How to Stop Stress from Infecting Your Relationship
Stress is contagious, and it can infect more than just your mood
When my wife is stressed, whether she wears it on her sleeve or buries it under a flimsy facade, I feel it. It transmits invisibly through the air, like a virus, and sinks into my chest and on down into my bones. Stress is catchy that way.
“Your stress can spread around, particularly to your loved ones,” says Rosie Shrout, PhD, a social-health psychologist at Purdue University whose research focuses on how stress affects relationships and health.
Though there’s not actually a virus or other particle spreading stress, its infections cause damage beyond just hurt feelings. Unmitigated stress, or its close cousin anxiety, can trigger the ongoing release of cortisol and other chemicals meant to help you handle short-term challenges like waking up in the morning or fleeing a tiger in the afternoon.
When stress runs through a relationship, it can raise blood pressure for both people, generate damaging inflammation in the body, and even alter the immune system, Shrout explains in the journal Brain, Behavior, & Immunity.
Even watching a stranger deal with a stressful situation can lift cortisol levels in some people, and the effect is more common when the…
