Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.

Do you ever feel like it's not one big thing stressing you out or getting you down, but a bunch of little things piling up, a client complaint, a coworker missing a deadline, a call from the kid's school, an unexpected traffic, even your roommate's dirty dishes in the sink?

These are what our guests today call microstresses, small annoyances that can snowball into big problems per performance, productivity, and physical and mental health without us even realizing it.

They're going to explain why that happens and what we can do about it.

Karen Dillon is a former editor of Harvard Business Review.

Rob Cross is a professor at Babson College and together they wrote the book The Microstress Effect and the HBR article, "The Hidden Toll of Microstress."

Karen, Rob, welcome.

Thank you, Allison. So good to be here.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Big picture, how do you differentiate stress from microstress?