How Personal Stress Affects Our Relationship. 

It’s no surprise that personal stress spills over into our relationships, and to all other aspects of our lives. Stress tends to be contagious, too, so that one partner’s stress “transfers” to the other partner and sometimes kids.

Even in the best of circumstances, there’s a lot of stuff one can be stressed about. Just making a living, minding a job or business, raising a family and dealing with the myriad responsibilities of modern life can raise anyone’s blood pressure.

Personal stress can show up in many ways and have many side effects. Here are some of them …

• One or both partners withdraws
• We disappear into ourselves
• We quit communicating
• One person shuts out the other
• We become alienated and disconnected from each other
• We might become less affectionate, distracted, superficial
• We obsess about the things that stress us
• We get more sensitive and take things more personally
• Negative behaviors become more visible
• We’re less able to stop ourselves from reacting
• We get more irritable, hostile which leads to more fighting
• We have shorter fuses
• We tend to vent, we got less filters, we say stupid stuff that creates more problems
• We get depleted, tired, fatigued.
• We can’t think as clearly, we make more mistakes

And there are probably more (we didn’t even mention the physical health consequences of stress, which are legion!)

So what can we do about this? We share 5 tips, including lots of practical ideas. 

If you want and additional opportunity to de-stress and work together, check out the 90-min. mini-workshop for couples to deal with stress and disagreements, How To Be More Understanding During Disagreements.

In this workshop-from-your-couch, we help you:

* Find understanding

* Relieve tension and stress

* Discover common ground between each other

* Get on the same page

* Learn techniques to de-escalate during conflict

* Get back to connection

Register here: https://loveworksforyou.com/how-to-be-more-understanding-during-disagreements 

We have helped thousands of couples navigate crisis and stressful times, and we'd be honored to help you, too.