ERP 074: How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship

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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Hi, thank you for joining. Today’s episode is episode 74. It is titled “How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship.” Before we get started, I wanna again invite to respond to me about the idea I’ve been talking about on my last two podcasts. This idea is opening up the opportunity for us to have the monthly call. This would be free to you, and what it would allow you to opportunity for is to get some direct coaching with me live, and to heard about other opportunities and resources that I might be able to direct you to if it feels like a good fit. This would essentially give us the opportunity to deepen in our conversation together.

As you know, on this podcast I don’t actually get your feedback. I hear from you via e-mail, some of you post on my podcast links or even write a rating and review, so there’s different ways that I hear from you, on social media, but I actually don’t have a dialogue with you, so this would be a great opportunity to engage in that. And I don’t wanna offer it up until I have enough interest for it to really be worth our while. So what I’m doing right now is the people that have expressed interest – I’m keeping a list of people who are interested and I would need that to get to a certain threshold to feel like enough of you will show up that it will really be a good experience for everyone. So if you’re interested in that, please e-mail me. You can e-mail me at [email protected], or you can click on my Contact page of my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com; click on Contact and you can find the ways to reach me there. Again, I would love to hear from you if this is of interest to you.

Today’s episode, again, is How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship. Throughout my podcast show I’ve talked about relationship stress a lot as it relates to difficult dynamics, problematic strategies and how all the things that get activated and cause stress within the relationship.

Well, today I’m focusing on external stress. This is the stress that we often encounter and is really common in this day and age. So whether or not it has to do with career and work, colleagues, bosses, finances, budgeting, mortgages, loans, debt – all of those things. Also having to do with family, family members, friends, close loved ones that we are feeling conflict or challenge with. It could be health, illness, injury… It could be lots of things that we will feel stressed around, and this is a common experience in our lives. I wanna talk about how this impacts our relationship and what you can do about it.

I was curious what the definition of stress was based on just the dictionary, because stress often is a very subjective term, like many of the psychology terms, like love or happiness, that’s not easily defined.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines stress as a physical-chemical or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation and tend to alter existent equilibrium.

Equilibrium is largely about balance, so this is talking about something that causes tension and takes us out of feeling balanced. This can be incredibly difficult. I think all of us at some point have felt off our game or not in balance. And balance is a tricky thing, if you think about being on a teeter-totter or even riding a bike or a motorcycle – that balance point you wanna be acutely aware of. So even though stress is a normal, common experience, it’s really important to be cognisant and aware of where our balance is, because when we get into the stressed out place and burnout it can cause severe symptoms and can have a tremendous detriment on our health and our relationships. I feel like more than ever we are becoming numb to these symptoms and these signs of stress. I think we’re almost coming to terms that this is just a part of life and a reality.

However, when we ignore signs and symptoms of stress, I think that actually contributes to the more problematic dynamic, because we don’t have a chance to correct course. It’s almost disempowering; we can’t correct, we can’t mitigate, we can’t deal with that stress constructively. It’s like sailing a boat – I’m not a sailor, but I imagine that you’ve got your coordinates, you’ve got your compass, and let’s say everything is cueing you and alerting you to the fact that you’re off course, and maybe you’re gonna run into rocks and an island, so to speak. Let’s say you’re ignoring all of those signs or those cues and you’re steadily just continuing to head towards a shipwreck. You’re ignoring your vital signs and cues as a sailor to let you know there’s danger.

If we wanna be able to mitigate, we wanna be able to correct course if we’re leading down a road that’s incredibly problematic from a stress level point. Additionally, I do think that stress has a tendency to produce more stress, and I’ll talk about all the signs and symptoms in a moment, but I just wanna ask you, have you ever been around someone that’s incredibly frazzled, anxious and stressed out? It’s difficult to relax, it’s hard to feel like you’re not taking it on too, or that you’re not also resonating with that stress level. I find it sometimes stressful to be around people that are that stressed. So in some ways stress begets stress, and I know whenever I’ve been in a mental state of stress, my thought process, my muscles, my emotions, all of those ways that I am being in a stressed state end up creating more stress.

When we talk about being in relationship in a stressed state, it’s almost as if stress is contagious. When we talk about this intimate partnership of a marriage or long-term relationship, we can see that stress… There’s actually studies, and I have a few articles that are discussing some of these studies that I will share with you in a moment, but there’s a serious impact on the quality of the relationship. Stressed-out couples tend to argue a lot more, they tend to turn away from each other, not seeing each other as a resource or a source of support. They isolate, they withdraw or they seek other connection. They feel disconnected, they feel frustrated with each other, they feel angry with one another and they have a difficult time relaxing and enjoying each other, seeing each other in a positive life.

