Planning, Writing / Alex
Editors/KY Creators
A friend came to me two days ago to tell me about her bad relationship. She said: “My love experience in the first few months was so good, he would prepare lunch for me the next day after get off work, plan where to go on weekends, and he would reply as soon as he sent messages. After work, we also often Will chat late at home.
But recently, my boyfriend seems to have ‘changed a person’ and often sits at home alone in the middle of the night in a daze. He didn’t contact me for many days, and when I said anything to him, he would only reply “um”, “oh”, “okay”, his attitude was extremely indifferent, his face seemed to say “don’t approach”, and he completely refused to communicate. “
I asked her if she had tried talking to her boyfriend, and she said, “I did. I talked to him about how I’ve been feeling about the relationship lately, and I feel like I’ve been ignored,” he looked at I thought about it for a long time, and finally squeezed out a sentence: “The work pressure is really a bit heavy recently.”
(Is that really not an excuse?)
So, she asked me an unanswerable question: Do you think he doesn’t love me anymore?
To be honest, this friend has many confusions, and our backstage has received many questions: “My other half of life seems to be completely occupied by work, and we can’t feel it at all. Love each other, what should we do?”
Does work stress really affect our performance in intimate relationships? In other words, when life is occupied by work, can we still have a good relationship?
Today, let’s talk about how work has gradually become the “number one rival” in our relationship.
The impact of work stress on intimate relationships,
It’s much bigger than we thought:
As early as 1986, psychologist Steffy found that in marital relationships, inter-role conflict between partners is positively correlated with work stress on both sides. In other words, the greater the work pressure, the more likely it is that conflict will break out between partners (Westman & Vinokur, 1998).
Not only that, but after a conflict erupts, stress can make it harder for us to manage and repair relationships. Marriage and family therapist Chappell Marsh said: “For people who are experiencing occupational stress and burnout, it can be very difficult for them to offer their significant other.Negative emotional states combined with a lack of energy make us more in a relationship. Conflict is easy to create and more difficult to repair because stress eats away the inner resources we need to maintain our relationship.”
Research finds that stress can hinder our detachment from work. The price of this inseparability is a reduction in the quality of the relationship. Psychologists Debrot et al have found that the more a person is unable to disengage from work, the lower they and their partners rate the quality of the relationship, and the easier it is to describe the relationship as discordant, less than ideal, more distant, and more difficult. (Debrot et al., 2018).
In addition to this, research has found that chronic stress can also lead to:
1) It is easier to fall into emotional incompetence
And when we are in a state of tension and worry for a long time, and the pressure builds up to a certain level, we may choose to actively isolate our emotions, leading to emotional exhaustion. People who experience emotional exhaustion often feel that they are gradually losing control of what is going on in their lives, and that they feel “trapped” by life and cannot escape.
Emotional incompetence is a state of “unwillingness to feel, share, and respond to the emotions of others.”
Being excessively apathetic in daily life (Kerig et al., 2012) significantly reduces both responsiveness and emotional engagement with the partner. This is because emotionally incompetent people tend to find relationships a challenge and fear intimacy — making it difficult for them to share deep-seated feelings and thoughts and avoid them when their partner is trying to communicate.
As a result, the other person in the relationship may feel left out, ignored, “hit a wall” every time they try to get close, can no longer make the emotional connection as naturally as before, or even feel Intimacy has become difficult to maintain.
2) affects our sexual performance
In addition to emotional changes, work-related stress can greatly affect the quality of your sex life. Stress elevates our levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that affects our sexual arousal, thereby suppressing our sexual desire.
Psychologists have found that chronic stress reduces our sexual satisfaction in both men and women (Bodenmann et al., 2010).
Our greatest sexuality, says clinical psychologist ClarkOrgans are our brains, but when our brains are occupied by various work affairs, we are easily distracted, and it is difficult to concentrate on the pleasure and satisfaction of sex.
Our perceived stress can trickle down to our partner:
In intimate relationships, partners respond not only to their own stress, but also to the stress of the other.
Stress spillover occurs when a partner’s experience of external stress affects their own experience of relationship stress.
For example, when a person returns home from a high-intensity work, he needs a certain personal space and time to “relax”, so he may deliberately keep a distance from his partner, indirectly alienated each other. This reduces the time for both parties to communicate and get along, which further leads to a decrease in intimacy between the two parties.
