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Transcript
Have you ever walked away from a conversation with someone you love feeling completely misunderstood, frustrated, or emotionally exhausted — not because of what was said, but because of how the conversation unfolded?
Most relationship stress doesn’t come from one huge event. It builds slowly through small moments of disconnection: feeling unheard, making assumptions, avoiding difficult conversations, trying to fix each other, or silently expecting people to just know what we need. And the hard part is that most of us were never actually taught how to communicate in ways that create emotional safety and connection.
In today’s episode, we’re going to explore five powerful tools to reduce stress in your relationships through healthier communication. We’ll talk about self-awareness, listening to understand instead of defend, asking clearly for what you need, becoming more comfortable with disagreement, and learning how to share the emotional and practical load of relationships more consciously.
Because healthy communication isn’t about saying everything perfectly or never having conflict. It’s about creating relationships where both people feel safe enough to be honest, human, supported, and deeply understood.”
Kia ora and hello, welcome to the Living Life Well podcast. I’m Janine Lattimore, a wellbeing writer and coach providing information and inspiration to make daily health and happiness simple.
The Hidden Stress Building Inside Relationships
Relationships don’t commonly fall apart because of one big moment. More often, stress builds quietly through misunderstandings, unspoken needs, assumptions, defensiveness, and the exhausting feeling of not being truly heard. Most of us were never taught how to communicate in ways that create emotional safety, connection, and mutual understanding. Instead, we react from habit, fear, overwhelm, or old emotional patterns. Healthy communication is not about saying the perfect thing or avoiding disagreement altogether. It is about learning how to understand yourself, understand each other, and create conversations that reduce stress rather than amplify it. When we do that, relationships stop feeling like battles to survive and start becoming places where both people can breathe, grow, and feel deeply supported.
In this article I want to give you five tools to reduce stress in your relationships by improving the effectiveness of your communication. Interacting well with others begins with knowing yourself. This helps you to understand what you are bringing to the relationship and what you are needing from it. Without this knowledge people tend to see the external world as the source of everything that they experience and operate from a place of defensiveness or blame. Next comes the powerful reciprocity of listening to understand and asking for what you want. The key intention here is clarity. The other two things which I have added to this list are getting comfortable with disagreement and sharing the relationship load.
Let’s dive in
1. Know Yourself
There are three key things to get clear about yourself to reduce stress in relationships: what triggers you, what makes you happy and what you need. Come to know these things for your own personal growth and then also communicate them so that other people know it too. If you are living life on autopilot and are unconsciously reacting to everything that happens to you, then you will feel out of control and easily become stressed. Lack of clarity creates stress, for you, and by extension, in your relationships. Notice what things consistently lead to you feeling strong emotions of frustration, anger, fear, sadness or hurt. These are triggers for you. The more you know and understand yourself, the less likely you are to project your uncomfortable emotions onto your partner and blame them for what you are experiencing.
Identify what sparks joy in you. This may seem obvious, but many adults become so lost in responsibility and work that if you ask them what they do for fun they cannot answer. Joy is life giving to ourselves and to our relationships. In my book The Great Life Planner I purposely chose to make the first question on the daily focus sheet “what fun would I like to have today?” because as adults we often forget to have fun or don’t make it a priority, and it needs to be for our own health and wellbeing and the wellbeing of our relationships. Consciously become aware of what you smile at, what you really enjoy and what stimulates laughter in you. Foster those things to build your own life-force and share them in your relationships. Laughter is one of the best remedies for stress.
Knowing what you need is a little more complex because we have surface needs and underlying needs. Our underlying needs are often subconscious and you may not be aware of what they are unless you spend time in deep reflection. The other thing that complicates knowing our needs is when we believe that our needs are either a weakness or a burden, or that our needs don’t matter. A big sign that you have these beliefs is if you pride yourself on being self-sufficient or on going without. Our needs are what actually connect us. When you deny your own needs for any reason, then you disconnect from the parts of yourself that need love and support. You also block the flow of reciprocal energy within relationships. We all have needs. At the very minimum we have the basic needs for food, shelter and love. Yes, love is a basic need. People who experience high levels of loneliness or abandonment are not just affected mentally and emotionally, it also affects physical health. Part of coming to know your own needs is admitting that you have them - to yourself first and then by extension to others. Asking for help and receiving support does not make you weak, or a burden, it reduces stress on you, and also stress in your relationships because it builds mutual connection and support.