Now, we all go through phases. If we look at our relationship, we can see that sometimes there’s more stressful phases depending on what’s going on, and sometimes there’s more positive, resourced, relaxed and good times. If we look at stress as chronic, meaning it’s not just a phase. It happens and it’s habitual, and it’s happening all the time and it’s not being checked, it’s not being managed, then this can become very problematic down the road. If we look at the long-term cost of habitual stress, we see extreme consequences of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, conflict, negativity, disconnection, which looks often like divorce, depression, anxiety and a number of other things.

Again, we all know that stress… One of the big statistics going around is that 80-90 percent, even more, of illnesses and diseases are caused by stress. So again, I emphasize this to not scare you but just to impress upon you that stress is no joke. It actually has a huge impact, and it’s not one of these things that is complicated. It’s actually pretty simple, which I think in some ways we can get it intellectually, but to live it is a whole different thing. To really be in the practice of managing our stress and be committed to that, it takes a whole level of real participation.

One of the things that I found interesting, and this was in an article titled Stress Hurts Relationships, by John M. Grohol Psy.D. and he’s talking about regardless of somebody’s skill level and their attachment style, stress will have a really negative impact. Their relationship skills and their level of safety and security from an attachment style kind of go out the window.

I quote him here:

“Relationships exposed to high stress for a long amount of time are bound to falter, no matter how well each individual’s relationship skills. During such times, we are more likely to see the relationship as being negative, not realizing the impact the stress is having in the validity of our evaluation. It colors our perception of the relationship itself. Remove the stress, and people’s positive relationship skills can once again – and usually do – take over.”

So he’s basically saying we become less skillful, less functioning and it’s actually a pretty common notion in the field of psychology that people tend to regress. they step down a few levels in their development when they’re highly stressed. Over the course of my career, I’ve done several stress presentations to different communities, whether or not it was when I worked at the university and helping college students really get a concept of what stress is, or just people in the community dealing with stress in their lives.

One of the things I typically lead with is in 1967 there was a stress inventory was created. I wish that they had a more updated version of it; this inventory is still utilized. If you’ve listened to my podcasts you’ve probably heard me mention this before – I will put it on the show notes if you’re interested in looking at it or actually taking the inventory yourself. It basically asks you to look at the last 12 months; you’re basically gonna identify stressful events in your life, and you’re gonna get a number for each stressful thing that you’ve experienced. Then you’ll tally them all to get a cumulative number, your grand total. And they look at that total and they evaluate your level of stress.

So why I think that this is important to just consider is that stress can be good stress, it can also be stress that we would probably deem negative, like getting fired or having a loved one die, or getting divorced, versus having a baby or getting a new promotion, or getting married – those things we would deem as positive; they’re both stressful, and we tend to undermine the level of stress and to minimize it.

Sometimes it can be incredibly validating to look at your stress number and say, “Okay, maybe I’ve been experiencing more stress than I realized.” So I think that this can be a good thing to identify, in the last 12 months, things that have been stressful that are contributing to your experience as it relates to stress.

The other thing I typically talk about is the stress curve. This is basically a graph where you have performance on one side and you have pressure on the other. So if you wanna look at this, you’ll wanna go to my show notes. Again, you can find that on my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and you can find the most recent episode there at the top. Again, this is episode 74.

So this is the stress curve – basically identifying our level of functioning. When we have low amounts of pressure or stimuli, like there’s nothing going on, we tend to have a low level of productivity. We’re bored, we’re not engaged, we’re not stimulated. And if we increase the pressure or the stimulus – if you’re engaged in an activity or a project – you’ll increase your level of performance, your productivity.

We wanna aim for that sweet spot where we’re highly functioning, we have a level of stimulus, it’s engaging us on all levels, and we’re producing in a very optimal way. I think the seductive thing here is to think the more you add to your plate, the more productive you’re gonna be. There’s that saying, if you wanna get something done or you want somebody to do something for you, as someone that’s already really busy; they’re in that inertia of really staying busy. I think in the United States we have this value for productivity and efficiency and work ethic.

