92% of Your Workplace Stress Is Because Your Coworkers Are Driving You Batshaet Crazy

Not the work. Not the deadlines. Not even the soul-crushing Zoom meetings that could've been emails.

Your coworkers.

I sat down with Todd Attridge—founder of The Studio and someone who's spent 30 years in applied psychology figuring out why we're all so goddamn stressed at work—and he dropped this bomb that explains literally everything wrong with your company culture:

"92% of workplace stress is caused by the people we work with, not the work that we do."

Read that again. Let it sink in. Then think about all the productivity tools, time management apps, and "efficiency optimization" bullshaet you've been investing in while completely ignoring the fact that Steve from accounting is making everyone's blood pressure spike every time he opens his mouth.

Work isn't stressful. People are stressful.

And until you stop pretending this is a time management problem and start treating it like the human relationship problem it actually is, your team is going to keep burning out, churning out, and quiet quitting their way through another quarter of mediocre performance.

The Stories You're Making Up Are Ruining Everything

Here's what's happening in your office right now, today, probably in the last hour:

Someone sent an email. Someone else read it. And that someone else immediately started building an entire farcking narrative about what that email really meant.

Todd nailed it: "You say something to me as a coworker. I misinterpret what you're saying, and then I start processing it because I'm human and humans start making up stories."

Sarah didn't respond to your Slack message for three hours? She's obviously pissed about the meeting. She's probably telling everyone you're incompetent. She's definitely undermining you to leadership. You know this because... well, you don't. You just made it all up.

Meanwhile, Sarah was in back-to-back client calls and hasn't even seen your message yet.

But you're already stressed, she hasn't done anything yet, and now when you two finally do connect, you're bringing this whole invented narrative into the conversation.

This is how workplace relationships implode. Not because of actual conflict, but because we're all walking around reacting to shaet we literally made up in our own heads.

Your Different Perspectives Are a Feature, Not a Bug (But You're Treating Them Like Bugs)

Todd dropped this truth bomb that should be printed on every conference room wall:

"You come from a different perspective than I do. You have ideas that are different from mine. You have a lived experience that's different from my lived experience, and so for you, it's very normal. Your world is normal."

This is supposed to be your competitive advantage. This is why you hired diverse teams and talk about innovation and brag about your "collaborative culture."

But in practice? Those different perspectives are causing constant friction because nobody's actually stepping into each other's shoes. Everyone's just trying to prove their perspective is the right perspective.

You're in a meeting. Boss asks for ideas. You share yours. It gets shot down or dismissed.

Immediately you spiral: I'm not important. They don't value me. My ideas don't matter.

Meanwhile, the person who dismissed your idea isn't thinking about you at all. They're processing from their own perspective, which is equally valid and equally limited.

This is killing your company culture transformation before it even starts. You can't innovate when everyone's defensive. You can't solve complex problems when people are more focused on being right than being effective.

And here's the kicker: Your leaders think they need to manage this dynamic. They think they need to step in, mediate, and referee every little conflict.

Wrong.

Stop Waiting for Leadership to Save You (They Can't)

Todd's approach flips the entire model: "That dynamic is constantly shifting. So a better solution is being able to get the people to manage their own dynamics."

You know why your company is slow? Why decisions take forever? Why everything needs approval from three layers up?

Because you've built a system where people can't handle their own shaet.

If you and I have a conflict, we shouldn't need to wait for our manager to notice, schedule a meeting, and facilitate a conversation where we both pretend to be professional while seething inside.

We should have the emotional muscles (yes, that's what Todd calls them, and yes, most of yours are weak as hell) to just... talk to each other like adults.

"Hey, we're not seeing eye to eye on this. Let's talk it through."

Revolutionary. Groundbreaking. Apparently impossible for most teams.

Emotional Fitness: The Gym Membership You're Not Buying

Here's where Todd's framework gets really good. He talks about emotional fitness the same way we talk about physical fitness.

You wouldn't expect to run a marathon without training. You wouldn't try to deadlift 300 pounds without building up to it. You know that physical fitness requires consistent practice, repetition, and strengthening specific muscles.

So why the farck do you think you can handle complex human relationships without any training whatsoever?

Todd's premise is simple: "Most of us don't even know we have those emotional muscles. And if we do know we have them, we're certainly not doing the things to strengthen them."

Things like:

• Empathy (actually trying to understand where someone's coming from)

• Asking questions (instead of making assumptions)

• Stepping into conflict (instead of avoiding it until it explodes)

• Listening (like, really listening, not just waiting for your turn to talk)

We didn't learn this shaet growing up. We didn't build emotional literacy. And now we're adults in high-stakes business environments trying to navigate complex stakeholder engagement and client relationship management with the emotional bandwidth of a stressed-out middle schooler.

This is why your retention sucks. This is why your productivity plateaus. This is why your "high-performing team" is one minor disagreement away from a full-blown meltdown.

The Three-Minute Solution Nobody's Using

The Studio's approach is almost offensively simple: Three minutes a day.

That's it. Three minutes of checking in. Three minutes of practicing those emotional muscles. Three minutes of getting ahead of stress before it becomes a five-alarm dumpster fire.

