Relationship stress
At Effective Self-Help, we create practical advice using scientific literature and Bayesian reasoning to help more people help themselves, and live a little better.
In our Stress guide, we highlight how financial difficulties, breakdowns in important relationships, and harmful work environments are leading causes of stress. While this report shares some of the most effective remedies for acute stress, tackling the underlying causes of stress matters as much or more in the long-term.
Our Stress report briefly discusses how to build a financial runway and manage a heavy workload. While we plan to release more in-depth reviews of these topics soon, we hope that ESH can act as a valuable gateway resource in the meantime.
Key takeaways
- Anyone can practice Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and it’s not only useful for mental health crises. Effective Self-Help’s recommendations, including CBT, are for anyone who wants to experiment with proven ways to make life easier and more enjoyable.
- CBT can help us interpret our experiences more clearly, and can interrupt and recalibrate destructive ways of thinking – in our work, our inner life, and our relationships.
- From CBT’s insights, we can identify common cognitive and communication errors that affect the way we think and speak about our relationships. Once we familiarise ourselves with the most common cognitive and communication errors, we can better understand the reality of our problems and communicate our needs more helpfully to others.
- In particular, we can start to make specific and practical requests to remedy any issues. Making vague demands like “I want you to talk to me more” can feel critical of the person on receiving end the recipient of those demands, making them more likely to become defensive and less willing to help. Time-limited, specific, and positive requests, such as“I’d like you to check in with me once a day or week” is much more helpful, and more easily achieved. Making behaviour-focused requests also removes the emphasis on personal traits, creating a constructive rather than critical dialogue.
CBT is for everyone
Today we want to review the most helpful resources for relationship health, with a particular focus on the benefits of CBT.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), referenced in both our Sleep and Stress guides, is very effective on a personal level, and can be similarly helpful in your relationships by minimising conflict and healing underlying resentment.
Your relationships—whether professional, romantic, social, or familial—don’t have to be in dire trouble in order for you to benefit from the insights of CBT. Therapeutic techniques shouldn’t be reserved for emotional crises, just as healthy food and daily exercise are not only for the chronically ill.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy proposes that many of us make mistaken or hasty assumptions. These prevent us from effectively processing our life experiences and approaching our lives more constructively. In particular, cognitive distortions (ways of thinking which unhelpfully distort our experiences) contribute to unhelpful (or self-destructive) thought patterns. These are described succinctly for individual use here by Dr. David Burns. If you’re new to CBT, Dr. Burns’s Feeling Good serves as a great introduction, alongside this free resource on CBT.
Cognitive distortions
How might cognitive distortions colour our relationships? Here are two particularly useful examples:
Disqualifying the positive
Let’s take ‘disqualifying the positive,’ one of the distortions often referenced in CBT research (also referred to as “Negative Filtering or Discounting the Positives”).
If my supervisor offers a mixture of positive and negative feedback during my performance review, I might focus solely on the criticism, and think not only “I must be doing worse than everyone else,” or “I’m not good enough at this job,” but also “they’re so hypercritical,” and “my boss is always finding reasons to criticise me.”
Perhaps some of us have supervisors who offer unreasonable criticism. Nevertheless, it is still counterproductive to jump hastily to this conclusion, discrediting any positive feedback in a working relationship.
A useful framework for countering this can be to adopt a scout mindset. This entails trying to see the full picture, rather than the most distressing pixel. By doing so, you can make an active effort to look for what positive feedback you might have received, balancing out a more automatic focus on negative outcomes.
“Shoulds”
Let’s review how “Shoulds” creep into our relationships, too.
We often think to ourselves, “She should have called me by now,” or “They shouldn’t be late. They know how important this is to me.” Yet often enough, people either don’t know, or are falling short of expectations for reasons unrelated to you or outside of their control.
Before we assume that other people’s behaviour should conform perfectly to our expectations, it’s important to examine those expectations, as well as each person’s patterns of behaviour. Above all, we should be charitable and curious about the other person’s intentions and their mistakes whenever possible.
Moving beyond immediate reactions
How do we move past these initial reactions and solve relationship problems most effectively?
Dr. Burns provides a few interpersonal techniques in his follow-up CBT-inspired manual for couples, Feeling Good Together. We believe the insights here can apply to a wide range of relationships beyond ‘significant others.’
We recognize that these are not as rigorously or quantitatively tested as the recommendations in our reports, but we think that some of these insights may prove useful. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments or by email.
We think one of the best ideas from Burns’ method is the notion of “communication errors.” These are common traps which derail productive conversation in relationships, a few of which we’ve picked out below:
- “Truth. You insist that you’re right and the other person is wrong.”
There may be occasions where one party obviously seems to be more right than the other, but approaching a conversation with the assumption that you alone possess the absolute truth is quite counterproductive and frustrating for the other person.
- “Blame. You imply that the problem is all the other person’s fault.”
More often than not, excluding abusive situations, people share responsibility (to varying degrees) for relationship issues.
- “Defensiveness. You argue and refuse to admit any flaw or shortcoming.”
- “Martyrdom.” Read more with this free online excerpt from Dr. Burns’ book.
Beyond just talking: making specific, practical requests
In romantic contexts, or in other close relationships, it is worthwhile to make specific and explicit requests if you’d like the relationship to change.
Specific and distinct requests, rather than vague statements like “I want you to be more attentive,” help the other person understand how to actually help, and making specific requests helps focus conversations on behaviour change rather than personal characteristics. We’ll draw some examples from another successful relationship self-help book, Getting the Love You Want.
While we’re unsure of the overall value of the book, its insights into managing close relationships seem to fit well with the principles of CBT and seem valuably practical.
Examples
Suppose you want more focused attention and affection from a friend, partner, or loved one.
- You could say, “you need to be more attentive.” This sounds negative, personal and critical, and might provoke a defensive response.
- Instead, you could ask them, “when you come home, can you come over and ask how my day was?” This is specific, practical, and positive.
Alternatively, imagine you want more space and time to yourself.
- Instead of saying, “I want to be left alone,” or “Please give me my space,” it sounds less personal and is more effective to say, “when I come home, can I take an hour to myself to catch up on my reading?”
- The focus is on whatever you’d like to do with solitude, rather than on pushing away your loved one. Specific, time-limited, and explicit requests prevent relationships from getting bogged down in abstractions and assumptions.
Thanks for reading!
Please reach out to us to share any other interventions you’ve found useful for relationships, especially other techniques with a basis of rigorous evidence.
To living better,
Mana Afsari
Content Specialist
Effective Self-Help
