I love coffee. And I love research into stress. I also love wordplay.
‘The daily grind’ ticks all those boxes.
I’ve been around the wellbeing space long enough to hear various perspectives on what’s ‘normal’. What ‘really’ constitutes stress. What should or shouldn’t affect people.
There’s a comforting story that big things, a crisis, disaster, or some other genuine potentially traumatic event (PTE) are the stresses we need to worry about and the ordinary working life, however busy, is survivable. There’s a tension in there between what, say, a manager would think is normal or reasonable, what an entrepreneur may think is normal or reasonable, and what an employee may think is normal and reasonable, and then what we might do next.
Yes, we’re all different, and there are edge cases and those at the margins, so for the sake of argument, let’s deal with the averages.
Hassles
Back in the mists of time, in 1981, when MTV was launching with the old banger Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles, researchers Kanner, Coyne, Schaefer and Lazarus published a study in the Journal of Behavioural Medicine, which compared two ways of measuring stress. The first was major life events, big ticket items like bereavement or job loss. The second was daily hassles, the minor recurring irritations of ordinary life, aka, The Daily Grind.
The unexpected result was that the hassles scale was a better predictor of psychological symptoms than the major life events scale. When they statistically removed the effect of major life events, the link between daily hassles and symptoms remained. The steady accumulation of small daily demands is a problem, and treating the daily grind as the less harmful part is the greater error.
The grind does damage on its own.
What are we talking about?
It’s worth looking at the hassles to be clear about what was being measured. The most frequently reported items were concerns about weight, health of a family member, rising prices, home maintenance, having too many things to do, and misplacing or losing things. These are domestic and personal life items. Work was one of seven categories, and not where the most common items sat. So Kanner measured the general accumulation of everyday irritations, and found it predicts harm. That’s a useful principle to keep in mind.
You can see how this applies to workplace stress. It likely isn’t the occasional pull-out-all-stops effort we get from time to time which is a single dramatic event you could point to. Instead, there are occupational equivalents of hassles and irritations: the photocopier that’s forever malfunctioning, the low-grade negative friction of a difficult team, constant interruptions, the unnecessary paperwork or processes, the petty power plays, the person who never does the dishes, the missing stationery, the small commitments that never seem to eventuate. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Then you lose your keys, someone cuts you off in traffic, the person at the checkout seemed rude, you’re suddenly low on gas, you forgot to get milk…
None of it is, individually, a crisis or PTE but, per Kanner’s principle, it all adds up.
These things aren’t the same
This is a fundamentally different mechanism from the acute traumatic event. Research on resilience to trauma, showing most people come through intact, tells you little about how those same people fare under sustained daily load of hassles.
The physiology of the chronic version is well described. The body’s stress response is built for short, sharp threats: mobilise, respond, then return to baseline, or homeostasis. Adrenaline and cortisol play their effective part. When the demand doesn’t end, our system stays activated. Bruce McEwen’s concept of allostatic load describes the cumulative cost of that. Because the stress response is running continuously, we don’t get the chance to recover properly, which produces wear and tear, an increase in baseline cortisol, sleep disruptions and sequelae, and our system recalibrates to a higher set point and stops returning to a clean rest state.
Might you feel acutely unwell in any nameable way? Probably not. You might just feel that everything seems to require more effort than it used to.
What about the workplace?
If we want to zero in on the workplace more specifically, we can start with work by Robert Karasek who, in 1979 in Administrative Science Quarterly, showed that mental strain arises from the combination of high job demands, workload, time pressure, effort, and low decision latitude, which is how much control a person has over how their work is done. Higher demands with low control is the toxic pairing. Then if you add personal hassles, you have a challenging mix.
That demand-control model was then rigorously tested, and its successor, the Job Demands-Resources framework, describes two pathways: a health impairment pathway, and a motivational pathway. The health impairment pathway outlines how high demands, when not offset by adequate resources, depletes energy and leads to burnout, then to generally poorer health, lower performance and withdrawal.
Like all models, it’s imperfect, but does have some utility in describing the general situation. What defines a demand is, of course, different for different people, and the organisational context itself needs investigating as much as the person’s response, but I hope you get the general thrust of where I’m going. The pattern and association between chronic demand and poor outcomes generally holds, and the idea of stress accumulating is sound.
Two edge cases
In high-load operational environments, you often get both. First responders such as paramedics and firefighters, face genuinely traumatic events AND carry sustained operational load with the same hassles and irritations as everyone else. Emergency managers, such as those responding to flooding, earthquakes and the like, also carry both.
A team can be admirably resilient to the incidents themselves (but we know they accumulate) and still be quietly eroded by hassles. Measuring only the crises and congratulating people on their resilience misses the point of the grind doing slow damage on its own. The cumulative markers will be showing up in things like declining heart-rate variability before it shows up in a breakdown.
The practical implication is almost the opposite of the comforting story. The absence of a crisis is not evidence that people are fine. The steady state of demand without recovery, of demand without resources, is itself the risk. There’s no great thing to point at and so we may overlook it until it surfaces as illness, error, or turnover.
Managing the hassles is not negotiable
Removing the hassles is a great way to manage the burden. That means, as a leader, or manager, of whatever, that the small things, collectively, really aren’t small things.
Repair the photocopier. Tidy up processes. Streamline. Handle the stuff it’s too easy to ignore because it seems like such small stuff. The payoff is greater than it appears.
And always make sure the coffee machine is working.
References
Kanner, A. D., Coyne, J. C., Schaefer, C., & Lazarus, R. S. (1981). Comparison of two modes of stress measurement: Daily hassles and uplifts versus major life events. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 4(1), 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00844845
Karasek, R. A. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: Implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285-308. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392498 [The demand-control model, measures sustained job demands directly.]
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33-44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb09546.x
Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2017). Job demands-resources theory: Taking stock and looking forward. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 273-285. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000056 [The health-impairment pathway.]
Corrigan, S. L., Roberts, S., Warmington, S., Drain, J., & Main, L. C. (2021). Monitoring stress and allostatic load in first responders and tactical operators using heart rate variability: a systematic review. BMC Public Health, 21, 1520. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11595-x [The HRV/allostatic-load evidence for high-load operational roles.]