How To Stop Work Stress From Destroying Your Relationship | Guy Winch

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12is it possible they could fall out of love romantically because of work stress and the second part is it the boss and the work environment's fault or is it their fault okay part one yes people can fall out of love when they're really chronically stressed because it's numbing. Yes. So it's not that they're falling out of love per se, it's that they're not feeling much. It's numbing. Yes. You're just dealing with the pressures. You don't have time to think or feel about other things. There's something that's useful about that, because if you were actually feeling how depressing your situation were, you might not be able to function.

0:56so you know so to numb yourself in order to get through it has its advantages but that can again spill over outside of work and suddenly you become numb to many things and that can be including your partner i've worked with many people who thought they had fallen out of level whose partner suddenly changed and became really annoying or really this or that and i'm like has your partner who changed or is it you like is it your work stress that has become so chronic that you can't feel it yeah and then when they do get a break when they do kind of use these tools to kind of lower the stress then they start to just reconnect to the feelings but also it's dynamic because if you're the partner and this person is standoffish you know they come home at the end of the day and when you go up to give them a hug they're stiff because they're still in work mode at some point you're not going to be a fan either.

1:51And then it starts setting up a difficult dynamic between two people. Interesting. Right? Gosh. So work is the enemy, huh? So again, a lot of this is happening in our head. Work is difficult. I want to be clear. Work is difficult, but it's how we manage it that's responsible for a large chunk of what we're doing to ourselves, because we're not creating that separation, because we're not creating the boundaries, because we're not nourishing ourselves in the way that we need to, to be able to manage that. Now, there's a lot of work can do to make things easier for us, like exhibiting caring. There's a study that shows that when there's layoffs about to happen, and unfortunately, you know how these things work, layoffs are announced, but they're six months in advance.

2:38So let's tell everyone that they're, you know. Someone's getting laid off. In six months, get to work, people. You know, it's like it's so difficult. And so, you know, it's so now the research is that if you're a personal manager who doesn't have any more information than you do, who can't control necessarily the budgets, who doesn't necessarily know who's getting laid off. If they exhibit caring to you, if they just say, hey, I know how difficult this is. How are you doing? That reduces stress by a huge percentage. Just caring. Everyone's empowered to do that. Every manager, every team leader is empowered.

3:13Every coworker is empowered to exhibit caring and it has a huge impact in a great way. If someone has fallen out of love, you know, from work stress or just pressures of life, what would you say are a few steps that they can try to reactivate those feelings and emotions to fall back in love with their partner? You just have to lower, you have to lower the stress, right? i mean when when you're treading water and the water's up to here you need to lower the water first i mean you you need to get more breathing room yes and there's a bunch they can do to get more breathing room because again a lot of that stress is spent on ruminating stress is very psychological right like people say to me sometimes like what do i do about the fact that my job is just very very stressful and but does it have to be stressful can you change the way you think about Yeah, yeah.

4:06Right? Let's say the job is comparatively stressful. Yes. The first thing you can do about that is stop telling yourself that your job is very stressful. Because what that means is that… It's reinforcing it, right? Yeah. It's reinforcing it, but there are many moments in which it's not. It's many moments in which it is, and there are many moments in which there's a lunch break in which it's not stressful. There are a few meetings which aren't terrible. But you're telling yourself that those two are stressful and terrible. So you're keeping yourself on alert and you're likely to perceive any negative thing that happens there as, see, that's stressful too.

4:40And that's so you're you're you're you're poisoning yourself into perceiving things that are more ambiguous or not that stressful as stressful. So don't say my job is very stressful. Say my job has stressful elements. I use firefighters as an example because I work with a bunch of firefighters. And, you know, is their job very stressful? They run into burning buildings. Yeah. Those moments are very stressful. those moments are very stressful there's a lot of downtime where they're just hanging out and just kind of relaxing and exactly and they always say to me like no my job isn't very stressful there are moments that are but we are in the firehouse most of the time yeah and then it's stressful yeah yeah and if it's my turn to cook it's stressful because people hate my cooking you know like that kind of thing um but it's like and it's a great lesson i took from them like yeah if they can describe their job as intermittently stressful then that's true of most of us yeah and And that framing alone makes a big difference.

5:32The framing of it is, yeah, it's finding ways to almost play a game in your mind when you go to work. Right. It's like, how can I make today fun, even though usually it's stressful? How can I crack a little joke with a coworker in between a stressful moment? How can I shake it off in the bathroom and just kind of relax? How can I listen to some music that brings me a little joy throughout the day? How can I do something? How can I prepare my favorite meal for lunch so I know I have something to look forward to? Perfect. Like every couple hours, like there's going to be joyful moments throughout my day.

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