Episode 18. The Stress is Killing Me!: Stress Management for Couples
In this episode we dive into the science behind distress versus eustress, analyzing physical and mental impacts. You'll hear amazing research on how perceiving high stress accelerates aging and increases mortality by up to 50%! Plus, we discuss an analogy using prestressed concrete to demonstrate key principles in managing marital stress proactively. The ending packs a punch with tangible tips to reframe stressful situations and practical solutions you can discuss with your spouse.
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Welcome to Marriage IQ, the podcast for the intelligent spouse. I'm Dr. Heidi Hastings. And I'm Dr. Heidi Hastings. We are two doctors, two researchers, two spouses, two lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose, to transform the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones, using intelligence mixed with a little fun.00:00:36
Hello, lovers, and welcome back to another exciting episode of Marriage IQ lovers out there. We're so honored that you keep coming back and that you're continuing to reach upward and onward toward building a more scintillating life. Yeah. Tell me what's going on. What is happening?00:00:59
What is reality? Ugh. I am so confused. Heidi and the kids will laugh at this one. Wait, what?00:01:12
I think that's gonna go on my tombstone. I think it's gonna go on your tombstone. Wait, what? All the time? Why am I asking all these questions?00:01:20
Cause I do all the time. That's who I am. But no, these questions are. Is creating a scintillating marriage just too hard? I sat down with and asked these questions to our executive producer, CEO, and founder of Marriage IQ podcast, Dr. Heidi Hastings, PhD.00:01:42
Now that we're reaching more and more people, I'm kind of hearing comments from listeners like, you all are just different. There's no way my marriage can ever be like that, or there's no way my spouse would ever listen to this, or, I'm not ready to hear all this. Okay. Or y'all have a corporate marriage. I like that one.00:02:02
This isn't realistic. Or, my marriage is fine, enough. Don't rock the boat. Just keep it nice and steady. Oh.00:02:12
Hmm. If I know myself, I can't just let it stand. I spring into action. The first thing I did, I asked myself, wait, are these concerns true? Good question.00:02:26
Are we? Just ask yourself really different from the rest of the world? And just mocking people by upholding some untouchable, shiny example that no one else can attain? Are we delusional? Am I delusional?00:02:43
Is this podcast a magical, smoke and mirrors quest to find some mythical pot of gold at the end of the marriage rainbow? Those are really good questions to ponder. We have talked together probably several hours now on how to interpret all this and how to move forward. Not that we feel bad about it, but we don't want other people to feel bad either, right? So, I'm fully aware this was my idea to make a podcast episode on this topic, and I know it can be axed at any moment, thrown onto the cutting room floor by the one who holds 100% of decision making power on this podcast.00:03:26
Well, that is not me. In the long run, you get to make decisions, but I have the cutting power. So I insist that my lovely, sweet, humble and adorable wife feel the exhilaration and weight of having total control over everything that is said on marriage. IQ. What can I say?00:03:50
I am turned on by a powerful woman.00:03:56
So what makes a scintillating marriage so hard? Why is a scintillating marriage so hard? We get in a ruthen, right? We do the same thing every day. We like autopilot.00:04:09
It's easy, right? It is easy. We don't have to think about it. Yeah, we don't think outside the box. No.00:04:16
New perspectives. New perspectives. Scary. We want to fix someone else. Why is it always someone else?00:04:27
In 20 years of doctoring, this is fascinating to me. It's human nature to externalize all of our faults to someone else. We get stuck in a victim mentality. But, doctor Hastings, you haven't been through what I've been through. Oh, maybe not, but how do you know?00:04:51
So let's talk about this. Okay? We've been married over 28 years. We're both in our fifties. We're empty nesters.00:05:00
We don't have kids in the house anymore. Heidi has experience. She graduated in public relations. She worked as an event planner. She gave all that up to become a mom to four wonderful and difficult children who we love very deeply.00:05:17
She's performed extensive research on human development, family and marriage dynamics, in addition to betrayal, trauma in spouses, and by so doing, she's earned a master's and PhD. I have over 20 years of experience in an exceptionally broad area of medicine, spanning urban, rural, and suburban medicine. I've delivered babies, worked many emergencies in the ER as an ER physician, managed ventilators in the ICU, supervised many code blues. The code blue is when they go into cardiopulmonary arrest. Does that mean when they're gonna die?00:05:56
