ERP 075: How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship – Part II

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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 listening today’s podcast episode. It’s episode 75 and it’s titled How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship. This is part two. Last week I published part one, and I’ll go over just to recap. If you missed that episode, I highly recommend you listening to it first. It will give you more of a foundation for what we’re going to be talking about today.

Before we get started, I just wanted to follow up. I’ve been suggesting to you to join me in a monthly call which would give us an opportunity to joining community, as well as for me to offer laser coaching to you directly. At the same time I only want to offer this if enough people are interested.

So over the last couple of weeks I’ve been inviting you to reach out to me, and the number of you have requested this call, some of which you’ve asked, ”Is it okay that I’m single? Do I need to be in a relationship?” And anyone and everyone is welcome if you have the interest of improving your relationship skills and just again being in this community of growth-oriented relationship.

So at this time I am still accepting people to put on my interested list and once I get enough… I’m actually looking for a pretty substantial number so that when I do provide – because I know most people aren’t going to always be able to make the time slot, so I want it to be rich and dynamic, and I would love enough of you to be interested so that it’s, again, a rich and dynamic and really valuable experience for you.

In the meantime, I am excited about offering live coaching. The way that I’m going to do this, for people who have questions and want me to respond to your questions, you have two choices now. You can e-mail me or contact me with your question and a little bit about your situation and I will create a podcast episode, as I’ve been doing. You’ve seen many examples of that.

The second option I’m really excited about is I’m going to be scheduling with people so that I have an opportunity to meet with you live. And this will give you an opportunity to get direct coaching live with me. And this will be a 30-minute, 45-minute mini session so to speak, a laser coaching session. And I will record this session and offer it as a podcast episode.

So you’ll get my laser coaching in the understanding that it will be recorded and available for people to listen to. And again, this would be serving other people. Most people are going to be able to really relate to your experience. I mean I don’t mean to globalize, we all have a unique, individual experience, and most of the time the themes that are operating through the experience are common, that we can all relate to. So I think that this will be a great opportunity, I’m really excited about it.

If you’re interested, reach out to me, we’ll schedule a time, and again, I’ll offer that direct coaching and we’ll have a call together and I’ll record it and play it as a podcast episode. If you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity, you can e-mail me at [email protected] or you can contact me on my website which is drjessicahiggins.com and click on Contact, and you can find the ways to reach me there.

For today’s podcast episode, again this is How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship, and this is part two. So again, we are talking about external stress. This is not the stress of your relationship dynamics and the pain and the hurt and the fears and insecurities. Many of the podcast episodes that I discuss really target those pain points.

Today, we are talking about how to deal with external stress. So in one of the articles that I read, and this was by Laura Newcomer, and she wrote an article “Is Stress Hurting Your Relationship?”, she talks about up to 98% of American adults report feeling some form of stress on a regular basis.

Now, that’s a pretty high statistic. I didn’t actually research that statistic but I do think, I would say, just intuitively or anecdotally, I’d say, seventy-five percent to ninety plus percent are very stressed with the external stressors. This can be with career, work, finances, extended family, it can be school, it can be health, it can — I mean there’s a lot of things that can be extremely stressful in life. Traffic… Right?

My husband and I went down to Huntington Beach for a family event and it’s typically supposed to take about like 2 hours, maybe a little bit more from Santa Barbara, and  we had traffic on and off the whole way down there and it was stressful. Luckily, we just made the best of it and had enjoyed the time together, but it’s not fun to commute in extensive traffic, so that’s an example of external stress.

So in my first episode I basically defined stress, I talked about the damage of stress, I talked about an inventory that helps you look at how many of life events you’ve experienced in the last year, twelve months, and it gives you a sense of this cumulative stress because I think when we’re living in the moment, we’re more aware of the current stress but we underestimate how much stress lives in our body.

I was talking to a friend, she was over for dinner Wednesday night and she was — she’s growing her business and we are talking about just stress, and I told her that when I was doing my pre-doc internship, so it was a full time… I was working at San Jose State University in their College Counseling Center and I worked there 40 hours, and I was finishing and doing my dissertation in addition to that internship. And, you know, it was an enormous amount of stress, all the deadlines and all the things that I was doing, it was enormous.

