So what we can see is there are three categories of these interactions.

Some that drain our capacity or our ability to get done what we need to get done.

Some that hit us emotionally and have an impact on us, either in terms of feeling anxiety or other elements like that.

And then some that just challenge our identity and slowly move us away from the person that we set out to be in the beginning, all of which are happening in small moments day to day, week to week that accumulate over time.

Through your research, what did you find about the real concrete impacts of microstresses for people in their professional and personal lives?

Some really phenomenal things.

We actually found studies that were showing that if people consume a meal within two hours of being under this form of social stress, they actually metabolize that meal by adding 104 calories to it.

And 104 calories it may not sound like a lot, but if you extrapolate that out through a year, that turned out to be 11 pounds in that specific study.

And so we see a lot of things physically that are hitting us in different ways, higher blood pressure, all sorts of elements like that.

And then the stories that we heard, we did hundreds of interviews behind this, but the stories were really profound.