Yes. Usually. I even used to do colonoscopies back in the day. I've extensively researched the human mind, emotional intelligence, human behavior, beliefs and personality, researching addiction, anxiety, depression, for over ten years now, on top of my regular daily schedule as a medical physician. So, are you saying this all just to brag?00:06:26
No, I'm saying. Why are you saying this? Here's what I'm saying. Is this totally out of the norm? I mean, what we do is not super normal.00:06:35
I'm building a case for these people saying, look, you guys are just different. There's no way we can do this. And I'm saying, maybe they're right. Maybe they're right. We have this experience, but I'm saying that it doesn't necessarily mean that they can't enjoy a scintillating marriage from the things that we provide to them, the education, the stories, the experiences, I think it is possible.00:07:07
Right? That's fair. Okay. I think our different perspectives, different from each other, and different from other people who have podcasts with me as a PhD and you as a medical doctor, provide some insights into things that other people might not be able to see. And I'll add to that that, because I'd been in a difficult marriage before, that ended in divorce, and I didn't want to be in another bad marriage.00:07:31
We were both super intentional from the very beginning about learning from and implementing things to keep that from happening in this relationship. I knew friends who had same song, second verse, same song, third verse. And I really needed to appreciate the things about you that were so good and really focus our. Our biggest priorities on making this relationship work. Even if people haven't been intentional like that from the beginning, I think they still can learn from what we're teaching.00:08:08
Because what we've done is, and this is one of the words that keeps coming up for me in developing this business, is we've reverse engineered parts of marriage that are bad, meaning that we've taken them apart, like, what is at the root of that. And we try to put it back together again in ways that make more sense, that offer protective factors that show us where the risks are, and help us really hone in on those and see how to either avoid risks or up the protective factors to protect marriages and to make them better. So we just have so many new ways of looking at the same old problems in marriages. Maybe as we were talking about these, we didn't see the long term ramifications of how it might land on some people. Right?00:09:06
And that's okay. We really want the feedback. We really want people to help us know what works. And instead of saying, I can't do this in my marriage, this won't work in my marriage, we really hope that people will be curious, become curious, start asking questions of their spouse and of each other of, is it possible that we can make some changes in this relationship? Is it possible we can try some of these things, that we can look at things through different lenses and see if we can make some improvements?00:09:39
So what I hear you saying, doctor Hastings, my love, is that it is definitely possible to have a scintillating marriage without going through the educational experiences that we did, right. Both life experiences and academic education. Right. So that's really what I'm getting at, is some people are saying, well, this is impossible because you have this unique situation. And what we are here to say is that is fundamentally incorrect.00:10:14
This unique situation came from paying the price of 20 years, 28 years, really, of working hard, plus, even before we entered marriage, hard circumstances. But we're really passionate about sharing freely what we've learned through these experiences to help people shorten that span. And from the get go or from whatever place they're in right now, implement some of these things to have better marriages. One of my goals for the year, this year is to bring a lot more love into the world. And that's part of what caused me to think about this idea with this podcast, is if we can just rid the world of some of the darkness by bringing in more love, and that really starts in homes and in marriages.00:11:05
So then if that's the case, the intelligent spouse will realize that they can do it, they can implement this in their marriage. And it's hard. It is. It is not easy, and it's not straightforward. Right.00:11:25
You try something and it works a few times, and then you slide back and you keep trying and you. But you still have that goal in mind. That's what we're trying to get at. Right. I still remember in one of our marriage retreats talking for hours about who do we want to be in ten years.00:11:41
Yeah. How many years ago do you think that was? Well, that was five, maybe. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was about four or five.00:11:48
I mean, we talk about it really every marriage retreat, but every year we come up with new visions and, you know, it's just that thinking ahead, like, what do we want to do in tenure? Who do we want to be? And it's a shared vision. This kept coming back. Like, we want to help people in relationships and marriages to be the best they can, to live a scintillating life, not just a good one.00:12:16
Right. The one that's sizzling and sizzling. Yeah. And that scintillating doesn't mean that it's good all the time. That's right.00:12:24
