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Running on 20%: What Stress Is Really Doing to Your Relationship
In a fast-paced city like HK, things seem to get tense easily.
We work an average of 43–45 hours per week, with industries like service, sales, retail, food & beverage, and elementary occupations often seeing longer hours: 45–54 hours or more.
You can imagine that after at least 9 hours of work each day in a 5-day work week, with an average of 1.5–1.6 hours of commute per day, and 8 hours set aside for sleep, we’re left with as little as 5.5 hours of “me” time to eat, freshen up, exercise, or simply do something we love.
What I’m trying to say is: how much “leftover” are we giving to our loved ones, like our partners and kids?
Many of my clients come in and say their relationships are extremely stressful and tense. We may need to examine whether our relationship itself is stressful, or whether it’s external stressors making our relationship stressful.
Most of the time, it works both ways.
I mean, after a long day of work, family, and financial obligations, how much do you have left?
You are exhausted. You may have at most 20% left. Even if you give your 100% at that moment, you’re really only giving 20% of yourself.
While you just want some space to breathe, your partner comes to you and shares all their exciting news about closing a great business deal.
Even though it’s happy news, you may feel annoyed, let alone if it’s something naggy. You simply have no bandwidth to handle it.
Instead of feeling excited, you respond with an indifferent face, which triggers your partner into thinking that you don’t care. They’ve been waiting all day to share this with you, because you’re important to them. They say, “You don’t care!” — and you feel attacked after a long, hardworking day spent working for the family. And that’s where the argument starts.
Well, my point is that to manage stressful relationships, we also need to manage ourselves effectively. I mean, to be fair, it’s not ALL our partner’s fault, or other people’s fault. We play a part too.
In my therapy sessions with clients, one crucial thing can determine the success of the therapy: Are you coming in wanting me to FIX your partner or other people? Or do you recognize that you play a role in the relationship, and you want to get better and are coming in for help?
Which one do you think has a higher chance of success?
Anyway, some fun facts:
- Men release less oxytocin than women when they’re stressed, meaning they have a stronger reaction from both cortisol and epinephrine.
- A study published in Psychological Review suggested that this causes women to be more likely to handle stress by “tending and befriending” — that is, nurturing those around them in an effort to protect both themselves and their young.
- Men, however, release smaller doses of oxytocin, which makes them more likely to have a “fight or flight” response to stress, either repressing their emotions and escaping the situation, or fighting back.
Of course, there are exceptions to the above.
What I want to point out is that people handle stress differently. If both of you are stressed, and one wants closeness and tender loving care while the other wants space and private time, neither of you gets what you want, and the situation is likely to escalate.
We’ve all heard of love languages, right? Different people receive and show love differently, through physical touch, receiving gifts, and so on.
It’s almost annoying if I love receiving gifts, but you think I’ll feel loved without ever giving me one, just because you show affirming words and feel loved that way yourself. You may feel you’ve done a lot, but my love tank is never filled.
We speak different emotional languages when we’re stressed, too.
Simply by understanding this, we stop taking it personally.
So, how do we manage relationship stress? I’ll talk more about that in the next article.
If you want to strengthen the bond with your partner with practical skills, book a chat with me.