All Stressed Up, and Nowhere to Go?
I have vivid memories of my children, when they were toddlers, acting out when they hadn’t had enough sleep. Maybe they had missed a nap, or played very long and hard, or stayed up late to watch a movie with the grownups. They would screw up their faces and squint their eyes and insist in whatever their particular toddler dialect was, “I’m NOT tired and I’m NOT cranky!” I would laugh (hopefully inwardly, so as not to make matters worse) and know that the only way out of this was to get them to sleep.
What didn’t seem obvious to them, what had sneaked up on them, was that they were on overload.
For adults, being overloaded is more complex, of course, and there is often no one else to recognize that we are stressed and help us put an end to it. We can be sitting there, spitting out irritation at those around us, with shoulders so tight they’re up around our ears, and still insist that we’re okay. Then after a while, when we find our stomachs as tight as our shoulders and the sleep that should restore us to be fitful at best, we start to wonder “How did this happen?”
Well, there are many sources of stress our world. One huge group of stressors is all the things that have to do with time. We often find ourselves rushing. We get stuck in traffic, and think about all the time we’re wasting, how we’re going to be late. If someone keeps us waiting for an appointment, we feel that as stress because it will put us behind schedule. If we don’t get to work on time, we’re likely to hear about it from a boss, or get “that look” from a coworker. The old saw about “time is money” might be thrown at us. If we’re late getting the kids to school, we might get labeled as an irresponsible parent, or our kids may get upset when they’re late. Or maybe there’s a really tight deadline at work, and we either work crazy overtime to get it done or feel really stressed when we don’t get it done. So time management can be a really important part of stress management.
Of course, sometimes we really can’t help being late, and it may be impossible to meet that deadline. And that, in fact, is another huge source of stress: unreasonable/unrealistic expectations that are put upon us. Some managers, for example, don’t have the real-world experience to know how long it really takes to accomplish a task or complete a project, and they don’t understand that unexpected obstacles may pop up that just make it all take longer. Bosses may not understand that quality work, which takes longer, saves time in the long run. And of course, there are some managers that assign unrealistic deadlines because they think it motivates people. That might work for some people in the short run, but over time, stressed workers become less effective.
And speaking of time and unreasonable expectations, there is the element of being constantly available, by phone or email. The time that you spend after your work day is supposedly over, answering calls and emails, is not downtime. Your brain is still in that work space, the stress hormones are getting released. When the line between work and leisure gets blurred, it takes a toll. And of course, the more you answer those emails and take those calls and tasks, the more you will get them. We all train people in how to treat us.
These, and so many factors in particular jobs and particular life situations, can contribute to levels of stress that affect both our productivity and our happiness in life. The good news is that it can get better. You can start by identifying sources of stress in your life, and making efforts to address them. Along with that, you can tune in to what it feels like to be UN-stressed, using meditation and relaxation techniques. And then, you can work on forming a vision of the life you want, what your values are, and how that is part of your future.
The other good news is that my colleague, Danielle Palli, and I have put together a course on Udemy to help you do just that. It’s called “Overcoming Stress, Building Personal Power, & Finding Joy” and it’s available now. And—the good news continues—you can click on the link below for a special offer.
What a Nice Surprise!
A couple of weeks ago, I was having “one of those days.” I wasn’t feeling well physically, and I was running late for a medical appointment, and I couldn’t find the directions to that office, that I had carefully printed out. My cell phone wasn’t syncing with my email, probably because I had dropped it in the watering can the day before. And my computer was in one of those mandatory updating modes that I couldn’t control. And then my dog, who had just had surgery, came and looked up at me with his doleful eyes, begging me not to leave. It was all so frustrating, and I admit, I came unglued for a bit.
And then something wonderful happened. After I had muddled through and found the medical office, a friend texted me. I hadn’t heard from her in a while, and it was like a breath of fresh air. She asked how I was, and shared some good news with me. Such a small thing—it only took about 10 minutes total, but it made all the difference. A brief look beyond myself, another heart caring about mine, turned the perspective around.
This experience reminded me of a psychological study* that I read recently. It focused on this very phenomenon—reaching out to someone in your social circle with whom you haven’t had contact for a while. People in this study reached out with a note, and/or a small gift, and researchers studied both the givers and the receivers. Those who reached out consistently underestimated how much their effort would be appreciated, and that seemed to be because they focused on the element of surprise; they thought the other person would be really surprised to hear from them, but not necessarily pleased. But that wasn’t the case. The receivers of the “reach-out” really did appreciate hearing from their acquaintances.