And that's even part of what makes the good so good, is when we have times that are hard. So that just kind of got the ball rolling organically and then some lightning bolts. I remember sitting in a restaurant on Boston harbor. We sat there, we came up with this idea to write a book on teaching men about intimacy, specifically geared toward men and intimacy. Right.00:12:50
I remember that I was in the middle of my dissertation at that time, and the women in my study were saying that they had no intimacy in their relationships, and that was really a part of the betrayal because they believed they would be loved and cherished and cared for. And when that was gone, that really added to the sexual betrayal that they were experiencing as well. So, yeah, just teaching men they can live their best life by becoming a man who knows who he is. He recognizes his own power and the feminine power that women hold and specifically in his wife. And intentionally showing up for her every day.00:13:38
I'm glad you said specifically in his wife. It would be best if it's only his wife. Yeah. He gains insight from his actions and behaviors, allowing him to change and become different, which leads then to deeper, more emotional, grand, ecstatic, and scintillating intimacy. So, since that time, my passion is to do this podcast and to write that book.00:14:11
Yes, I know I have to go to work every day and see patients, but the passion that drives me is this right here. I love insight. I love when people have light bulbs go on. I love it. Right?00:14:26
Do you know how easy it is to talk about what's wrong with my spouse? There are books, there are podcasts, there are YouTube channels. There are support groups devoted solely on how someone else is a narcissist or someone else is gaslighting you or manipulating you or stonewalling you or in some way making your life miserable. I can't be the problem. I can't bear the idea that I'm the one who needs to change.00:14:59
No, no, no. It's not me. It's them. It's you. It's the world.00:15:06
My spouse is the manipulator, the narcissist, the fill in the blake with whatever is popular right now. Meanwhile, I'll cope with all this by binge watching Netflix's new k drama because I don't know what to do or spending all my time on Facebook. We could go there, you know. Heck, it would be easy. But I'm worried about when my spouse is the only one broken.00:15:32
I get off the hook. It lets me escape personal responsibility. Stop. First of all, we love you. I love you.00:15:46
We both love you. Your brave, intelligent, scintillating spouse. You are loved by the hosts of this podcast. Second, we don't want to offend you. That means we consider how our words land with you.00:16:00
We do. We consider them. We try to. Anyway, there are all sorts of marriages out there, from extremely robust to extremely fragile. We want you to know that we respect each other each and every one of you and all of the marriages and where you are right now.00:16:17
And I've been on both ends of that spectrum. Third, we know just as well as anyone that there is true pathological mental illness out there. Absolutely. We are not unaware of bipolar disorder, severe depression, anxiety, extreme narcissism, extreme co dependence, severe obsessive compulsiveness, schizophrenia. Addictions of all kinds, including drugs, alcohol, sex, pornography, eating and spending.00:16:51
They exist. Here's the problem. We all have elements of these to some degree or another. All of us, it depends on the situational context. Every last one of us are addicted to something.00:17:07
If we all have problems and we all admit it, then maybe we can start looking at things through a different lens. Maybe it's okay to start talking about things. A lens that allows us to feel the weight of the burden, but without the shame of feeling broken that comes with it. Now that I know that something's wrong with me, I must be broken. No, that's not the conclusion.00:17:37
We want you to come to it. Just, just when we see our weaknesses or areas that we can change, doesn't mean we're broken, doesn't mean feel shame. Right. We don't go all the way down the hole. Right.00:17:50
We say, hey, look, there is a problem, okay? Neutral. Right. Right. We don't go down that rabbit hole that we're broken and they're shameful.00:18:00
Right. It allows for more connection. When I learned that virtually every man I see on the street, through research, I learned just about every man struggles in some way with pornography or has struggled. Yeah. And the majority of them do.00:18:21
Now I feel a whole lot of pressure off of myself. I can feel more comfortable talking about that in the open as man. Well. And vulnerability creates connection. Brene Brown says.00:18:38
And fourth, is this what you want to hear or what you need to know? Because these are very two different things. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, when. When you hear things, you want to hear things that support you or make you feel good or are positive and happy.00:19:01
And I'm not saying that's bad, but you need to hear what you need to know, too, is that kind of sense of self. Right. And so we do. We want to have positive things, too, that we say and that people feel good about themselves. It's a nice mix, right?00:19:22
