Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: We all experience stress and it's no secret that this stress doesn't stay neatly compartmentalised away from our personal lives. It spills over, affecting how we interact with our partners, often without us realizing it. Today, we'll explore how these external pressures impact our interactions with our loved ones and what happens when our personal stress cup overflows. Plus, we'll discuss practical strategies not only to manage this stress, but also show you how to use your relationship as a safe harbour during turbulent times.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hey, we're Kim and Rog and we're here to show couples how to get the best out of their relationship so they can start living their dream life together.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: We're a West Aussie couple who are living the life of our dreams. We don't entertain the word should, we think about the future as a field of possibilities and we let joy be our compass.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: We've taken the simple idea of working as a team and applied it to our marriage and it's been a game changer, allowing us to work out what truly lights us up in life and to go after it together.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: From living in snowy Japan to starting our own house stripping business achieved some big dreams and most importantly, we feel fulfilled and are having the most fun we've ever had.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Pick conversations from inspiring couples, thoughts from relationship experts and tales from our own lives as we help you to gain the wisdom and skills you'll need to turn your relationship into a real team.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: These are relationship conversations for real people, by real people. So sit back, get comfy in whatever tickles you pickle and enjoy living the team life.
We are all impacted by stress. Good stress and bad stress.
In one of our most popular episodes, we brought the useful tool of the stress cup. The stress cup was a metaphor for how little stresses can build up through the day without us even noticing it. And all of a sudden our cup gets full and starts to overflow. Why this is so important is that stress in other areas our lives, often spills over into our personal relationships. Work life conflict is the top source of stress today and research has shown over and over again that we bring up the stress and strain from work and other areas of our lives into our home. So today we thought we'd talk about stress itself, how it shows up for us the impact of stress and also the impact on relationships. And of course, we're not going to leave you hanging, so we're going to give you some tips on how to notice stress and how to tackle it together as a team.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: This is such an important subject. I think stress for everybody comes up regularly. Our lives are so crazy busy. They really are. And we're in a state at the moment where we're in definitely experiencing a heightened state of stress. And can you tell?
The interesting thing about stress is actually that it can come in so many different forms. Stress can also be excitement, a lot of excitement. So we have a few changes happening in our life, and they are exciting, but they're also stressful. The excitement is stressful. The change is stressful. So being aware of when stress is coming up in the relationship, how it's showing up, talking about it, and making sure you attend to the fact that you have a heightened state of stress going on can be really positive, because otherwise, the opportunity for that outside stress source to seep in and have an impact on your inside relationship is high.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Yeah. No, you're right, babe. We are carrying a lot of stress at the moment. And as we'll talk about later in the episode, our home is our safe harbor away from the stresses of the world. And so this is why it's so important to understand why we stress so much, why our bodies stress so much, how it impacts our relationships, how it impacts our home life, and how we can help our partners alleviate stress.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: All right, so let's jump into the why do we stress? Stress is, as I said, it can be exciting stress. It can be, it can be difficult stress. There's lots of different forms of it, and it's a natural response in our bodies to situations that are causing us to feel more pressure within ourselves. It might be pressure to run, pressure to stay, pressure to do more, whatever it is. And stress is really natural in the sense that it goes back, obviously evolutionary, to the fight flight, freeze response, that response in the body, the stress response where the body gets ready to save itself from, you know, the saber toothed tiger. Today, obviously, the stresses that come up in our lives are not always life threatening, but the body still goes into stress mode. And what happens when it goes into stress mode, that fight, flight, freeze, is that we actually have significant hormonal changes, the primary ones being that we get pumped with adrenaline and cortisol. And adrenaline raises our heart rate, our blood pressure, our energy levels. The cortisol increases, our blood sugar boosts, sends, you know, the blood sugar to the muscles so that they're ready to boosts brain function, and it shuts down non essential functions. So things like your digestive system, they get shut down. So when we're not in a state of stress, we end up with the rest and digest, they call it so that lovely state where your body's doing all the things it should naturally do to maintain homeostasis. So it's base level, it's normal ground level, but when you jump into stress, it gets ready to roll and it sends out some pretty, pretty intense chemicals to do that to get you all fired up for it. Obviously, having those chemicals pumping through your system ongoing, if you have ongoing stresses, can start to actually be damaging to the body.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And this all makes sense back in the caveman, Hunter gatherer, Sabretooth Tiger days that Kim talked about, because you literally had to fight and fend for your life, but after you did that, you just chilled by the campfire and, you know, hunted for nuts and roots and berries and stuff like that. But today we always seem to be in a high state of alert. We've always got information heading towards us. We've got ongoing stresses, we've got bills to pay, we've got mortgages, we've got kids running around crazy, where we are.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Literally stressing me out as you list this.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Well, you're right. And so what happens is that this constant high of cortisol and adrenaline actually starts to impact us in a heap of negative ways.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So let's unpack that a little bit. We thought it would be helpful to sort of break down how stress actually, stress actually impacts our function, our body functions, because that's obviously going to have a huge knock on effect in the home and around our partner and in our relationship.
