How Mindfulness Can Help You Avoid Arguments

Hi, my name is Karyn and I'm a Relationship Coach with A Better Relationship Coaching and this is our podcast A Better Relationship in Five Minutes.

So today I wanted to talk with you about how mindfulness can help you reduce or avoid having fights with your partner. And I think sometimes people get, you know, they think of mindfulness is kind of maybe some sort of a meditative practice, as something that you have to kind of do in that, in that meditative way of, you know, being still for a certain period of time, a certain number of minutes every day or something like that. And, although that can help with mindfulness. But what really, what I'm talking about when I speak of this today is how to be more, aware and clear about how you're feeling with yourself.

So it's really mindfulness and this practice of how you're feeling and what's going on with you in any given moment so that when you are interacting with your partner, you know if you're in a good space and how you're showing up. So how this can help you avoid fights and arguments with your partner is when you are realizing that you're not in a good space and maybe you're feeling activated or triggered and you're starting to get into that fight or flight, if you have that increased awareness of what's going on with you and your emotions and your body and how you're feeling, that can help you be able to identify that you need to take a break. Um, or maybe just kind of that you internally can go, okay, what's going on here? Let me take a breath and start over. So sometimes, though, you do need to take a break, and that might be a ten minute break or an hour break or something like that, but having that mindfulness of, okay, this is how I'm feeling. I'm not able to have this conversation in a good, productive way... That is what allows you to pause however you're needing in that moment, the conversation, and avoid where it would have possibly gone. 1.3s 

Then when you come back to it, you are able to have a more productive conversation with your partner which will let you see things from their perspective, that gets you into the mind frame and that space to be able to actually hear what they're saying, be able to be more responsive and just in a more relational approach to whatever that situation is, as opposed to that fight or flight, like just triggered reaction to whatever they're saying.

This helps you communicate better because you're actually listening to your partner instead of just waiting for them to stop talking so that you can react with whatever it is you're going to say. I know we can all maybe relate to that... and so that's really what this mindfulness does. It just kind of allows you to be able to see better what's going on with you, so that you can then respond in a better way to whatever that interaction is with your partner.

So just yesterday, actually, this is great timing.... My husband and I were having a conversation yesterday morning and it started to get tense, and we were both feeling stressed and upset. And luckily we were able to kind of take that pause and go, okay, listen, this is not going anywhere. We were both well, to speak for myself, I was kind of getting to a place where I'm sure I was going to say something that I would later have wished I didn't say, and honestly probably think that I didn't even mean, because that's what happens when we get so activated... So luckily we were able to take that pause, not finish having that conversation at that time and say, let's come back to this later when we're both at a better place.

Then yesterday evening we came together and we had the same conversation and it was completely different. So we were able to talk one at a time, hear each other, listen, respond instead of react, and it was altogether a much better experience than it would have been had we continued that yesterday morning.

So that's really the benefit of mindfulness is being able to say, hey, I'm not in a good place right now. Let me come back to this later. And that may be both of you needing that break. Or it could be just one of you. And it's okay for either one of you to identify that and, you know, request that you come back to it later.

All right, guys, that is it for today. I hope this was helpful. Until next time, take care of yourself and take care of each other. Thanks.