Have you had days that exhaust you extraordinarily without any particular reason why? Yet you feel anxious or beaten down just the same, and perhaps worse, you have no idea why. We call it “microstress”—brief, frequent moments of everyday tension that accumulate and impede us even though we don’t register them. Unlike stress triggered by a notable anxiety-producing event (a sharp conflict with a friend or colleague, a health scare), microstress is hard to spot because it is baked into our daily lives. And often it arrives through the people closest to us, making it more difficult to either admit or avoid.

---