Is Stress Impacting Your Relationship?

In 2022, the American Psychological Association (APA) completed a survey which found American adults have a “battered psyche” from the onslaught of stress that they are facing—both “normal” daily stressors on top of “an intense range of stressors over the past few years, as the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, and political divisiveness have dominated news cycles and social media."

Because people are navigating so many normal and unprecedented stressors in their day-to-day lives, they start to experience "stress spillover" and "self-regulatory depletion." Stress spillover occurs when the stress from the "outside world" begins to spill over into our homes through negative interactions with our loved ones—particularly when we begin to argue more or become more withdrawn.

This spillover starts to happen due to self-regulatory depletion. This is what happens when "coping with external stress is an effortful process that consumes spouses' regulatory resources, leaving spouses with less energy to effectively respond to their relationship issues" (Buck and Neff). Essentially, we only have so much coping we can do in a single day before we can't cope much longer. As soon as we get home, we might be out of the fuel we need to behave relationally by doing things like showing patience, flexibility, affection, humor, and curiosity.

The Fix

The impact of stress on relationships has been studied for a long time. We know that it impacts people’s minds, bodies, and emotions in a way that makes it harder to have the bandwidth to relate. Yet, many of us don’t know where to start to fix it all. Recently, someone asked me if I had any tips on how to navigate the stress that is spilling over into their own marriage and negatively impacting it.

This is a complex question and answering it fully would require me to write a book (good thing I did: Til Stress Do Us Part, which is available for preorder). However, you can get started by using my stress spillover system. Using this system will clarify the stressors in your life, help you start a conversation, and provide guidelines for how to focus on each issue.

Start by individually writing down all of the stressors you can think of in your relationship. This list should include everything that is stressing you out. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but push yourself to think of the big and small stressors in your life. Once you have your lists, sit down together (with your partner) and create a "master list" combining all of the stressors you both wrote down.

Once you’ve created a list, pick a time to meet with each other to begin to split your stressors into three “baskets”:

1. Shedding.
2. Preventing.
3. Adapting.

Basket 1: Shedding

Look at your list and put anything you can “shed” into this basket. Items that we can shed tend to be things we are doing that we don’t really need to be doing. For example, if we feel like our lives are imploding, maybe we don’t actually need to volunteer to bring all of the snacks to the Girl Scout meeting each week. What tends to go into the shedding category are tasks that you can outsource (yes, this can be expensive and might not be possible or worth it for everything) or obligations you’ve taken on that you can’t actually agree to anymore (driving someone somewhere, doing extra projects at work not related to your pay or job description, etc).

Once you put everything that you can shed into this basket, go over your list again. Is there anything else you could push yourself to shed?

Basket 2: Preventing

After adding stressors to your shedding basket, go through your list and see which stressors could be prevented with better systems—routines, rituals, and structure. These stressors tend to be issues you can predict but because life feels chaotic and unstructured, you end up not using your future-seeing abilities to prevent the problems. Don’t get overwhelmed. You don’t need to make up rituals, routines, and structures right now. Just add what you think needs to be prevented to this basket. That is your first step.

Basket 3: Adapting

Some stressors in our lives can’t be shed and they can’t be prevented. People get sick, lives get busy, and random awfulness happens. In these situations, we need to work on learning to adapt to the circumstances. Adapting requires us to build stress management skills—like knowing how to let our stress cycle complete, being good co-regulators, and accepting our reality (even when it’s hard).

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Now that you’ve looked at what you can shed and prevent, put any stressors you need to adapt to into your adapting basket.

Shed, Prevent, Adapt

As you work on these three baskets together, be curious with each other and open to change. Once you’ve filled your three baskets, the next task is to start small—thinking about one small thing you could shed ASAP and one small thing you could work to prevent ASAP. Then, commit to learning how to self and co-regulate together to adapt to anything else.

Things won’t change overnight, but making your stressors visible and beginning to think through them in terms of shedding, preventing, and adapting can help you start the journey toward a less stressful life.

To find a therapist, please visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.