During the height of the pandemic, when so many people were so isolated and so lonely, it seemed that we did this more often. We reached out with a text, or an email, or a call, sometimes just to ease our own loneliness and to remind ourselves that there were other hearts beating out there. But now, as people return to in-person work and social activities, a couple of things seem to have happened. First, we have forgotten how to be around each other. We often don’t do the casual interactions with others, and instead develop this tunnel vision where we don’t notice each other, and instead we stay inside our own heads. (Talk about an echo chamber!) Or, we spill so much stuff out that we overwhelm the other person. The other person says “Hi, how are you?” and we reply with a full description of a recent surgery, our adolescent’s dating issues, and how our romantic relationship is on the skids. It’s just too much.
A better idea would be to start small. Reach out with something brief—a note of (sincere) appreciation, a compliment, or just a hello. A simple connection. Remember the study. Don’t assume the other person will just be surprised; that could easily cause you to say “They’ll just think I’m weird” and then you won’t do it. Instead, just put it out there. You never know what might happen. It might just make the other person’s day a little brighter, or it might be a baby step toward deeper interactions.
It doesn’t hurt to try.
For more information on the benefits of social connection, listen to my guest appearance on the Bright Side of Longevity Podcast by following this link:
E87: Finding Your Tribe: How Social Connection is the Key to Healthy Longevity (spreaker.com)
*LIU, P. J., Rim, S., Min, L., & Min, K. E. (2023). The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(4), 754–771. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000402
Five Things You Need to Know about Communication with your Partner
People who work with couples—psychologists, marriage and family therapists, counselors, relationship coaches—all know about the importance of communication in a relationship. Most people, when bemoaning difficulty with their partners, cite communication as a major problem, and if you took an inventory of the relationships you’ve had (or observed) that were happy and healthy, you’d probably find that communication skills were a big part of that. Other factors matter, of course—like shared values, compatible world views, attraction, commitment—but without effective communication it’s hard to sustain the relationship in the midst of, well, life. So here are some things to remember about communication with your partner.
1. It’s a two-way street—with lots of lanes.
Communication is a dynamic process, and involves both someone sending a message and someone receiving that message. It’s not just person #1 stating what they feel and doing so effectively; it’s that person giving the information in a way that is most likely to be received by person #2, and that person being open enough to receive it. And then in response to the message, person #2 communicates another message, and then person #1 receives it and responds. And this back-and-forth can be interrupted by all kinds of external factors, like noise, or children, or time constraints.
And the two-way street between sender and receiver can have many lanes. Messages may be sent and received verbally or nonverbally, may relate to concrete facts or emotions, may be personal or impersonal, or have a host of other characteristics. In navigating that complexity, here are a few “lane markers” to guide you.
2. Words matter.
This seems so basic, but in working with couples around the issue of communication, I continue to find that they don’t choose their words well. Name calling—as in “you’re and idiot” or “you’re a pig,” or using profanity to describe your partner—is destructive to the relationship, and hinders any effective communication. Saying “I didn’t mean it” at some later time doesn’t undo the damage. If you really don’t mean to say those things, then stop and collect yourself until you can effectively express what you’re angry or disappointed with in your partner. With practice, you can learn to say “what you’re saying doesn’t make sense to me” or “I wish you’d pick up your towel in the bathroom.” If you do really mean to be insulting, then well, the relationship has problems that go beyond communication, and professional help is needed.
Two of the words that matter a lot are always and never. As in, “You always change the radio settings when you drive my car” or “You never take out the garbage.” These absolutes are generally not true—maybe you had to ask 4 times before she took out the garbage, but she did it—and using all-encompassing statements can imprint negative images of your partner in your mind. It also tends to make the other person defensive, or even defeated—as in, if that’s who you think I am, then it’s no use trying to change. Instead of this pattern, you could simply ask politely, and then notice and compliment when it’s done. You’ve got nothing to lose by communicating this way—even if the behavior doesn’t change, it gives you a more pleasant basis for working on it.
3. That’s not all that matters.
The non-verbals count. If your partner tells you about narrowly avoiding a car accident and being so shaken that he had to pull over to calm down, you need to look up from what you’re doing and make some eye contact. If you apologize for something you did, but your tone of voice is flat—or worse, sarcastic—you may damage the relationship more than whatever you did to warrant the apology.