And I told her, I said, “I think it took me about a year and a half to work that out of my system, just the stress.” And I am sure that there was some accumulation of stress, because that was a five-year program that I actually did in four years. And just seeing — I mean the national average of finishing a PhD program, I think, is 7 to 8 years, so I was trying to do the lesser of two evils. I was trying to get it done as quickly as possible.

Mind you, I’d already done a master’s program, a separate masters program. So I’m like, ”Enough of those already. I just want to get done with this.” And  I did quality work and quality training and I really buckled down and I really did a lot of work and there’s a side effect to it. I remember – I didn’t even intend to talk about all this, but I remember I was laying in bed one morning, I was with my husband and I was reflecting on, I think I was in that last year and I was like, ”Gosh… If I would have known what it would have required of me and what it would’ve taken, I don’t know that I would have signed up.” I mean, granted, that was in the moment; I probably would say yes now, but I had no idea the feat that it would be for me. And again, I had no idea, and so it was enormous.

So again, coming back to this week, I had a had a friend over and I was just describing to her. It doesn’t just automatically work itself out, right? The cortisol in your system,  all the stress that you’ve been holding in your muscles and the tension, the breathing patterns, the emotional tone – all of that takes time. And then if we have repetitive stress that piles on and we’re not ever getting a break, that can be incredibly damaging to our health and our relationship, so we’re looking at that.

Again, this episode isn’t to scare you or overwhelm you, but it is to alert you that these stressors do have an impact, and we have a tendency to deny them and overlook them, and at great costs. So I want to, again, just invite a more mindfulness approach here, to be more aware of what you’re going through, and especially as it relates to your relationship.

So one of the things I talked about to describe stress is also the stress curve. So again, check out podcast episode one, and you can check out the show notes to get a visual of that stress curve as well as the signs and symptoms. So all parts of our being — you’re going to get symptoms and signs that you are in the stress zone, and these are essentially warning signs, letting you know “Alert! Alert! You’re in the stress zone, pay attention!”

I gave a lot of examples for that. Again, in order to get to today’s content, I’m not going to review that too much, but I’ll give you just a couple examples. So I said for myself I tend to get a little more distracted and my husband will sometimes say, ”Are you listening?” I guess he can tell when I’m like half listening and I’m usually — I have a lot of training to be a really good listener, right? I do this in my career where I’m like super focused and I’m taking in and I’m really with you and giving you my undivided attention. So he can tell when I’m like half there or distracted or what that looks like in my body is I’ll be a little more fumble. I’ll fumble things or I’m not looking.

How it shows up in volleyball – I think I told you guys I play a lot of beach volleyball – is I stopped looking at the ball as it’s approaching my arms. So if I’m going to bump it or pass it, it’s the first hit on the player side, the team’s side, and it’s basically you have your two arms in front of you clasped. Your hands are clasped and you have your forearms extended and you’re pushing the ball and you’re lifting the ball up.

That’s probably not the right language but… So essentially, you want to watch the ball hitting your platform of your arms. And if you don’t, if the ball has a lot of spin on it, you can so-called ”shank the ball”, which means it’s not going to go where you want it to go. So when I’m stressed or preoccupied, I’ll have a tendency to stop looking at the ball a foot away from my arm, I’ll just assume I have it. And if it’s got a lot of spin or wind, if it’s really windy, that last look matters. So it’s just an example of how that shows up for me.

I encourage you to look at that, signs and symptoms, and if you’re really interested, you could also Google signs and symptoms of stress and really tailor your own list, because you want to know how you show up in stress and you want to get to know your signs. There’s a reason why those signs are alerting you. You want to pay attention to that.

So I offered you in the first episode two ways of the six ways to combat stress in your relationship. And the first one is kind of what I’m recommending right now, which is to know your stress cues or your warning signs. Knowing your individual stress cues, like how you know you’re stressed, how you feel it in your body, what do you feel emotionally, so I try to cover all different aspects of your being, and I gave you examples around how you can do that. But you also want to know your partner, because if you’re in a relationship, they’re also going to be going through stress at times.

So my husband works for the Santa Barbra School District here in Santa Barbra, and they are about to start school next week. He works in the technology iPad. They have a pilot program one-to-one, where each student is getting an iPad. And so there is this whole support and how they assign the student the iPad and the whole management around it, it’s a huge thing. And so they have a lot of preparation, like 10x-ing the amount of devices this year than they did last year. I think, don’t quote me, but I’m pretty sure they’ve upped their devices significantly.