Let's unpack some of it and we can talk more about that. One of the first things that you'll be able to notice when you're stressed is a decreased ability to concentrate. So you might have heard yourself say something literally like, I can't concentrate today. I can't focus on anything. And if you stop and pause in that moment and think about it, you'll probably notice that you've got some stressors sitting there in the background and they are causing you to be in a state of stress that does not allow you to use the part of your brain that really gives you that, that ability to focus.
So sometimes you'll see things like memory issues popping up. You might start to struggle to remember a task you had to do or the name of someone or. This is a big one for me because I have adhd, I already have really poor short term memory, but if I'm strung out, I just can't even find words and I certainly can't remember tasks. Rog will literally ask me to do something and 10 seconds later, it is goldfish out of there. So it just is very, very hard to remember. Especially if you already struggle with memory. When you're under pressure or overwhelm, you might notice that you have more negative thoughts. You stay in a state of negativity in terms of the lens you put on the world. So you see people on Instagram, and all of a sudden, everyone's got a better life than you. And they're arrogant and they're this and they're that. Rather than appreciating or sitting in a space of gratitude for what you do have, you might experience more anxiety when you're feeling stressed. An increased sense of worry. Worry about everything. You might find yourself waking up in the night, 03:00 a.m. like I did the other night, and thinking for 3 hours about the tasks you had to get done. You might feel more irritable when you're stressed. And that's certainly one that comes up for me. I feel like I have a shorter fuse, like I can't cope with as much, with as much chaos as I normally can.
The restlessness. Obviously, you'll see that with decreased concentration, some people might head into a state of depression when they feel stressed. They might feel completely overwhelmed, and they might end up in a. In a sort of a perpetual state of freeze where they feel like they can't get anything done. And when we stay in that sort of perpetual state of freeze, there is a risk that you head towards depression because you can't move in any direction. You feel completely paralyzed where you are. Some people will experience digestive issues, sort of IB's, diarrhea, constipation. Some people will eat more. I really love a good stress feed. So, you know, tuck into a big bowl of pasta. Carbs, carbs, carby. Because your body craves the quick sugar, hit because it's using all the sugar. And it can certainly head you in an interesting direction. And obviously, drug and alcohol misuse are a common one that we see. We're feeling a bit stressed, maybe all of a sudden we think that we didn't want to drink this week, but we think, oh, having that drink is just gonna really help me right now to cope with how I'm feeling. And once you have that one, well, your inhibition's lowered, and off you go to the next and the next and another one that's super important to actually counter stress. And all that adrenaline, cortisol, is you might stop exercising or just do less exercise. And that's only going to allow those chemicals in the body to run rampant and have an even bigger impact.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I think all those things you just talked about, sweetie, they're really undesirable things that impact you and how you feel about the world and how you act in the world. And, you know, the truth is, it really just does bring the worst out of a stress. And as you just said, when you're stressed, you can't do a lot of the self care things you need to do, not proactively by yourself to actually alleviate stress. And so you start to spiral a bit as well.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And that sort of brings up the idea of how it sort of seeps into your relationship and what it looks like when it does seep into your relationship. And when we're under stress, it definitely has the potential for us to head into that overwhelmed state, that state where we have way less resources at our disposal to cope with different situations coming up. And that can bring out some, some difficult traits in us that can make us feel short, like we said before, and irritable with people. And when we're under that sort of stress, we know socially that we can't spray our bosses or our friends. That's not acceptable.