So it can be a seductive thing to think, “Oh, I’ll just work harder” or “I’m gonna work longer” or “I’m gonna just try harder.” That’s increasing the pressure, but we don’t always recognize that our level of productivity or level of performance declines at a certain point when that pressure gets too much. So the real notable thing here is to look at when the stress curve starts to go down. When I worked with students and presenting about stress, I would circle this point on the graph where the line of productivity starts to diminish radically. What’s happening there is it’s too much pressure, we tend to get burnt out and a lot of things are happening mentally, emotionally and physically. So what we ideally wanna do is recognize the warning signs, the cues or the symptoms of stress so that we can catch this amount of pressure before it gets too much.

If we recognize, “I have some signs here” – and this will also be on the show notes, but emotionally these are symptoms and signs of stress that you wanna be aware of. We don’t want to collapse in our performance and our productivity. This is where we can have a burnout, we can have a breaking point, we can have a meltdown, we can get sick, we can get in an accident… This is really where we fall off in a big way. So if we can recognize the signs and the symptoms ahead of time… The whole goal is to manage and autocorrect, correct course.

So some of the signs and symptoms – and you can find all these on my show notes – emotionally we tend to feel anxious, apprehensive, more irritable, our fuse is shorter, we get upset a little more easily, or we’re not as social. If you know yourself to be really social and you tend to be withdrawing or feeling lonely even though you have a lot of friends, or you’re feeling some level of worry and restlessness, or you’re feeling sad and angry, you’re not smiling as often, you’re not laughing as easily, or perhaps you’re feeling insecure or more fearful than you know yourself to be, or you’re just feeling a level of dissatisfaction – all of those things are emotional, and those could be cues to let you know “Hey, something might be going on here. Maybe I’m pushing my threshold around what’s too much pressure.” Again, you wanna work with our optimal state of being, and that’s gonna be individual. Everybody’s energy level fluctuates depending on your season, you phase… I hear this from pregnant women: “I try to push myself, but I forget that I don’t have my normal energy. I’m growing another human being inside my belly and yet I keep expecting myself to function like I did before I was pregnant.”

So there might be different phases where you might have more energy and you wanna be able to really assess what’s really real for you in the moment. And then when we talk about stress and all the things – if you do that life inventory, you might need to scale back your expectations given how stressed you are, to manage that stress.

Here are some other signs and symptoms. Physically you might feel a lack of energy, you might feel fatigued… I get a lot of muscle tension in my jaw and in my neck and in my shoulders. Some people feel a sense of shortened breath and shallow breathing, and I experienced that as well. There might be head tension or headaches, stomachaches or not being able to sleep as easily. Some people gain weight or lose weight, libido drops – that sense of sexual desire can really feel… Stress is a huge libido killer. Or even an increase in substance use. Some people eat or like sugar or drink alcohol or caffeine or other substances. You might notice you’re resorting to that more than you normally do.

These are all, again, not to be sources of judgment or blame or shame or guilt, but just to work with what’s going on for you. These can be indicators. Sometimes we’re not conscious of how we’re feeling. More often than not most of us don’t know how we’re feeling and don’t really know what’s going on for us or what’s up for us. So if we can look at our behavior, look at how we’re relating to others, how we’re feeling, those can be good signs and cues, and I’m gonna give you some points around how to work with this in a moment.

I have a couple more notes here around signs and symptoms. Mentally, we can be a little more distracted, not as focused and not able to concentrate as much. I get pretty preoccupied. I’m not really in the moment, I’m not focusing as much on the here and now. Some people might experience some confusion or forgetfulness or daydreaming. You might notice that decrease in productivity, creativity or even curiosity, that decline of energy. You might feel burnt out, you might have negative thinking or even feelings of guilt.

Again, that same article, “Stress hurts relationships” by John M. Grohol Psy.D., he says:

“When under increased stress, we feel perceived slights, for instance, by our significant other more acutely.”

We tend to interpret neutral comments from our loved one as slights, or we might interpret them as negative or threatening.

In another article titled “Is Stress Hurting Your Relationship? Here’s How To Fix It” by Laura Newcomer she said:

“One study that followed 80 couples over four years found that those who experienced more stress outside of their relationship reported feeling less comfortable and less close with their partner. They also felt less sure of the relationship than folks who experienced less stress.”

So again, they’re evaluating their relationship more negatively, and that’s kind of a mental interpretation or perception.

The last category, relationally – and you can probably Google ‘signs of stress’ and you’ll find many different lists, and you may even wanna develop a comprehensive list or you may want to identify (that’s one of my points coming up) what you specific stress signs are. So relationally – I kind of mentioned this already, but you may have a shorter fuse, you may have less patience with your significant other. You may focus on the negative, how you’re unhappy and what’s painful. You may be more reactive. You may not be available for connection. You may not be interested in sex, you might communicate less, you might listen less and you might judge more and have a tendency to blame more.