So it’s stressful right now. There are things that I’m doing to try to support him and there’s also ways that I’m trying to acknowledge, and this goes to my second point, which is holding the bigger picture, right? I’m trying to think, “Okay, it’s the start of the school year, he might be a little less available, he might be a little more grumpy”, and to know that we deal with stress differently.

So for myself, I like to feel supported, I like to feel cared for, I like to have the space to process and communicate. I think I shared I sometimes need a good cry in my last episode, where my husband benefits from alone time. And I have found even more this week that if I just kind of let him be, that that actually allows him to work some of it out of his system. Then he’ll come to me when he’s ready to connect.

Where I think in the past, I might be right there letting him know I’m here if you’ll need anything or “Can I help?” or I’m eager to assist. But I think that eagerness perhaps doesn’t give him the full space to drop into whatever he needs to to release and decompress some of that stress. So it’s interesting, he’s actually seeking me more out, since I’m giving him a little more space. And there are some other things I’m doing to support him, and I’ll talk about that in a moment.

I’m essentially trying to recap my first two points. So again, in last week’s podcast episode I talked about how to you know your stress cue. This is for yourself as well as your relationship and your partner. And the number two point is how to hold the bigger picture in mind. This has to do with accepting that your partner is not flawed; they’re going through stress and the way that you and your partner deal with stress is different. And I offered a lot of points around how to hold this bigger picture in mind, which has to do with compassion, flexibility, forgiveness, resourcing. So again, I encourage you to check out part one to this topic.

For today, we are going to continue with the tips of how to combat stress in your relationship. Assuming you’ve done some inventory and some reflection around knowing your stress cues, you’ve gotten some kind of tenets around how to work with stress and how to work with your partner. Number three is to learn how to reset and refuel. This is both individually and as a couple.

It is so interesting, I’ve have been watching way more TV than I normally do because the Olympics have been on, and watching these athletes perform. I’ve been focused highly on the beach volleyball given that that’s my sport, but just catching different events and just the athleticism and knowing the devotion and the dedication, and all the work that’s gone into their sport is mind-blowing, it’s inspiring, it’s awe-striking, it’s just crazy to see these athletes perform at this level.

So the other thing that’s occurred to me watching specifically beach volleyball is how much pressure is on them. So the American female beach volleyball team this year was Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross. And they’re incredibly strong, very skilled and talented players. They lost to the Brazil team as they’re kind of trying to get to gold, so they basically got bombed out of the gold or the silver, and they were then contending for the bronze.

And it’s just occurring to me that these athletes have to deal with so much pressure, right? Not only how do they deal with losing, because the way that beach volleyball works too is they how pool play, so you don’t necessarily have to win all your games to advance. So you have the top, I believe, two players of each bracket — or actually, don’t quote me on that either… But you have your top teams advance to the playoffs. So you don’t have to even win all your games to advance, but once you’ve advanced it’s basically if you lose you’re out, or if you make it to the actual finals then you would play one more time for bronze. That’s how it works in the Olympics, at least.

So these players, these athletes, how they work with losing, how they deal with the pressure… I mean, just being at the Olympics in itself, right? Some of these other athletes and other events, it’s enormous amount of pressure; feeling like they’re playing for their country or all their family or all the people that are believing in them, that’s a lot of expectation.

So it just dawned on me. I was like, ”Man, that’s a lot of stress,” right? And it requires you as an athlete to manage that stress, because again, if we look at that stress curve, we want to be in peak performance and there’s a certain amount of stress that’s good, that allows you to be at your optimal performance, but too much stress leads to not great things at all. So it’s just amazing. I’ve heard interviews about athletes and how they deal with stress, I’ve seen articles and it’s stuff that we know. It’s how to mentally get your mind right, how to put things in perspective, how to be positive.

Some athletes have a psychologist that they work with, and visualization, and their thinking patterns, their belief system. Also, people talk about quiet time and, you know, “I’m prepared physically, now I just need to get my emotion and my mental state just really dialed in”, and they do that through quiet time or taking a hot bath or reading or journaling,  utilizing the breath to calm the body. That’s huge.