Balance, always. I can see what you're saying and see a little bit of that in myself, too. So when I see how a lot of other women have similar experiences that I had for the first 20 years of our marriage, about sex, I feel a whole lot more comfortable talking about it because I know we're kind of in the same experience. So, for example, just because my libido and desire come later than they do for a man, for a lot of years, I thought that meant I had no libido and no desire and was kind of broken. And then my brain would be somewhere else making a grocery list or planning a kid's birthday party or something.00:20:08
And so I didn't feel the pleasure as much as I could have. But after reading about other people's experiences or hearing about them, it's not like I go around talking to people about this. Actually, most of it came through my academic training. Then I was able to see, oh, okay. Or maybe there are some podcasts that I've listened to.00:20:30
It does help me feel more connected to them and realize that I'm not broken, but helps me understand myself better. So, for an example, just this morning, we were discussing how sometimes when we're sitting in a group of.00:20:47
When we look around, it seems like everybody else has a perfect life, right? And we know that our family life or our marriage or whatever is totally a mess. Initially, we're thinking, I'm broken. That's not what I think. I allow you to have your own thoughts and opinions.00:21:07
You actually, this morning during breakfast, said, that's what you think. You talked about everybody else being perfect. And then I. When I said, well, that's not what I think, though. You think they think they're perfect?00:21:20
Yeah, and I challenged you on that, too, and I said, no, they don't. They know they're not perfect in most cases. I mean, certainly a narcissist would not have much self awareness at all. But in most cases, I think we know what our weaknesses are. I think we know what our family problems are.00:21:39
I think to some extent, maybe not fully aware, but it's hard to talk about it. Right. Because that often will bring pain to somebody else in our family or our spouse. That's why it's important, as I mentioned this morning, that we talk about ourselves airing our own dirty laundry. I can't go tell my friends or my mom or whoever.00:22:05
Your dirty laundry? That's not my place, but I can do it. If it's myself. You can do it. That's right.00:22:12
What if your dirty laundry impacts me? In what way? That it hurts me or it makes me feel shame? Well, I would say it's time to start asking some questions and get curious about do I have a strong, flexible self or a reflected sense of self. Okay, let's explain what that is then, in this kind of a situation.00:22:34
Okay. So a reflected sense of self would be, I get my good feelings about myself from what you do, right. Or what you say or what you are. Life's great. If it makes me uncomfortable, then I can't handle that.00:22:55
That would be a reflected sense of self, right? Yes. So if you do something that I'm not happy with and you talk to other people about it, maybe I would be worried that people will think I'm not pleasing you enough. That would be why you turn to porn or. Yeah.00:23:14
And I think in that case, if I didn't have a strong, flexible self, that could be very devastating to both of us. And so that's why I'd say we just don't talk about it. Hey, if we don't talk about it, therefore it doesn't exist in reality. That's really bad. But that's how a lot of people function.00:23:35
Probably 65%. It's how we used to function, too. And to some degree we still do. I don't want to say that I am completely aware of myself. I will never be completely aware of myself, but I will have to say that I've made great strides to get there.00:23:57
And therefore, if you say something about me to someone else, it's going to be up to me how I'm going to interpret that, whether it's a reflected sense of self or a strong, flexible. So a strong, flexible self means I'm not trying to change you. I'm only responsible for me. Right. I have my opinions.00:24:19
You have your opinions. I'm going to make my decisions. You're going to make your decisions. And human development, adult development research shows that 65% of people never move out of the stage of really only caring about what other people think and doing what they do because of what other people think is really sad. So thank you for that conversation.00:24:48
On dirty laundry. On dirty laundry. But let's talk a little bit about being intentional. How do you know my intention? If you say you're gaslighting me, or if I say that to you, like, how do you know what is gaslighting?00:25:04
That's intentionally making someone else feel like they're going crazy about a certain situation surrounding facts that are twisted. So if I ask you about a situation and you're intentionally lying about it or reframing. Yeah. And saying you're crazy, how can that be? How could you think such a thing?00:25:28
And in reality, it is happening. Okay, that is. Yeah, that's being intentionally gaslighting. Okay. But I can't just say you're gaslighting me when I have no idea what your intentions are.00:25:37
