How to support your wife under stress? How to help her overcome her situation? How can you as her partner help her take charge of her life?
Women are often burdened with a lot of stress due to the various roles she plays in her life. The core issue is often neglected under the societal norms and standard beliefs where women are expected to be on a war foot situation.
You can start by letting her know that it is ok to get tired and it is normal not to meet all the expectations. Let us discuss a few further handy measures in this blog.
How to support your wife under stress?
If you are a husband and you are reading this blog this itself means that you have made an effort and taken a step towards helping and supporting your wife. If you have searched through Google engines that how to support your wife under stress and have landed on this blog then I will try my best to give some handy tips to you, I will share seven useful tips with you, out of which at least a few will convince you to take them in your stride.
Our life is full of ups and downs and stress/tension is the result of many such unwarranted situations in our life of which we are not prepared, we least expected them or we could not predict it will ever happen to us. Stress leads to the end number of conditions within our body and no matter how much we choose to stay in denial stress does affect our work, performance, and daily life, even normal routine work.
Seven Effective Ways To Support Your Wife Under Stress
What do you do when you feel ill constantly for days and weeks? You don’t feel like doing anything or you just want to lie down? You want to rest and the reason is sometimes unexplained. The thing with stress is that it seems to be unnecessary to many, people often take it very lightly, and hence no proper care is given.
You consult a doctor, try to recover from the pain or illness when you are unwell, isn’t it? The same nature of attention is needed when you see your life partner under immense stress, such as that it hampers her day to day activities and all the things she used to do willingly and happily. Everyone needs emotional help at some point in their life, it’s just they don’t get the right environment and safe space to open up. Can we at least try and create that safe space for our partners or family members to open up?
| 1.) Listen |
| 2.) Reassure |
| 3.) Offer help |
| 4.) Support |
| 5.) Identify triggers |
| 6.) Try retreats |
| 7.) Seek expert help |
1.) Listen
The simple act of lending an ear into active listening can sometimes work as an ice-breaker. It could work in fixing things. Especially when you deal with the stress of your life partner, no wonder who else can support them other than you by just making them talk and help them open up their bottled emotions.
If your wife is an extrovert then your job becomes a little less tricky but it is more of a challenging task to get an introvert to talking, encouraging them to talk and express.
2.) Reassure
Not only assure but reassure that you are going to be there, you are going to help her fix this stressful condition. Anxiety or any stressful condition leads to a lot of worry, fear, and panic in an individual’s mind. The more you reassure the more you help her remove the doubts and fear from her mind.
A partner can play a very supportive role to overcome the stress and tension and a little reassurance could help in a long way, you might feel that no matter how much you try she is still in doubt and fear but trust your process and she will heal with time.
3.) Offer help
How to support your wife under stress? With your time and help, you can make a huge difference. When someone is under stress even daily chores start pressurizing them, due to their condition they feel tired, fatigued, and sleepy all the time. Most of the time they get labeled as lazy but if you see a sudden difference in her behavior and attitude you need to intervene.
Offer help and try to make things easy for them. Your little kind gesture will act as reassurance and your wife will feel much relaxed (mentally).
4.) Support
“Support”, a word used daily and very casually but is very priceless. You are here because you want to help your wife, you want to support her overcome stress. Your support could be in the form of emotional, mental, or physical, and trust me it will also help strengthen your bond with your wife, she will be so grateful to you for being her life-support system.
5.) Identify triggers
You have seen her having burnout and you have known what makes her upset. Try to observe the pattern, sometimes it could be a person, sometimes it could be a memory or it could be a food item or any small thing which could pull that trigger. You can save your wife from the episodes of a panic attack by identifying the triggers.
When you know what could hurt, you can avoid confronting it and keep her stay away from it. It will help her heal and give her time to reflect upon things and you can play a very important role here.
6.) Try retreats
Do you know her secret travel bucket-list? Does she love the sound of waves or the sight of mountains? Sometimes a little change and getaway could help a lot and it will give time to her to heal and gain strength, try to join some wellness program and I would suggest you both go together.
How to support your wife under stress? Just escape from the daily hustles of life, take a breather and this escapade could be in the form of a yoga retreat, meditation retreats, or a simple vacation. It will help her to rejuvenate and you will also feel good in a new environment.
7.) Seek expert help
It is always advisable to seek professional help when you fail to figure out ways that could work in your favor. I understand even you have your temper and limitations and sometimes even though we try to put ourselves in someone’s shoes, we do find things complicated even though we want to help them.
It is better to meet a counselor, a therapist who can understand the problem and suggest effective coping mechanisms.
Can stress affect your relationship with your partner?
Yes, it can badly leave a long-lasting impact on your relationship. It is prevalent to fall into a stress zone for people, but the most challenging thing is their partners, and family members fail to read the signs and identify the problem well beforehand. Sometimes they even deny the existence of problems caused by stress and blame the person for being an attention seeker or victim player.
If your wife withdraws from you or you feel disconnected you usually blame her for not paying attention to you, or you even doubt her, but in most of the cases the disconnection could be due to some other underlying issue which we hardly try to find out, we are too possessed with our own thought process to look beyond how we perceive things and how they actually are.
Five Dont’s if your wife is under stress
As I have spoken about this in my earlier blogs, I would again like to point out that knowing the best tool to help someone with stress could be difficult but we can at least try not to pull the triggers and try to help them which could make the situation even worse, which in turn could also affect our relationships.
1.) Keep your calm
I know it is really overwhelming to deal with someone with stress and especially if it is your wife, as it affects your day to day life. Moreover, if you are really fond of your partner then please have patience with them and trust your path which will help them overcome their situation.
2.) Don’t let their stress affect you
It could be too difficult at times when your needs and demands don’t complement and you lose your temper in spite of knowing the fact that your partner is under deep stress. Let all this not affect you in such a manner that will badly ruin your relationship.
3.) Don’t get irritated
Stress affects both and dealing with a partner with stress and tension is one of the trickiest parts in relationships, you might lose your mind on many occasions but if you look at the brighter side you are helping someone overcome their fears and emotional turbulence, which you should be proud of.
4.) Make sure they don’t feel left out
On the occasions of social gatherings and public events, they might feel left out because their feelings of fear, worry, and doubts hardly leave them and they will seek comfort which could be in the form of your presence around them, please be there for them and never leave them alone.
5.) Don’t let it affect their physical health
Mental health does affect one’s physical health, now when you know the signs and symptoms and few handy ways to deal with stress while keeping your own sanity, at least try to help them by focusing on their physical well being after all a sane mind will help them to recover from their mental disturbances. Help them realize it.
In the end, I would say supporting your wife who is under stress could be a painful and challenging part of a relationship. But since now you have decided to help them overcome their stress and take charge of their life, you got to be strong too. You never know what difference you can make in their life. Be aware and be present. Seek professional help if required, take care of yourself too, and live a happy life.
Priyanka Nair is the author of 26 Days 26 Ways for a Happier you and Ardhaviram. An NLP practitioner and Founder of Sanity Daily, helping you prioritize your mental health. Let’s build a happy community.