I heard an announcer on one of the finals games on the beach volleyball, she was talking about there’s this sweet spot. As a player if you’re too relaxed, you’re not going to play at your best, you’re not going to play at your ability, you’re not — you know, your muscles aren’t as tense as they need to be. But if you’re too tense or too excited or too nervy, then you’re not going to play well either. So she talked about techniques that players do to get themselves more excited and she talked about clenching the jaw and that that increases that level of up energy, or she talked about utilizing the breath to calm down if a player is too excited.

So these players are constantly managing their inner world, and there’s a lot at risk. I mean, this is their work, this is their profession, so they have to manage their stress. It’s critical for their performance. But again, if we go back to the statistic of  the high percentage and the statistic that Laura Newcomer quoted of 98% of adults, American adults are living with a large amount of stress on a regular basis… Again, I think we have a tendency to overlook it and surpass it, and just think, “Oh, it will get better.” We don’t attend to it.

So this is my trying to plea of how important it is for us to learn what helps us reset, what helps us refuel. And what I’m about to say is probably not going to sound that surprising to you, but what I want to encourage you to consider is things that really make a difference for you. So some things are going to matter for others… Some people love listening to music. It has an impact on their inner state and their inner being, right? You see these swimmers, a lot of them come into the aquatic center and they’ve got their headphones on, right? There’s something they are listening to, whether or not it’s music or affirmations, but they’re really helping, they’re trying to get into that very sweet spot of enough stress to keep them really active but not overstressed, where they’re relaxed enough to be at their peak. So music is something that people — and just being creative — really find a lot of benefit in.

A big common one is exercise. Having some outlet that you actually enjoy that you would want to do. Not that’s work, something that allows you to feel better afterwards and that you can say yes to when you’re stressed. Because if it’s a vigorous workout that feels stressful, that’s maybe not going to feel inviting to you when you’re already stressed. We want to look at things that fill your cup.

Rest, sleep and relaxation can be huge. So one of the main ways that we process cortisol, that’s the stress hormone in our body, is through sleep. That’s one of the major ways… Your body’s way of processing the excess cortisol is sleep. So rest, right?

John Lubbock, I’m going to quote him here. He says, ”Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

Just even reading that quote, and I think about the times where I’ve been in that space of idleness, so to speak, and how healing it can feel… There’s times where my husband and I will not have music on or we won’t have the TV on and we’ll just sit together. I’m like, ”Wow, we don’t do this very often and it feels so good to not have all these sounds around us, just to have quiet.”

Social support can be a huge relief to stress when we can be in community and fill that bond, as well as being in nature. Often times nature provides an opportunity to just shift our perspective, shift our mindset. We’re so in our own world and then we can get into nature, it’s almost like we open our eyes to the world that we live in and beyond. So one of the things that my husband and I have loved doing that we find as a huge stress reliever is we like to go to hot springs.

Fortunately in the areas that we’ve lived, we’ve been able to access hot springs, so we did visit many places in Colorado like Glenwood Hot Springs, Pagosa Springs, Strawberry Hot Springs. And now that we live in Santa Barbara, we know that if we go North to San Luis Obispo area, we can go to Sycamore Hot Springs, which is in a hotel resort area, or we can go up to Ojai and there’s some hot springs there as well.

What this does for us is it really gives us a chance to be in nature, to be in hot, warm, mineral water that has a lot of health benefits. I’m even remembering a couple that we were friends with in Colorado went to – oh, where was it? I think it was in New Mexico and I think it was Ojo Caliente, and they had a bath of pure minerals of different types. It was really great, you got to go into different areas where they had different baths that had prominent minerals of different types, so it was kind of funny we got to kind of experiment like a tasting room, but with hot springs. So that was really fun. And they even had like a mud one where you could kind of rub mud all over you.

So my husband and I just really enjoy… This is very relaxing. Obviously, it relaxes the muscles and your breathing in the fresh air, being in nature and these minerals are having a positive impact and it just really is a devoted time for recuperation and restoration, and that’s just something that we really enjoy and we don’t always make time for it, right? I was thinking recently we should do it once a month and I think up until now it’s once every few months, right? So that’s something that I can incorporate a little more mindfully.

