying to get through this week for the past two years.”

Where Does Microstress Come From?

Miscommunication, tech glitches, interruptions, decision fatigue, social media notifications, and so on, all provide cumulative micro-stressors throughout the day, which impact you and everyone you interact with later. And these are just the stressors that affect your personal productivity. Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, authors of The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Add Up–and What to Do About It, also identify those kinds of stressors that deplete our emotional reserves such as toxic people or a constant impulse to care for the well-being of others.

And there are the microstressors that challenge your personal identity such as being asked to do tasks that don’t align with your values, or attacks on your personal identity or self-worth. Here’s a diagnostic tool to try to help recognize where it’s coming from.

How Do You Combat Microstress?

When we think about overcoming difficult moments in life, we often think of the personal attributes, or fortitude, people possess. It’s true that mindfulness, intentional breaks, exercise, healthy diet, and adequate sleep are all quite effective at alleviating stress and promoting well-being. Definitely do those things, but also recognize that they are personal, often isolated, and subject to our own willpower, discipline and habits.

But if you ask people the role of others to overcome adversity, you get different answers. It’s not just close friendships that matter, but a variety of relationships, especially those formed around shared interests such as cycling, religion, singing, tennis, or activism. These connections often involve individuals from different professional, socioeconomic, educational, or age backgrounds, enriching our lives with authentic interactions and broadening our perspectives. The activity itself feels like the primary pursuit – your exercise class, book club, or volunteer group – but the hidden benefits of these social interactions are surprisingly powerful.

In their research, Rob Cross and Karen Dillon point to these social groups to provide the strength to “rise above” microstressors in our lives. Specifically these social groups provide empathy, perspective, humor, and help us see a way forward – all in a way that closer ties, such as involved colleagues or family members, might not recognize because of their proximity to the stressful event.

Go join a singing group. Yes, a singing group. Robin Dunbar claims that the combination of endorphin release and speed-to-friendship made singing clubs the most effective means to create a sense of belonging and community. He found similar results with dancing groups and rowers.

So there you go. Put yourself out there.

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We just released a new series of courses on Embracing Curiosity for Career Growth. It includes valuable ideas how to overcome the small obstacles and micro-stresses that slow us down. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy here. And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching Skills for Managers.

If There Are No Monsters in the Closet, Why Am I Still Afraid?

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Hello and welcome back to my newsletter! Last week I was writing about why we can’t pay attention, and also wondering who would make it to the end of my article. Turns out, many of you did, after taking a few breaks along the way.

This week I’ve got conspiracy theories on my mind. Why do people believe them? How do we understand those who fall into these mental traps? How do we have a conversation with them? How do we avoid these cognitive traps ourselves. I provide an overview of my research, with plenty of deeper links of you want to go to the source. Hold on, and enjoy.

Eric Oliver’s young son was having anxiety attacks because there were monsters in his closet. One night he was terrified. It was late. Eric was tired. His son was tired. Eric did everything he could to convince his son that there were no monsters in the closet. They opened the closet. They searched the closet with a flashlight. They listened carefully to the walls of the closet. They barricaded the closet. And still, Eric couldn’t convince his son there were no monsters.

Finally his son said, “If there are no monsters in the closet, why am I still afraid?”

One of biggest predictors of whether or not you are susceptible to conspiracy theories, is whether or not you also believe in paranormal and supernatural activity – you know, ESP, levitation, telepathy, demons, werewolves, zombies. That sort of thing.

The unifying theme of paranormal events is that there is an unseen, unexplainable force affecting the world, and we accept that instead of an explanation that is scientifically verifiable. It’s also known as magical thinking; the belief that seemingly unconnected events are affecting outcomes.

People who work in highly unpredictable, chaotic environments, often believe in magical thinking. Offshore fisherman, baseball players, restaurant owners for instance. Or your nutty uncle who won’t let you move chairs if his team scores a touchdown. Outcomes in these environments are hard to scientifically predict, so we substitute superstition.

Sometimes ritual and superstition can be useful. Marshall Goldsmith has been known for years for his signature green polo shirt he always wears for presentations. Tiger Woods always wears red and black on Sundays during tournaments. They know it’s superstitious, but it builds confidence, and puts them in a high-performing state of mind. These are ways of managing anxiety in the face of uncertain, and changing, circumstances. It’s a way of gaining surety in the face of chaos.