And again, in that same article by Laura Newcomer, she says that you might even feel some attraction towards other people. Research shows we’re more likely to feel attracted to other people when feeling taxed. Anxiety can make us fantasize about being with a different partner and pay less positive attention to the one we already have.

Again, no blame or shame, this is just a recognition that these can be signs that alert you “Danger! Danger!” We wanna use these as constructive indicators to auto correct, to correct course.

As I mentioned, in the field of psychology we know that people typically regress when under stress; their level of functioning and their skill level is dramatically lowered.

Just to illustrate this even more, John M. Grohol, the Psy.D. who wrote ‘Stress Hurts Relationships’ says:

“Ability alone, as the researchers note, does not ensure that you’ll be able to respond appropriately in your relationship. In may be necessary but not sufficient to have good relationship skills, because you may not be able to draw upon those skills when under increased stress. The researchers also found that a person’s relationship abilities – like relationships themselves – wax and wane over time. They are not these static skills and  exist in some vacuum. In times of stress, the research suggests that we can’t always call upon our positive relationship or communication skills. The stress can overwhelm us and our abilities.”

In a lot of ways, stress will activate the fight/flight or freeze response in our nervous system. If you’ve heard my podcast, you may have heard me mention this. So one of the things that we wanna be acutely aware is are we in that fight/flight or freeze response, because we are not operating with all of our systems on board. We can’t think in our higher level of thinking. We’re responding from a primal place of our being and from more of a survival mechanism.

One of the ways to get all of our systems back on board is to activate the relaxation response, our parasympathetic nervous response. One of the best ways to do that is through relaxation exercises.

Now I’d love to just move into the six ways I have for you today to combat stress in your relationship. The first one is to know your stress cues or your warning signs. You may wanna look at these lists of symptoms and really think back in your life during stressful times and you might be able to recognize patterns.

I can remember, I think I’ve mentioned recently that I’ve run a team program for several years and I would remember all the preparation. I essentially enlisted volunteers, I had teachers that worked for me and I trained them, I developed a curriculum, I did all of the event planning – it was an enormous amount of work. And I would get stressed right before the retreats, sometimes so much that my eyes started twitching. So I know for myself that if my eyes start to twitch, then I am extremely stressed. That’s probably a really good cue to let me know that I’m too stressed.

Now, a subtler version as I already mentioned is I typically carry a lot of stress in my neck and shoulders, partly because I’m doing a lot more sitting; as a therapist, as a coach I sit with people, I sit and I do my virtual work with people, and I’m on the computer quite a bit. So I’m in the sitting position, I tend to have this leaning towards people and it creates this posture that I don’t is probably that healthy. Not only that, I tend to feel responsible and when I go into stress I go into a perfectionist place. That’s one of my patterns, I get a little perfectionistic. Which again, as I mentioned before, stress begetting stress or stress producing more stress – perfectionism is a huge cause of stress. So these are just some of my indicators.

One of the other things I typically do is I will become a little more accident-prone. I will be so wrapped up in my head and distracted that I’ll be more likely to bump into things or drop my silverware, or that type of thing. I’ll also smile less, I’ll laugh less and I’ll breathe a little more shallow, and I’ll feel not as emotionally connected. My range of emotions becomes a little more flat.

So these are just my cues that I know about myself. I would love for you to consider what happens for you when you get stressed – physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally. What are the things that let you know, cue you to let you know you may be experiencing more stress than you thought. You might be able to even ask your partner, “What do you know about me when I get stressed?” If you’ve been together for a really long time, your partner might have some good feedback.

I think it can also be really helpful to look at what happens in your relationship where one or both of you are stressed. Do you fight more, do you have less sex? Do you communicate less? Do you feel less connected?

I mentioned several podcasts ago that my husband lost his father (his stepfather). I say father because he was in his life since he was three. He had his father that he had a relationship with who also passed in 2006, but his stepfather he lived with his entire life, so stepfather doesn’t quite capture it. So it’s been a really big deal, and on the stress inventory that I mentioned, losing a really close loved one gets a pretty high score. So my husband has been living life and moving on and also grieving, and he has been less available for connection. We are connecting, but it’s less than what he normally is available to.