Non-verbals operate in tandem with the words you use. If you tell your partner they’re wonderful while smiling, making eye contact, and giving an affectionate pat on the hand, the message is coherent, and warm, and likely to be received. But if you grunt out an “I love you” without looking up from your phone, the message that’s received is more likely to be “I don’t think you’re important.”
4. It’s important to listen—and let the other person know that you’re listening.
When someone has had that warm and magical first date, he might gush, “We talked and talked. She really heard me!” It’s great to feel that someone is hanging on your every word, wanting to know all about you—and showing that by touching your hand, looking deeply into your eyes, and murmuring, “Yeah I know what you mean.” It really does feel magical.
But later in the relationship, the thrill of learning about each other can fade. Communication may be about more mundane matters, such as whose turn it is to clean up the dog poop in the back yard. But it’s more important than ever to listen and communicate that you’ve heard. Okay, so maybe you won’t be cooing softly into your partner’s ear about canine excrement. But you can make eye contact, say something like, “Yeah, you’re right. That should get done before it rains. Could you do it this time, or should I?” Letting your partner know they’ve been heard just takes a few seconds and keeps that two-way street open.
5. Make sure you’re heard.
Okay, so you’re doing everything right. You’re making your non-verbals match your meaning, you’re listening to your partner and letting them know you got the message they were sending. But what if you don’t get the same thing in return? What if your partner continues to look everywhere but at you when you’re talking, and doesn’t hear or remember what you’ve said? What then?
First of all, ask about it. With all the patience you can muster, say something like, “When you look at the TV when I’m telling you about my day, it feels like you don’t care about what I’m saying.” And then wait for a response. Communication is a skill that is learned and continually renew, and your partner will need to learn and renew it, too. Reminders that are direct but respectful are the most likely to enhance that process.
If your reminders don’t seem to produce the effects that you want, professional help may be needed. A therapist or relationship coach can help you to improve your own skills, and decide how best to cope with the communication in your relationship.
Another Life Lesson
When I was in my doctoral program in Counseling Psychology, we were required to take two semesters of graduate level statistics. The reason for this was the scientist-practitioner model, which holds that psychologists should be experts in both the science (which tests, mathematically, what is valid and what isn’t) and the practice (actually providing skilled services to real people). This all makes sense, but in the case of our program it meant that the eight of us people-oriented folks were in statistic classes with twenty of the folks for whom numbers and experiments were their reasons for getting up in the morning. So those two classes were generally considered to be our most challenging.
But of course, as with many things that are difficult, we learned more information of value than we thought we would. I am a better consumer and evaluator of scientific research than I would have been without these classes. I also took away two key ideas, one from each semester.
Early in the first semester, we were introduced to multivariate analysis. This statistical technique is used to determine how much (if any) a particular factor contributes to a given outcome. Most outcomes, of course, are not caused by just one thing; instead, there are usually many contributing factors and often we can’t determine everything that goes into the result. But we try, and that’s why statistics is important and as a student I needed to connect with a reason why it was important to study this stuff. Here is the example that stuck with me: the most important determinant of success for children was their ability to delay gratification. More than intelligence or socioeconomic success or a host of other factors, the ability to put off getting a goody now in order to get a bigger goody later was associated with success in life.
So that was the lesson from first semester. Not only did it help me to survive the statistics class in order to reach the larger academic goal, it impressed me with an important idea about how humans function in the world. Going for the immediate gratification, whether it’s in making a career choice or building a relationship, doesn’t reap the greatest rewards.
And then came the second semester of statistics. We had a different instructor, and the concepts were more complex. Fortunately, the instructor really cared about whether we internalized the important ideas, so he told us on the first day of class that he had a philosophy about our quizzes and exams. He said that the problems were designed to basically “come out even,” so that if you found, at any step in solving the problem, that you were getting a number with, say, seven decimal places, you were probably on the wrong track. In such a case it would be better to stop, crumple up the scratch paper, and start over. Maybe you were using the wrong formula altogether, or maybe you had made a simple math error somewhere along the way.
Hmm. Another life lesson. If you keep trying, but you keep running into things that don’t look right, maybe you should reconsider and try a different path.
So do these two ideas contradict each other? Is it like saying “Persevere in the face of obstacles” on the one hand and “Give up if it’s too tough” on the other? I actually think that the ideas complement each other. If you set a goal, persistence is important. But sometimes you run into a dead end and you have to re-evaluate—maybe refine your goal, or change your idea about what it might look like to obtain what is most important to you. Sometimes persistence is defined by steady progress and sometimes it’s defined by lots of crumpled up papers on the floor.