From the article Stress Hurts Relationships by John M. Grohol, he says, ”The takeaway for couples is simple — each individual needs to learn to deal with stress in positive ways outside of the relationship, through activities, to minimize the buildup of stress in the first place – regular exercise, and other stress-relief activities. No matter how well you function in everyday life, all the skills in the world may go to hell in a hand-basket when stressed out.”

I like that, because he’s basically alerting us, again, to the power of stress and how much of a toll it can take on us. Again, this is all under the point three, learn to reset and refuel, knowing what really works for you.

Number four would be have a stress protocol. This is how as a couple and for yourself individually, you can have some go-to. So if you know your signs when you get stressed and how you know, you get stressed, and then if you know there’s certain things that work for you… Again, you might not have the inclination to do it, but again, if you’ve done some forethought around this and you’ve done some pre-planning, you can resort to a so-called a ”stress protocol” that you can pull out and resort to. I think this can be particularly helpful in your relationship, because this will allow you the experience to feel like you’re on the same team,  you’re working together. So it’s not you against the whole world, it’s you and your person dealing with a stressful time.

Again, if you have a plan or you have some things that you can turn to that help, what you know about yourself and what you know about your partner, I think that will help assist you in navigating these really stressful times. Do you need to scale back and say no? Simplify, take on less, do less, right? What’s the bare minimum?

I think I made it a little harder for myself this week, so one of the things that I did in knowing that this week was going to be tremendously busy and stressful for my husband, I said I will do all the grocery shopping, I’ll do all the meal planning, I’ll do all the cooking. And that’s great, I’ll just totally take that whole part over. And he’s like, ”Fabulous.”

Well, I tend to do a little more than I need to, so I have new recipes that I haven’t made. I have like three or four new recipes, all of which require a lot of cutting and sauces. They’re great meals, they are really clean, they are healthy, they are nutritious, they are yummy… Well-intended. And it totally took a huge part of my time, which I wanted to give, but it was a little more than anticipated, and it just has taken a lot to execute that. So simplify, right?

I think that it could’ve been way easier to just resort to things I’ve done before or just really simple, simple meals. And we’ve had a lot of guest over, which I wouldn’t take back, because I do think that social support, even though it feels like extra work sometimes, I think, the benefit of that is really healthy. So again, what can you say no to, take on less if people are asking favors, just letting them know you’re not available, maybe you’ll be more available at another time. And again, just providing space to be in communication with your partner and reevaluating. “Okay, so I said I was going to do X, but I’m not sure that this is going to really work this week, can we renegotiate? Or I said I was going to get this thing done, would you be okay if I get it done next week?” Again, we don’t want to feel so alone and overwhelmed and burdened.

So under this point four, have a stress protocol – again, I have listed emotionally, physically, mentally and relationally. These are four aspects of your being that you can think about in having a stress protocol. So if you think about emotionally, if you can say yourself or to your partner, ”Wow, it looks like you’re feeling tense or it looks like you’re seeming stressed. What would help you de-stress? What would help you get back into the green, so to speak?” And that can be something you can ask yourself or you can ask your partner. And again, this takes a prioritizing of de-stressing, right? This is with that understanding that it’s important.

Physically, I mentioned my husband benefits from some real alone time and quiet time, so just kind of for me to give him more space and do my own thing. And again, like I mentioned a moment ago, sometimes women physically need a little more sleep. Actually I didn’t mention that, I mentioned the cortisol. But there’s a known fact – I don’t have any research to cite, but women typically need a little more sleep, especially when stressed than men do.

Mentally – this is where we can support one another. The stress protocol is, okay, if I’m getting into negative thinking or catastrophizing, or thinking worst-case scenario, how do I remember and reframe so that I’m not overlooking the positives, I’m not de-emphasizing all the good things that are happening in our lives. Or even with your partner, helping them have some balanced thinking, helping them keep things in perspective.

And again, there’s timing with this, but I think it can be a really good to think about in your stress protocol. Because again, if you know yourself to go to a really negative place, how can you support the mental outlook there, right? Expectations of yourself. I think I’ve told you guys I tend to get perfectionistic when I’m stressed, which does not help me at all.