Gaslighting, by definition, has to be an intentional act. The same thing goes with, like, if you look at. I know it's election year, so I'm using a little politics here. Political opponents. I hate election years for these reasons.00:25:52
There's so much hate and vitriol. But it's like you just assume what the other person's thinking, their intention, their nefarious intentions. It happens on both sides, and it just. It drives me nuts. Yeah.00:26:07
Sometimes I feel frustrated, ignored, irritated. Heidi, when you don't see eye with me on something, and I guess you have that right to feel that way. So here's the thing. I don't know if I can ever change my initial reaction if I disagree with you. So if you state something and I say I don't agree with that, and you have those emotions, you're saying you can't.00:26:33
I don't think it's humanly possible to stop that from happening. Okay. I don't think. I think it's probably okay to have those feelings and experience because I'm a human. I think it's possible.00:26:46
But what I can do is instead of being perfectly understanding, perfectly patient and compassionate and loving, eliminating all these unpleasant reactions, what I can do is shorten the time interval between my initial reaction with you, like, disgusting or whatever, to resolution. So the interval between the initial reaction when my emotional regulation is maybe not controlled to. All right. Now I'm in control of my emotional reactions. I think one of the biggest thing we teach this is just I feel statements.00:27:31
I feel blank, like, I feel agitated, I feel unheard, I feel ignored, all understood. It's neurologic. It's scientific. We start moving the emotional turmoil in the limbic system, and it starts moving down toward that prefrontal cortex part of the brain. We start getting more rational and less emotional.00:28:02
I think that's very possible to shorten that time interval. And I have been working on that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I'm just curious. We started out talking about how this is so hard.00:28:15
Doing all of this is so hard. It is. It's really hard. So I love your thought about not expecting perfection from ourselves immediately or even long term. We've been working on this a long time.00:28:30
Yeah. We're humans. We're not going to be perfect. But being able to shorten the gap between when we first have an emotion and when we make a repair and so just coming back and saying something like, let me try to explain that again. Let me come at that again.00:28:48
And it's okay if you don't agree with me on this. This is my opinion, but I want to see if I can express it in a way that maybe brings up less emotion in me and in you and that we can just look at it through a different lens. I know this morning whatever you were talking about, what you said originally, and I can't even remember what the topic was, but it did make me think, no, not going there. I don't agree with that. And I said something about it.00:29:21
But then the more you talked about it, I realized, oh, I do agree with what you said. You just made a brief statement that wasn't in context. That was not in context. And so I challenged you. When you make statements like that, can you put some context with it so it doesn't appear to be controversial?00:29:45
So that's something that we're working on today. Yeah. So, like, and that's, the other thing is we're constantly working on this, too. This is going to be a constant thing. And we don't want anyone to think that there's going to be a perfect marriage out there.00:29:56
It does not exist. But very, very scintillating ones do. And that's our goal. Right. You know the philosopher Viktor Frankl, I guess he's an author, and I call him a philosopher.00:30:10
He says there's a psychologist. Yeah, psychiatrist. He says, he says there's a space between that stimulus and the response. And in that space you have the freedom, the choice to choose. And I think that that is largely true.00:30:28
I think that we do have space to decide how quickly we're going to repair or resolve that emotion that is triggered within us. So let's talk about some, some action items for this week. I'm inviting you to stop thinking of yourself as a victim. You cannot change, you cannot improve, cannot get better, and you definitely cannot become a scintillating person as a victim. And so that's our desire for this week.00:31:13
Just think about that, bring that all back together. I want you to think about identity, intentionality, insight, intimacy, and how this applies to all of those using integrity as your bedrock. Right. All right. Well, we appreciate you listening in this week, and with that, we'll leave you until next time.00:31:38
And remember, the intelligent spouse knows that to change from a stinky to a scintillating marriage first requires a change in themselves. Thank you so much all for tuning into marriage IQ. We hope today's episode has sparked some thoughts and brought you some valuable insights. Remember, the conversation doesn't end here. Stay curious, keep exploring, and we'll catch you next time on another exciting episode of Marriage IQ.