2. Listen to Understand
There are three common responses to uncomfortable conversations in relationships; defend, blame or fix. When someone expresses dissatisfaction, disagreement or upset to us, most people deal with it by deflecting it with defence or blame, or minimising it by stating a solution. All three of these response types create increased stress within the relationship. To decrease stress, and increase connection take a metaphorical step back and set the intention of listening to the other person with curiosity to understand them rather than trying to fight or fix them.
The foundation of this is an understanding that conflict is not an attack, it is an expression of unmet needs. Listening to identify and acknowledge the unmet need creates what we crave which is deep and meaningful connection. Listening to understand is not just about removing distractions and waiting your turn to speak, it is having the intention to deeply see and hear the other person.
The next time someone close to you starts an uncomfortable conversation try using phrases like this:
You are important to me.
That sounds interesting, can you tell me more about . . ?
How did you feel about . . ?
What I heard is that you thought/felt . . . can you tell more about . . . ?
What are your thoughts about that?
Can you talk about that more please so that I can try and understand where you are coming from/your point of view?
Can you say more about that?
What do you mean by . . ?
What is making this hard for you?
Can you tell me what’s got you worried?
What I think I hear you saying is . . .
What do you think might be a next step for you regarding . . ?
Remember, what happened is only the trigger. What is causing the issue is the thoughts and feelings each person is having in response to what happened. That is what you are actively listening to understand. When someone feels seen and heard in terms of their thoughts and feelings then they feel safe, and when your body feels safe, it turns off the stress alarm.
Communicating in this way takes courage, and it often requires one person to initiate and model this new way of managing difficult conversations and conflict. When both parties share the aim of meeting each other with love though, then communicating in this way not only significantly reduces relationship stress, but fosters a depth of honesty and connection that is very fulfilling.
3. Ask and Clarify
I have often heard statements like, “If you truly loved me then you would know what I want without me having to tell you.” Love does not make you a mind reader. Yes, when we care about someone we are tuned into what they express about what they like and don’t like, but we only know what they show or tell us, and we are always interpreting things from our own point of view. Even people with high levels of empathy cannot read the mind of their partner and know their unexpressed thoughts and needs. Empathic people may be able to make more emotionally intelligent assumptions, but they are still coming from their own perspective unless they are told otherwise.
This is not only relevant in terms of gift-giving, but also in the ways that we desire to be loved and supported. I learned this in my body through a difficult experience. When I get overwhelmed, stressed and upset I need quiet, alone time and space to process before I can communicate about it. One of my former partners went through a very intense experience and so I gave him space to process, because that is what I would have wanted in the same situation. I thought I was being loving, but I was loving from my own framework, not his. To him, it felt like I abandoned him. Always ask the other person what they need and what would feel good to them in that moment, and be aware that that may also change. Asking rather than assuming can save a lot of stress in relationships. It may feel awkward at first, but it will become more natural the more you do it.
You don’t need to wait for challenging situations either. You can be proactive and prevent stress. This comes back to the first tool of knowing yourself and communicating what you prefer and need in terms of love, support and living life. It also links to tool two and listening to understand. Sharing what you need can be an opening to curiously enquire how your partner responds in similar situations. For example, yesterday morning I asked my partner what he had planned for the day and then I paused because I reflected that it adds to my feeling of overwhelm when someone asks me that question and I am carrying a huge mental load of planning for my day. I explained that to my partner and then asked him, “is it the same for you?”
The best way to communicate your thoughts and feelings is by using “I” statements such as:
“I think . . .”
“I feel . . . “
“I experience . . .”
“I need . . .”
“I want/would like . . .”
Speaking from your personal point of view is less confrontational, than making “you . . .” statements, and using these statement starters also helps you to clearly identify what your thoughts, feelings, desires and needs are.
4. Get Comfortable with Disagreement
We don’t all agree and that makes for wonderful variety in the world, yet, many people feel a driving need to have others agree with them and that often leads to stress and conflict. If that is you, coming back to tool one, know yourself, consider why you need someone to agree with you. What are you making agreement mean for you? For example, typically, the need to be right stems from insecurity and a need for validation.
“observe another’s truth without any obligation to claim it as [y]our own.” - Skott Jones
If you are in conversation with someone and they are very insistent about their point being correct, listening to understand can help them to feel heard and validated. You don’t necessarily have to agree with them or say that they are right. Simply acknowledging their point of view as heard and valid is usually enough for them to feel secure and safe. When you feel safe, your body switches from survival stress mode to relax and create mode, and you become more open to consider other points of view.