So if my husband can reflect back like, ”Wow, this sounds like you’re really doing a lot here; is this helping you?” And I might resort to what I do and I might say yes to this – and not necessarily in a defensive tone; I know that sounded as such, but it could be ”No, this is really important to me and it feels like this is my root and I’m going to stick to it.” And he’ll say, ”Okay.”

That goes back to point to number two, which is just to recognize again the acceptance that we deal with stress differently and really maybe have some flexibility and forgiveness, and allow some space.

Relationally – how can I help? How can we help each other? How can you help me? More communication. So again, one of the things I mentioned – this was actually as we were driving back from Huntington Beach – I offered to really take the lead with a lion’s share of our domestic work throughout the week, so it could take that load off of him even having to think about it. That was my effort to want to support him.

So there’s things that we can do, and if we’re talking about it, there’s again that sensation of “We’re in this together.”

Number five is encouraging health. Again, this goes back to my, I think, biggest global point here, that stress really has an impact, a damaging impact on our health and our relationships. So if we can prioritize our health, then we’re going to prioritize distressing or managing our stress.

Again, these Olympic athletes, they don’t have a choice, I would guess. I mean maybe they do, but it’s a high priority to maximize and target that peak performance spot, so managing their stress is critical, where I think the average American can get away with those signs and symptoms of kind, of ignoring those until it gets too severe, and we don’t want to get to that place. I mean, again, they say that most of our diseases and illnesses are caused by stress, so I want to emphasize the prioritizing of health here.

Having each other’s back. So if your partner is stressed, how can you show up for them? And this is easier when it’s temporary, right? It’s easier for me to say, ”I’ll do the lion’s share of our domestic work this week”, because it’s a week, right? But if it were a year, I don’t know that I could sustain that. But if the intention is to want to help, I think the communication here can get collaborative, right? If you’re on the same team, if you’re trying to encourage, I want you to be healthy.

And I can even think of the time my husband was out of work for a year and he was under a lot of stress. We had to have several phases and communicate and process what that was like for us to negotiate. That was a huge stressor for him to lose his job and how we dealt with that. So that was definitely more chronic, meaning it lasted a lot longer than just a week.

I have clients that deal with a tremendous amount of stress and many of them talk about feeling so vulnerable and overwhelmed by the stress, and basically they’re sharing with me while their significant other is with them, how much they’re caring, how overwhelmed they are, how stressed they are. And then the relationship tension and the dynamic feels as though their partner doesn’t have their back or they’re kicking them while they’re down, right? ”I’m hurting, I’m struggling and then my partner’s at me and it feels like they are kicking me while I’m down.” And I don’t at all ever experience that that partner is intending to kick them while they’re down, it’s more the way they relate, it feels like that.

So my work is to shift those dynamics and help them have a new way of relating to each other. But when we are dealing with this much stress, that’s what it can feel like. So again, I think some of the earlier points support this number five, encouraging health, knowing again that people deal with stress differently. So if you’re encouraging health, like you want to support your partner to execute their stress plan, their stress protocol, or as a couple you want to initiate… “It seems like we’re experiencing more stress than usual, let’s look at how we can do this.” So initiating communication, knowing what helps so you can really show up for one another. You know what to do, you know what to kind of turn to. Most people want to help, they just have no idea how, or the ways that they try to help don’t work, right? They feel frustrated, they feel like, ”My hands are tied. I want to help but I can’t do anything.”

I was talking to a couple this week, actually a couple couples that were talking about stress and their partner was like, ”I want to help. I just feel like what I’m doing is making things worse.” So if there is a communication, then again we can feel like we’re together a little bit more.

Unbeknownst to me – this was years ago; I want to say… Oh, man, I don’t know. It could have been like eight years ago, and my husband was building a business at that time and I think I was in my internship, now that I think about it, my pre-doc internship that I just described a moment ago. So let’s see – that was in 2009… Yeah, 2008-2009, and it was a particular morning, I was getting ready for my day and he was getting ready for his, and I think we are having breakfast and I could just see in his face how much stress he was under and how much tension and, you know, he just was kind of in it. And I don’t know why I said this, but I said it – ”It sounds like you just need some Reid time.” That’s my husband’s name. “You just need some time for you.” I kind of meant alone time, I meant freedom time to just do whatever you please. And my husband’s a bit of a caregiver or a people-pleaser – not in a bad way; he just is a giver, so he tends to think about people and be pretty generous. So I was inviting him to think about himself, right? I was encouraging his health. And later I think he posted or shared with someone on social media or someone told me later, how big of an impact I had on him.