Todd shared this scenario that's happening in your office right now:

Team member shows up. Seems off. Leader notices but doesn't say anything because "we're professionals here and we don't talk about feelings."

Days go by. Performance drops. Quality suffers. Leader finally addresses it in a formal meeting. Employee reacts defensively: "I've been overwhelmed for weeks! How could you not see this?"

Now you've got a problem that requires HR, PIPs, and probably a recruiter.

OR

Leader checks in: "Hey, where are you at today? What's your capacity like?"

Team member: "Honestly, I'm at about 60% today. Had a rough night."

Leader: "Got it. Let's adjust expectations accordingly."

Problem solved. In 30 seconds. Before it became a problem.

This is what proactive relationship management actually looks like. Not tracking metrics in a dashboard. Not scheduling quarterly reviews. Just... talking to people like they're human beings with fluctuating emotional states.

Workplace Stress Is a Team Sport (And You're Losing)

Here's my favorite part of Todd's framework: He treats beating workplace stress like a team sport.

"You can't do it by yourself because it's caused by the relationships you have with each other. So you can't solve it singularly. You have to solve it as a team."

The Studio literally keeps scoreboards. Your team vs. stress. Home team vs. away team.

And the only way to win is by learning the moves together and practicing them consistently until they become muscle memory.

The move might be: "I need to listen more. You need to speak more. I need to ask you more about what you think. You need to be able to share more."

Do this enough times and it becomes natural. Your team starts working well together. Trust goes up. Communication improves. Productivity increases.

And stress—the thing that's been killing your sustainable business expansion efforts—goes down.

The Ripple Effect Nobody Talks About

Here's the part that made me want to high-five Todd through the screen:

People who learn these emotional fitness skills at work don't just use them at work. They use them everywhere.

Better relationships with spouses. Better relationships with kids. Better relationships with clients. Better relationships with vendors.

You invest three minutes a day in building emotional muscles with your team, and suddenly your entire life gets less stressful because you're actually equipped to handle human relationships like a functional adult.

This is the opposite of what most companies do. Most companies optimize for "work self" and "home self" like they're two different people.

Todd calls bullshaet on this immediately: "We're not just our work selves at work and our home selves at home. Work spills into home. Home spills into work. You're with the entire person."

So stop pretending your team members check their humanity at the door. Stop acting like the stress from home doesn't affect work performance. Stop ignoring the fact that you're dealing with whole humans, not just their "professional personas."

Your Productivity Problem Is a People Problem

Let me connect the dots for you since apparently nobody else is willing to:

You want to scale. You want relationship-driven revenue growth. You want high-retention client relationships and trusted advisor status with your customers.

But your team is stressed, burned out, and can't even communicate effectively with each other.

How exactly do you think they're going to build authentic client connections when they can't even have an authentic conversation with the person sitting three feet away?

Your external relationships will never be stronger than your internal ones. If your team culture is toxic, defensive, and stress-inducing, that energy will leak into every client interaction, every sales call, every customer service exchange.

You can't fake this shaet. Clients can feel it.

The Uncomfortable Investment Nobody Wants to Make

Here's why most companies won't do this:

It requires admitting that the people problems you've been ignoring are actually the root cause of your performance problems.

It requires leadership to model vulnerability and actually check in with their teams.

It requires consistent practice over time, not a one-time workshop where everyone gets inspired for 48 hours and then goes back to their old patterns.

It requires treating emotional fitness as seriously as you treat physical fitness, financial performance, and operational efficiency.

And most companies would rather buy another productivity tool, hire another consultant, or reorganize their team structure for the fourth time this year than actually address the fact that their people don't know how to work together.

Watch the Damn Episode

This conversation with Todd went deep into the emotional muscles you're not exercising, the team sport approach to beating stress, and why your three-minute daily check-ins might be the highest ROI activity you're not doing.

If you're tired of burning through talent, exhausted from managing constant interpersonal drama, and sick of watching stress destroy your team's potential—this episode is your wake-up call.

Watch the full episode here because the frameworks Todd shares are the difference between a team that barely functions and one that actually thrives.

P.S. I can already hear the objections: "We don't have time for three-minute check-ins! We're too busy! We have real work to do!"

Cool. How much time did you spend last week dealing with miscommunication? Smoothing over hurt feelings? Managing conflict that could've been prevented? Re-doing work because someone didn't understand the expectations?

Probably way more than three minutes a day.

That "real work" you're so busy with? It's taking three times longer than it should because your team is stressed, defensive, and making up stories about each other instead of just communicating.

But sure, keep telling yourself you don't have time to invest in the thing that would actually make all your other work easier, faster, and more effective.

P.P.S. The fact that 92% of workplace stress comes from people, not work, means you've been solving the wrong problem this entire time.

You've been optimizing processes when you should've been building relationships. You've been implementing systems when you should've been developing emotional muscles. You've been managing tasks when you should've been managing humans.

Todd's giving you the playbook. Three minutes a day. Practice the moves. Treat it like a team sport.

The question is: Are you actually going to do it, or are you going to keep wondering why your "culture initiatives" keep failing while your stress levels keep rising?

Go watch the episode. Learn the moves. And for god's sake, check in with your team today.

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H—human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.