To use Eric Oliver’s example, if you live near a volcano and every year you throw two teenagers into it to appease the volcano gods, that actually is science up until the point when A. it doesn’t work any longer, and B. someone explains to you plate tectonic subduction, and magma pressure from within the earth’s mantle. After that awareness, if you continue to throw the teenagers into the volcano every year, that’s magical thinking.

What about conspiracy theories, and the people who believe them. Let’s take flat-earth believers. Or in their words, those who have been “flat-smacked.” You know how easy it would be to debate a flat-earther? So easy. You just drop a few truth bombs on them, get them to question their own crazy ideas, and boom! You could change their mind on the spot. Just ask, “What about the tides? What about the horizon? Explain a lunar eclipse? I mean, just explain the seasons!?” Pow. Game over.

“It takes more information to make you believe something you don’t want to believe, than something you do want to believe.”

– Peter Ditto, Ph.D, University of California Irvine

Nope. Not even close. The flat-earth community has prepared rebuttals for everything you can throw at them. Earth looks curved from high altitudes because of wide-angle lenses. The arctic circle is at the center of the disc, and the antarctic ice at the edges go on forever. What’s underneath, holding us up? More earth, and it goes down, forever. And the sun? The sun is not 92 million miles away burning as a nuclear fusion star. It’s electric and about 4000 miles away underneath the protective dome that encloses our earth disc.

There’s a couple problems with debating conspiracy theorists. You are on their turf, they have an answer for everything, and they don’t trust you. Pick any conspiracy theory – anti-evolution, 9/11, Chemtrails, moon landing, JFK, Roswell – and all belief adherents follow a formula. Research by John Cook and Stephen Lewandowski identifies five primary elements of conspiracy believers: cherry-picking evidence, belief in conspiracy theories, illogical reasoning, reliance on fake and fringe experts, and belief that science should be perfect.

Let’s just take the last point, that science is supposed to be perfect. Yet science isn’t about absolutes. Science requires constant questioning, doubt, experimentation, and recognition of new truths in light of new evidence. All good scientists are eternally curious, and inquisitive, trying to hone their understandings.

So after listening thoughtfully to a conspiracy theorist, your question should not be to ask them to contradict a counter point (“Oh yeah, well how do you explain time zones? Huh?“). The best approach is to ask them, “What evidence would you need to disprove your belief?” That’s a very different question. You are acknowledging their skepticism, their interest in following science and finding the truth. You are asking them to critique their own world view.

“Our inherent cognitive biases make us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by those who have an agenda to push, especially if they can discredit all other sources of information.”

– Lee McIntyre, author Post-Truth

We are experiencing an epidemic of unreason, and that irrationality is exploding, in part, because of the unpredictability and uncertainty that is unfolding before our eyes. We all feel an increasing instability in the world. That emotional anxiety, fueled by an increased lack of attention, is propagating conspiracy thinking.

I don’t need to tell you. We see it everywhere, all the time. Covid, climate change, Ukraine, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, and so on. If you get lost in a hole on the internet and become convinced that a cabal of the illuminati, big pharma, and the deep state have engineered Covid to control people, well that becomes an easily accessible way to understand not only Covid, but also how THEY are subjugating YOU.

If you believe we are in end times, the world suddenly is potent with symbols everywhere. And if our attention is scarce, our critical thinking absent, and our fear on red alert, almost any easy explanation becomes warm and comforting. But that doesn’t make it true.

For more on understanding conspiracy theories, and science deniers, I recommend Lee McIntyre’s book. And if you prefer podcasts, any – or all – of these interviews on conspiracy thinking are, well, illuminating.

Here, just for you, have a micro-learning course we recently published on Being an Agile Critical Thinker.
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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful online micro-learning experiences to drive the human change that propels your team. You can find our catalog of high-impact courses here. And if you want something more tailored, you can learn about our custom work here.

My book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now.

And if you want to learn to apply some of these ideas and be an effective coach for your team, we wrote a course on that too. It’s called Coaching for Managers available over at UDEMY for Business.