Part of it is just understanding and not blaming him. Just recognizing that this is one of the things that he experiencing right now. He’s grieving, and in the stress of that, he’s less available.

So my first invitation to you, I guess I’m asking you to identify your stress cues, your symptoms, and identifying what happens in your relationship when your relationship is impacted by stress from one or both of you. When my husband’s more stressed, his fuse is a little shorter. He tends to get a little toned with me much more quickly, more agitated.

When we can identify that we’re stressed, the first thing you wanna do… Most of us will know if it’s an external stress, we’ll know why we’re stressed. “I lost my stepfather” or “I was fired from my job”, “I’m building a business”, or whatever it is, we’ll know why. But if you don’t know why, you wanna really take this opportunity to identify what’s the source of your stress. If it’s an internal emotional thing, that’s gonna be incredibly key.

In a lot of my podcasts I focus on this, so I’m not gonna focus on that too much today, but again, you can find a lot of the resources in my previous podcasts around how to work with identifying emotion in yourself.

So dealing with external stress, one of the second things I have here is holding the bigger picture in mind. Sometimes when we experience stress, we are fighting it. We’re struggling with the fact that it’s happening. We don’t want it to happen, we don’t like it, so we almost fight with the reality that it’s happening, and some people would argue that that’s the source of suffering – struggling with pain. However, if we can accept that there’s pain and stress in this current circumstance, then we’re much more likely to flow with what’s happening. So this really points to accepting, because if we can accept that it’s a stressful time and come to terms with that, it almost invites this sense of “Okay, how are we gonna deal with it? What are we gonna do about it?” But if we’re fighting with the reality that it’s stressful, there’s a lot of angst there, there’s a lot of struggle with not wanting to feel it.

I know when I was little, if I felt physical pain I almost tried to stop breathing and I almost pushed away, I didn’t wanna feel the physical pain. I didn’t wanna really breathe into it and really feel the pain, I wanted to get away from the physical sensation. It was so painful if I hurt my finger or had an injury… But that act of trying to disconnect from the pain, we’re almost fighting with it, which again, a lot of people would say creates more pain.

If we can come to terms and accept, “This is our current circumstance. How can we come together in this? How can we support each other?”, recognizing your partner is not to blame. If there’s stress, the fact that there’s stress is not a character flaw. They’re not to blame, but it’s like everybody deals with stress differently. Some people need to sleep more, some people need to watch TV and just kind of check out and zone out. Some people need to cry. I know there’s been instances where I’ve been a part of a process group and I didn’t even realize how stressed I was, and if I got into this safe process group, meaning it’s intended to really provide a space for people to open up and share… This could have been a supervision group that I’d done.

In the field of psychology there’s a huge – I subscribed to this… That I wanna do my personal work, especially being in the field that I’m in, because I want to be as clean and clear as I can be if I’m gonna assist other people in their emotional growth. So there’s a huge practice of me doing my work, or a therapist doing their work. Most PhD programs or masters level programs, they require you to do a certain amount of hours of your own therapy. So regardless of what the venue, I can remember a few times being in – over the course of my life, this is something I’ve known to be true many different times, where I didn’t realize how stressed I was, and I got into this more safe group of emotional sharing, and I would just cry.

I remember one time I was in Florida, I was going to undergrad school and I went to this group… It was a young adult group and it was very much about personal growth and these process things that I’m talking about. I was a newcomer, I was the first one there, and I never went back because I was so embarrassed that I cried a lot. I was so stressed; I didn’t realize how stressed I was, and once I dropped into that real emotional holding in that safe community space, I just wept. I felt like I needed to release all this stress that I was feeling. And everybody was really sweet and really welcoming, and very sensitive and understanding, yet I… I was young and I didn’t know, I just kind of felt embarrassed that that was my first impression. But it was what it was, and I can recognize that throughout different phases in my life sometimes I just need to cry. Now, knowing what I know, if I’m ever in that instance, sometimes I will just say “I cry really easily. I’ve been under a lot of stress and this is just one of the ways that I process this – releasing through tears.”

Along with acceptance, it can be really helpful to consider compassion. If we’re thinking about this number two point, how to hold the bigger picture in mind. If we’re recognizing this is a phase that we’re in and we’re not at our highest… Stress has such a big impact on us that we’re unable at times to be as skillful and as productive as we normally are. So if we can recognize that we’re doing the best that we can, or your partner is doing the best that he or she can – when I think that thought, that he’s doing the best that he can, my heart softens. I’m not judging him that he should be doing better, or he’s got a character flaw… If I recognize he’s struggling, he’s grieving, then I can be more compassionate; I wanna help.