But in terms of who we can let it all out on, that can often be our partner, because that's the space where we feel like we're safe to do it. So we think about maybe something that sprang to mind when I was thinking about this was how many times in the past someone has said to me, how you going? And on a stressful day I've said, oh, yeah, good, thanks. And thought to myself, that is such a load of crap. I feel absolutely overwhelmed right now. And I just hold that back because we know that we don't necessarily want to share it with that person. But. But if we hold it all in constantly when we get home, there is a risk that when it comes out, it might come out a little fiery and a little faster than we would have liked.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: I totally, sweetie, you know, you're thinking negatively, you're anxious, you're irritable, you're restless, and you're just in that. You're in a bit of a state. But, yeah, your boss isn't going to cop it. Your friends aren't going to cop it. You know, the bus driver's not going to cop it. But do you know who's going to cop it? Your partner and your family. And that, that causes issues. Because when we come home, we're supposed to be on the same team, but instead what happens is we're more irritable. We're depleted of these cognitive resources which normally help us, I guess, get through and be the bigger person when conflicts arise. But instead we're doing the opposite. We're hyperville and we're over sensitive to criticism and we're more likely to pick fights even though we don't want to. How many times have you found yourself sitting there going, why did I say that? I knew that was going to get me into trouble. What am I doing? Why did I bite back? Well, that's because stress has impacted your body and your thought processes and you don't even sometimes have full control of them.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: I think a really great way to think about this is you can't hear properly when you're stressed.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: And you also can't think of properly when you're stressed because you are depleted in both of those areas. Because you haven't got the focus to hear properly. You haven't got the access to the part of your brain that does all of that lovely rational thinking because you're stuck in that stress state. And so you're affected on both sides what you're taking in, but also what you can give back out because you aren't. You can't necessarily process that information well and put it through that good filter. We have our rational brain because you're stuck in the stress state.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: And if you're already having stress and conflict within your relationship, bringing your like, this is just the ongoing issues that every relationship has. When you bring your outside stress in, that just exacerbates it and it can make even the smallest little things ten times worse than they actually are.
What this does, of course then is, as we talk about your relationships, always either in a state of harmony, disharmony or repair. But what this does is when we bring external stress into our relationship, we spend more time in the disharmony phase and we have less capacity to actually repair to get back to the harmony phase. Because it's hard to see things from anyone else's perspective. It's hard to have empathy when you're stressed. And I like to use the analogy of a vice grip. If you're. If stress from the outside world is hammering you, impact you, and stress at home is hammering you and impact you, it feels like the walls are closing in, like you're in a vice grip and you can't get out. And you can see that how over time, this can lead to a lot of overwhelm and people breaking down themselves and the relationship.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it's something we can't avoid, though, right, Rhodes? Like you can't. External stressors are going and we talk. They're going to happen. We talk about this a lot because the reality of life is different seasons of life will bring stresses. You know, we're at an age now where parents are causing stress for a lot of people. Parents are getting older. They are encountering different situations as they age. We're encountering different situations as we age in our role as children. And those external stresses, they're going to be there. They're going to be the different seasons. You know, the season before of stress for our group of peers was really around having very young children. And again, we've sort of moved into different stage now. And I think that it's really important to understand you can't avoid stress. That's not the point. But what we're saying is, and use the vice grip, the external stresses will exist. How do we create the internal safety? So the safety within the relationship so that you don't have both the external stresses bring them home, create ruptures in the relationship and then have internal stresses. And like you said, rog, just feel like you've got nowhere to go and you're going to explode.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: That's right. Because in the end, sweetie, a strong relationship can serve as a safe harbour. Our home with our partner is supposed to be our safe harbour. Supporting each other, finding comfort, being a refuge from life stresses. And what is clear from the research and the experts is that a strong emotional connection is actually the best way to create a harbour. Or as Stan Tatkin calls it, the couple bubble. So here are some practical ways to create a safe harbour in your relationship. So when each of you bring in the outside stress into your relationship, you have a way to support each other through it. So one is identify the stress. Be attuned to your partner's stress. Yes. A free flow of information and talking about the important things during regular catch up is really. Catch ups is really important. But if our partner is withdrawing because of stress, it's really important that you notice that. And we did do an episode on this in five yellow flags for your relationship. The other thing is to make sure you don't take it personally. If you know your partner, if you've noticed your partner's stress but you know they're struggling at work, or the kids are teething or having trouble at school, or their parents or a family member's sick, understand that's not your fault and you're supposed to be there to support them.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: So a key part of this, as with every relationship, Roger, is obviously open communication. You need to be talking to help make this work, to help make that safe harbor exist. You need to share stresses with your partner, tell them what's happening for you, but also invite your partner to share theirs. When we're overwhelmed, bringing up what's happening for us can actually feel quite impossible, because as I said before, you can't process the information, you can't get clear on your thoughts. So if you notice, as you mentioned, Roger, if you notice your partner is feeling stressed out or appearing stressed out, maybe you notice that they're a bit distracted or they've got a bit of foggy brain, then you can invite them to share with you what's happening, invite them to feel safe enough to unburden themselves with what's happening, and have a teammate in that conversation, you know? And when you do have a conversation about stress, whether you initiate it or your partner initiates it, both of you need to be practising, active listening, you know, really giving your partner your full attention, turning your phone off, not teetering back and forth, because there's one sure way to increase stress. That's to offer to listen to your partner and then not pay attention to them. That is just going to make them feel even more alone in this situation. And in terms of that, turn towards each other. We talk a lot about this as a really important key. When you start talking to your partner, you really need to turn towards them in the conversation. And the Gottmans have found that couples who turn towards each other in times of stress, rather than turning away, they build stronger, more resilient relationships with better relationship outcomes. Another thing that we need to think about if we want to build a safe harbor in the relationship to help manage those external stresses, coming inwards is offering emotional support. And that's what I sort of said. In the open communication, you want to be actively listening, but also just that extra step. If you want to build that emotional support, you want to validate them. You really want to validate what the experience that your partner is having, so that then when we validate someone's experience, it says, I see you. You are not alone in this. You do not have to manage this on your own and offer them that affection and that reassurance.