Many people see disagreement as synonymous with conflict, but it doesn’t have to be. It all depends on how you frame it. What if you equated disagreement with variety and saw it as an opportunity to learn new information and be exposed to a different perspective? What if you let go of the polarity of one thing being right and everything else being wrong? What if multiple points of view all have value and what if having an understanding of multiple points of view increases your level of wisdom? When you look at disagreement through that lens, then it becomes something beneficial rather than stressful.
5. Share the Load
Some people tend to take on more than their share of the mental and practical load within a relationship, and some people don’t take on enough, and both of those things can cause stress. People who tend to do more than their fair share in a relationship see themselves as giving, but in actual fact they are usually taking more responsibility and control from others. If you are someone who habitually does more than the other person in your relationships (and I will put my own hand up here), then take a step back and reflect on what is underlying that choice, because it is a choice. You are either choosing to do more, or choosing not to deal with the issue of negotiating for more equal load sharing. Underlying those choices is a need to control how things are done, and/or control the relationship itself in terms of earning worth and value to avoid conflict, rejection or abandonment. Know yourself. Exhausting yourself from taking on too much of the load in a relationship is not healthy for you or the relationship.
It is also not healthy for the other person. While a few people may enjoy a free ride with a partner who does all the work, for most people it undermines them. It takes responsibility off them, which may appear helpful on the surface, but underneath it can reduce how capable and confident they feel about themselves. Their opportunities to develop skills are also restricted. This goes for parents who do too much for their children as well as people who do too much for their partners. Sharing the load is not just about fairness, it is about recognising the capability of both partners to do that work and carry that load. Being in a situation where your skills are undervalued or where you don’t feel like you can contribute meaningfully in ways that allow you to utilise and extend your skills, often leads to depression or stagnation and a loss of life-force within the relationship.
On the flip side of that, if you are someone who tends to let your partner take more of the share of the load, then consider if there are ways that you could step up. Maybe you could initiate drying the dishes when your partner is washing them. Maybe you could set up a calendar reminder system for birthdays, anniversaries and other important dates. Maybe you could offer to take over looking after one of the household chores that they habitually do. Maybe you could decide what to have for dinner and organise it one day a week. You may not feel confident with how to do it when you start, but you will learn and get better as you do it, in the same way that your partner did.
A note to the control freaks (in other words, a note to myself). Being comfortable with disagreement extends to letting it be okay for different people to do things in different ways. Your partner will not always agree with you and they will not do things in the same way as you. Resisting this fact and needing to be in control of everything leads to stress all round. Don’t sweat the small stuff and communicate your desires about the things that are truly important to you. Usually, it helps to communicate why it is important to you. For example, rather than saying “you need to put the dishwash brush in the dishwasher before you turn it on at night” which is very directive and likely to stimulate resistance (stress) in the other person leading to them not doing it or forgetting to do it, instead say something like, “I would like the dishbrush put into the dishwasher before it is turned on at night because it cleans and sanitises it thoroughly. It gets rid of any grease that otherwise leaves a film on the dishes when I use it to wash them the next day.”
Moving From Conflict to Connection
The quality of our relationships is shaped less by perfection and more by the small ways we communicate with each other every day. Stress grows when people feel unseen, unheard, unsupported, controlled, or unable to express themselves honestly. Relationships thrive when both people feel acknowledged, respected, and safe. None of this requires perfection. It simply requires a willingness to slow down, communicate consciously, and meet each other with greater understanding. Easy shifts in the way we listen, ask, share, and support each other can profoundly transform the emotional climate of a relationship and turn stress and disconnection into trust, teamwork, and deeper love.
Just One Thing
This week’s “Just One Thing” action point to help you turn information into transformation through implementation is to create twenty minutes of space for yourself and reflect on the following three “know yourself” questions:
What are 3 things that stimulate fear, anger or hurt in you?
What are 5 things that spark joy, delight or laughter for you?
What are 3 things you need at the moment?
Record your answers and notice what clarity that gives you in terms of understanding yourself.
The next step would be to share these reflections with someone you are in a safe, close relationship with as a way of starting a curious conversation with them.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Living Life Well
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If you try the just one thing action point for this week, I would love you know what happens for you. You can send me a direct message or add a comment.
Wishing you a life lived fully and well.
Aroha nui, much love
and I look forward to connecting again on the next episode.
Bye for now.