Again, people have different ways of dealing with stress, different ways of dealing with grief, and if I forget that he’s grieving, I could be easily expecting or judging him. But if he’s in this really important phase of grief, I wanna be able to support that, I wanna be able to have his back and hold compassion for that. If he’s not available to connect, okay. Sure, I would rather have it differently, but given the circumstances, I wanna support him. That is way more important to me than my immediate desire of connecting with him.

Which goes to my third point underneath this second point – this invites a level of flexibility. If we’re perceiving that this is a phase, it’s temporary, then we could be a little more flexible. If he’s not available, okay. It doesn’t have to mean anything huge; it just means right now he’s not available to connect, and I do something different and I can be with him, but just not as deeply engaged as we might be. So it requires me to be a little more flexible.

I’ve had many clients that talk about one of the ways they like to help in stress is to lighten the load for their partner. What can I do to help? Let me make dinner. Let me do the laundry. Let me pick up the kids. Let me help take the load off. There’s some flexibility in the agreements or the roles that you typically take.

I also think it can be helpful to have a sense of forgiveness, that they’re not at their best. Your partner is not at their highest place; this isn’t the highest version of themselves. And that yeah, we might want it to be different, but given the way it is, we accept – coming back to that acceptance. It doesn’t mean that this is the way I prefer, but I can give you the benefit of the doubt; I can be flexible. I can kind of pick my battles, so to speak. If it brings up some really serious points in that, again, I have many podcasts that can talk about how to engage in that conversation. But if we’re sticking strictly to stress, are there things that you can give your partner the benefit of the doubt in and forgive? They’re imperfect, as we all are imperfect, or fallible. We wanna offer that grace, that forgiveness if we can.

So the other thing here is enlisting resource, or getting support. I think it’s really important in this day and age to ask family, ask friends for support, or do a trade with somebody, or hire extra help. I think a lot of the times, especially if people move away from their extended family, they don’t have as much support. I know people who have young children feel this the most; they don’t have grandma and grandpa to call. They don’t have two sets of grandma and grandpa to call, and you feel like you kind of have to do it all on your own.

I was getting my hair styled this week and I was talking to my hairstylist; she has a young child and we were talking about this, because her family lives elsewhere. Here in Santa Barbara she doesn’t have extended family. And she talked about being sick one night. Her and her husband were both very, very sick and she got worried. She was like, “I don’t know who to call to help take care of my daughter in case she needs something in the middle of the night.” She ended up working it out, but it’s not as easy when you don’t have family nearby.

Or when my husband and I lived in Boulder and we were getting married, there was this trade – I had a friend tell me about it. I didn’t actually engage in it too much, but it was this trade – I have to look up the name – commerce where basically you could… I think I did some dog walking, and then I ended up getting a woman who did event planning, and she and her boyfriend came out to support our wedding. We were up in the Rocky Mountains and she put together our flower arrangements, she did a lot of setup for us, and that essentially was trade work. I didn’t have to pay her, I had done some other things for her for a year here or there. I love dogs and I think my husband came and walked some dogs with me. I don’t know that I would do that now, but many years ago that seemed like a great opportunity, so sometimes we can trade – whether or not it’s a formal organization that helps you trade, or if it’s just someone in your community that feels like you could do an exchange to be able to get support, get resources… Clean your house, or whatever it is that you’re needing during this stressful time, I think that it can be helpful to get support, and I think sometimes we try to do it all on our own.

I am looking at the time as we’re approaching the 45-minute mark here, and instead of rushing through the four additional ways of how to combat stress in your relationship, I’m going to do a second podcast episode on this topic. The good news about this is if you have any questions or specific things you want me to speak about, you can e-mail me or contact me and let me know so I can leave that into the second episode. But again, I will have four more ways for you to combat stress in your relationship. Essentially, I wanna help you develop a stress protocol, so that you know how to deal and really set course to managing your stress so that stress doesn’t have a damaging effect on you and your relationship.

I hope you’ll check out the next episode… Again, this will be part two of How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship. If you have any questions or want me to speak about something specific about stress, feel free to reach out to me. Again, you can e-mail me at [email protected], or you can find the ways to reach me on my website, which is DrJessicaHiggins.com. Click on Contact, and you can find the ways to reach me there.

Thank you so much for listening. I so enjoy spending this time with you and helping you feel more conscious and growthful and successful in your relationship.

Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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