But sometimes the stress that work puts on one partner in a relationship doesn’t stop at the individual, but becomes a dyadic phenomenon—a Phenomena affecting both partners in romantic relationships (Randall & Bodenmann, 2017).
This phenomenon is known as “stress crossover” (Westman, 2006). For example, the perceived stress of one partner at work can cause the other partner to become “uneasy” and difficult to relax. Psychologists Westman & Etzion have also found that many times our stress comes primarily from the professional stress our partners experience.
Stress and burnout can break us down over the little things,
What is “Paralysis of General Services”?
We spend more than a third of our day at work, and when life is occupied by deadlines, we can easily fall into a state of burnout due to overwork. Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger put forward the concept of “burnout” in Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement, and stated some signals of “burnout”, two of which are: must do “productive, fruitful” “Things, feel that they should work continuously, and long for a sense of accomplishment.
Research found that in intimate relationships, higher levels of burnout may be associated with lower relationship satisfaction (Khoshkar et al., 2020).
Not only that, but Burnout can also deprive us of the ‘important but not urgent’ chores in our daily lives, for example, you might Found:
The water pipes/air conditioners/refrigerators at home are broken, but they have been delayed and not repaired; they keep saying that they need to organize their wardrobes/desks on weekends, but they don’t want to do them on weekends; buy clothes that don’t fit well , but felt that it was very troublesome to return the goods, so the parcels were piled up in the same place; I always forgot to cancel the automatic renewal of the mobile app subscription / recharge the phone bill / go to the hospital; …
In 2019, Buzzfeed columnist Anne Peterson named this phenomenon of “never getting up and doing the little things on the to-do list” Errand paralysis .
As Anne said, “These seemingly simple things that can never be done are lying on the to-do list day after day, day after day, week after week. Another week brings us a never-ending obsession.”
For cohabiting couples or couples, when one party is paralyzed by general affairs, the other party will inevitably undertake more housework and daily trivial arrangements, resulting in an “imbalance” of responsibilities in the relationship .
When work becomes a rival,
How to deal with stress in a relationship
If you feel you are experiencing stress and burnout:
Tip 1Don’t assume your partner knows everything.
In the face of stress, many people are always asking for their partner’s understanding, but never expressing their inner feelings to their partner. So a healthier way is to fully express to your partner the recent stressful events you faced at work and the emotional feelings (both positive and negative) that these events caused you. The process of expressing to your partner can also help you understand, Be aware of your emotions and rebuild your sense of yourself.
Tip 2 distinguish between “important” and “urgent”
When you’ve done something important and urgent, you can do something “important but not urgent” to regain control of your life. If oneThe important thing does not take more than four minutes, so do it first. Over time, you’ll discover that many of the things we procrastinate and don’t want to do can actually be done in a few minutes. According to the Fidelity survey, about 50% of people said that anxiety is greatly relieved by taking the first step; 40% said that “breaking things down into smaller tasks and writing them down” helps .
Tip 3 Learn to disengage in moderation
It must be acknowledged that our mental space is limited. The reason why people feel tight is because of the excessive consumption of energy. A stressed brain is like an always-on phone, overthinking even on weekends.
Research has found that moderate disengagement promotes our ability to interact positively with our partners, creating a sense of well-being in the relationship (Debrot et al., 2018). Therefore, we need to learn to really relax and rest, such as turning off work software on weekends, and finding some activities that are of interest to both parties.
If your partner is experiencing stress and burnout:
Tip 1Try aggressive dyadic coping strategies
If you capture the pressure of your partner in your daily life, or if your partner expresses to you the troubles and anxieties you are facing recently, don’t underestimate the pressure of the other party, and think more from the perspective of “we” , see stress as a “we” problem, not a party’s problem. Actively participate in helping your partner cope with external stressful events. The higher the level of participation, the more likely you are to be supportive to your partner.
Tip 2 focuses on physical contact
For people under stress and burnout, intensive, overly concerned communication can be exhausting, and sometimes non-verbal interactions can be more supportive and comforting . A survey of 183 heterosexual couples found that non-verbal intimate interactions such as hugging, holding hands, and caressing can significantly and rapidly reduce the level of cortisol in our body (Ditzen et al., 2019) and relieve each other’s stress.
Today’s Interaction: When your partner is under stress and burnout, what would you do to relieve their stress? Leave a message in the comment area~