I think even on social media, I think he might have posted like, “One of the greatest forms of love is when your partner supports you for some self-care time” or something, I don’t know. That’s not at all what he said, but it was of that flavor. And I actually said it kind of in passing. I didn’t have a ton of energy around it for me. I was just really trying to encourage his health and it meant a lot to him. It really, really meant a lot to him.

So we don’t always know how our encouragement to one another makes a difference, and I do think if we’re in a tendency to overlook, this is almost like an accountability partner. It’s someone that can support and remind you, as you can support and remind your partner, if together you’re prioritizing your health.

Last point, number six, is prioritizing your connection. This is key. However small, if you have a lot going on and you try to simplify, even if it just means “Let’s spend 15 minutes. Let’s give each other foot rubs” or “Let’s just really be together, let’s hold each other” or “Let’s go out on the patio” or “Let’s go out in the yard” or “Let’s go for a walk”, but just that intention of being in each other’s energy. Even if you’re drained, you wanna prioritize.

So my husband and I get support occasionally – I think, I’ve mentioned that – and my husband was talking about how I can tend to talk about work. There are times where I don’t even know he’s trying to connect with me, and if we’re just in dialog and I’m talking about where my mind is, I can go to talking about work. Now, I don’t talk about clients – that’s been something true my whole profession – but I can talk about different strategies or different ways that I’m trying to structure my coaching business… There’s lot of things I can talk about.

And he was describing that it is saddening to him, if he is like really intentionally trying to not talk about work, right? He’s just trying to connect with me. And then if I wander off and start talking about work, he feels really disappointed, and I had no idea. So we talked about, ”Let’s just alert each other. Let’s cue each other. Can we talk about having like boundary time, like no technology, no iPhones, no laptops? Not talking about work, let’s just be together” and that we could have boundary time. So that was good for us to identify, and I think its key.

Laughing together. This is really great, where one of you can initiate playfulness. Sometimes my husband says the most absurd things, and he’s trying me to laugh. And I can feel his silliness and his playfulness, and sometimes when I’m stressed or I’m bothered I don’t want to laugh, but I can feel his pool and it invites me into play, and it’s so helpful.

John Gottman calls this repair times. Like, if we were fighting, then that would be him trying to repair with me. But he does it when I’m stressed or trying to get me to lighten up, and it’s very helpful. So how we can play together, be creative together? And again, if we look at what’s the long term benefit or cost, meaning okay, if we fast-forward six months from now and we don’t give any nurture time to our relationship, what’s that going to feel like? What’s the cost of that? What’s the cost of not taking those 15 minutes here or half an hour here or an hour there, what’s that look like six months down the road or a year down the road versus prioritizing connection? What does that look like if we get to nurture in these potent ways, sprinkled throughout our week, cumulative over six months and a year, what does that look like? What does that result in? And again, the communication here is really important.

So again, as I talked about my husband and I processing, I had no idea he felt disappointed and was wanting to connect with me. I did not know that, and that had happened frequently or had happened many times. And I was telling him, “I really would love to know that your intention is to really connect or wanting to be together rather than talking about work.” I wanted to meet him in that, I just had no idea, right? So that communication is so important.

So I’m going to leave you with a quote here, and this is by Sydney J. Harris: ”The time to relax is when you don’t have the time for it.” And I would even say here under this last point, the time to connect with your partner is when you don’t have time for it.

Thank you for listening again, this has been podcast episode 75, How To Combat The Damage Of Stress In Your Relationship Part 2. In summary, the six points are

1. Know your stress cues;
2. Hold the bigger picture in mind;
3. Learn to reset and refuel;
4. Have a stress plan or a stress protocol that can assist you and support you;
5. Encourage health;
6. Prioritize your relationship connection.

So thank you so much again. If you’d like to reach out to me, you can find the ways to reach me on my website. Again that’s drjessicahiggins.com and you can click on Contact and find the ways there. You can also reach out to me to schedule a free direct coaching call with me that will support this podcast. You can also select questions for me to create a podcast episode on, and if you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you.

Thank you again and until next time, take great care.

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