Healthy Relationships, Healthy You
Many learned individuals promote happy and healthy relationships for many well researched reasons. One of the many reasons is that those in a happy and stable relationship are not lonely and live longer. Loneliness and isolation can be damaging. Those who suffer with long periods of loneliness and isolation can also suffer from depression.
We ordinary folk know how awful it can feel to be in a bad relationship. Living in a relationship like that can have multiple detrimental effects on mental and physical health. Often we look tired and drawn. We may comfort eat or we may eat very little and neglect ourselves. Our sleep is disturbed and suffer from severe anxiety. The breakdown of communication is often the most debilitating. Being in healthy relationships, however, does the opposite. We look better and feel better. We have more energy and are more positive across a range of subjects. Those in healthy relationships are generally physically and mentally healthier.
Few of us ever think about ‘working’ to maintain our relationships which, as seen from earlier, is such a vital ingredient to our overall health. Let me take just one example of the multiple destructive physical and mental effects of a poor relationship can have, and I cite ‘the silent treatment’ as an example. When this all too common issue occurs (All vision and no sound), a series of consequences can result. First of all, our mood deteriorates. Our stress hormones race through our brain and adrenaline increases our pulse rate and our blood pressure rises. We are usually by now having a raging conversation in our head. We may bang doors or destroy something due to our anger. We may start drinking as a way of ‘calming down’ or start some other kind of destructive behaviour, drug taking, for example. Sometimes I ask my clients to imagine they are watching their antics on CCTV (with sound), and what they are watching is their poor relationship behaviour. “How would it look and feel if we released it onto national TV?” I ask. All clients recoil in horror. It makes them stop and admit that how they acted and what they said was, at best, childish, rude and silly, and they are old enough to be have behaved better. I encourage you to think about how ‘the silent treatment’, for example, can be bad for your health and relationship.
When the relationship is good and happy we are very proud for others to see how happy we are, and our friends and relatives are also happy for us to see how happy we are. We get together because we are better together than apart. We are able to see a future and we are blossoming. We each give each other something intangible that results in what we call love.