When you're in a fight with your partner, here's how to calm them down.

PRIMARY CONCEPTS

• When you practise mindfulness in your relationship, you can help your partner stay calm during disagreements.
• It is better for our relationships and health to be cool during dispute.
• Being a thoughtful spouse involves both conscious awareness and compassion.

That contentious issue rears its head once more in your relationship. Your partner becomes enraged, and the conversation goes entirely off the rails. A small trigger, such as doing the dishes or discussing weekend plans, can quickly escalate into a full-fledged dispute or a long period of mutual ghosting. "How did we get here?" you're both wondering.

You may have heard that staying calm during a fight is crucial. In fact, we're more prone to develop stress-related ailments and even die young if we're continuously overwhelmed by encounters with our partner that make our blood boil. The ability to remain calm in the face of dispute is strongly linked to better relationships with reduced divorce rates.

Partnering with Intention

In my unpublished dissertation, I looked at whether interpersonal mindfulness in couple relationships (what I call "Mindful Partnering") is linked to lower physiological stress during couple disagreement. Mindful partnering is defined as a type of attention to one's partner that includes complete, present attention and awareness, as well as compassion and acceptance for one's partner. We cultivate awareness and compassion toward our own internal sensations as well as our external world in meditation. Mindful partnering is all about paying attention to our partners in the same way that we pay attention to ourselves. Higher levels of mindful partnering, we hypothesised, would be linked to decreased physiological reaction to interpersonal conflict (i.e., less biological stress during relationship conflict).

To test our hypotheses, 17 couple pairs (N=34) came to the lab to complete a variety of tasks, including questionnaires and a conflict discussion in which they addressed their relationship's major points of contention. During the baseline period and conflict discussion, participants' respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA), a measure of nervous system activation, was recorded. Participants took the Mindful Partnering Measure (MPM), which includes the subscales of MPM-Mindful Awareness and MPM-Acceptance/Compassion, to assess the extent to which they display mindful partnering in their romantic relationship.

When there's a disagreement, there's less stress.

We discovered that mindful awareness toward one's relationship was strongly connected with a partner's RSA, implying a stronger relaxation reaction and a less severe stress response when we ran the studies. These findings imply that being totally present and attentive to one's partner can help to reduce the stress of marital conflict. In the context of conflict, being present with complete attention in this way may calm a partner's nervous system by generating a sense of being totally heard and understood.

So, the next time that hot button topic arises and you find yourself becoming reactive or closing down, practise more mindful partnering by following these steps:

1. Take a deep breath and pause for a moment. Take note of what's going on—you're back in the same old cycle between you two that never ends well.
2. Make thoughtful partnerships a habit. Make the decision to try something new. Tuning in to your partner and being entirely present with them might help you develop mindful partnership. Inquire about their feelings by asking them questions and watching their reactions. Become aware of what triggers you and communicate your vulnerability with your partner. Instead of acting out your part in the cycle that provokes your spouse, have the goal to practise empathic care and compassion.