These are small acts that can have a huge impact. Give them a hug, give them a kiss on the cheek, tell them you love them, tell them you're there for them. This is not a big thing you have to do, but it can have a massive impact.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: That's right, sweetie. And the other way you can build a safe harbor in your relationship is when people are stressed outside the relationship and they bring that inside, they'll often withdraw from each other or turn away, which is the opposite of, of course, turning towards. But we're saying, no, no, double down on the relationship. Spend more quality time together. Establish some rituals of connection. Go. Hey, babe, do you know what? I reckon on Wednesday this week, we're gonna go for a coffee and we do that every week until we're feeling a bit better or forever more. Start doing some more shared activities together. Babe, do you know what? This weekend, instead of playing golf with my. With my mates, I'm going to ask mum and dad to come look after the kids and you and I are going to go for a hike together so we can, you know, shoot the proverbial and just, you know, enjoy being outdoors and spending some time together. The other one is plan and problem solved together.
You want those chemicals flowing, those love chemicals flowing during times of stress, to counteract all those stress chemicals. And a way you can do that is actually planning on how you're going to get through the stress and the tough times together. Make a plan for something interesting in the future. Make a plan for a holiday. Make a plan for something silly, it doesn't matter, but if you do it together, you plan for it and then you execute it. Those love chemicals from both, you are going to start to pump through your bodies and you're going to start to feel better. The other thing to do is actually prioritize health and self care together.
Be there for each other. Don't just say, oh, go for a massage, go. We're going to do a couple's massage. Don't just say, oh, why don't you go for a walk? Going, I'm going to come for a walk with you. Hey, is there something you want to do together? Why don't we start playing cards instead of watching tv at 08:00 every night?
[00:22:54] Speaker B: These are so good and I'm so pleased because I feel like we're doing quite a few of them right now to help ourselves. As I said at the beginning that we're in a bit of a stressful, exciting, but stressful state at the moment. And I think that as you talk through these, I feel like we have definitely pivoted into talking more openly about it, validating each other. We're certainly focusing on our self care and prompting each other to do things together that are going to promote wellbeing. So I think that, yeah, that's lovely. And I'm going to hold that in my mind to continue with that because I think it is making a difference for us.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: I love that, sweetie. All right, so what is your gold nugget from today's episode on how outside stress can impact your relationship?
[00:23:44] Speaker B: My absolute favorite part of today was when you said to double down on the relationship. The number one. I think for me, in the past, the number one corrosive outcome of having external stresses leech into the relationship has been that I would then pull away and exacerbate my sense of stress. Feel more alone, feel more overwhelmed.
It's counterintuitive, I think, when you feel stressed, to invest more time in doing stuff, but it really is the way forward to actually reduce your stress. Invest your time in doing the right things and you will reduce your stress. What about you, Roger?
[00:24:26] Speaker A: For me, it's that if your partner is stressed, don't take it personally because we're all stressed, right? And the relationship can be a real safe harbour. And if you show your partner that you're a safe harbour for them in their times of stress, I guarantee you they'll do the same for you.
You're amazing. You've just spent quality time on your relationship.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: Feel like you're on a roll. If you want more living the team life relationship insights and conversations, head over to kimandroj.com where you can find all the show notes as well as tons of other relationship goodies.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: And if you like today's episode, please hit subscribe or let another couple know where they can find us. It'll make them happy and it'll make us really happy.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Until next time, keep on living the team life.
