Improve Your Health Through Mindful Relationships

You may have heard that those who are happily married are more likely to have better physical health, and even lower mortality risk, than those who are not married or in unhappy relationships. That's because marital conflict creates biological stress, especially if the conflict is characterized by unhealthy communication. Stressful marital interactions that occur repeatedly in a relationship may cause chronic stress, leading to wear and tear on the body that leads to physical health problems.

Couples who use positive communication behaviors (e.g., affection) are more likely to experience less stress and demonstrate healthy immune functioning. In contrast, couples who use more negative communication behaviors (e.g., criticism) are more likely to have problems with immune functioning as well as chronic health problems and illness symptoms, as well as poorer overall physical health. Couple communication characterized by negative behaviors is experienced as a threat to the security of an attachment between partners, leading to physiological stress. In contrast, positive communications may reinforce safety and soothe the stress system by creating a sense of security. As such, communication behaviors between partners may have implications for reducing chronic stress and thus improving physical health.

However, identifying unique behavioral predictors of less stressful couple relationships provides an incomplete picture of the environment of a couple relationship and its connections to health. The causal direction between unhealthy couple communication and couple relationship quality is unclear, limiting the applicability of these findings to health research. Some research suggests that less healthy couple communication, rather than being a cause of relationship stress, is the consequence of a less healthy environment in the couple relationship. Therefore, at least in part, communication behaviors may be a symptom of relationship distress and thus negative health, rather than a cause of wear and tear on the body.

As such, my colleagues and I recognized that research must move beyond looking simply at isolated couple behaviors in predicting health and find a way to conceptualize and integrate differences between interpersonal relationships that contribute to negative health outcomes and those that may protect from negative health outcomes.

Along with greater quality relationships, mindfulness can have a strong stress-relieving and thus health-improving effect. As such, my colleagues and I thought that utilizing mindfulness skills and enhancing relationships may be synergistically associated with positive health outcomes. Both mindfulness and greater quality relationships have the power to reduce chronic stress and thus the wear and tear on the body that is harmful to health.

Our new research shows us that practicing mindfulness in your romantic relationship may improve your physical health. Those who practice mindfulness in their relationship pay attention to their partners fully in the present, attentively, nonjudgmentally, and compassionately. Mindful partnering (or mindfulness in the couple relationship) is a unifying construct that goes beyond the current research of identifying unique behavioral predictors of couple health to provide a fuller understanding of the environment of a relationship.

We collected data from 83 couples (N= 166) who completed questionnaires about their levels of mindfulness in their relationship (including how compassionate, accepting, and mindfully attuned they usually are with their partner) and their physical health. When we ran regression analyses controlling for demographic factors, we found that compassion/acceptance, mindful awareness in the relationship, and total relationship mindfulness scores were all related to better self-reported health for both self and partner.

Meditation helps relieve stress by taking the mind out of regrets from the past or worries for the future and into the present moment. When you practice present-moment, full attention with your partner, this is a practice in mindfulness, relieving chronic stress and thus improving health. And, your partner's health improves too, likely because when we are fully paid attention to, it relieves our stress as well.

Partners who practice interpersonal mindfulness with each other may be likely to repeatedly soothe each other’s stress systems rather than persistently activate them, with implications for health. For example, when partners show mindful awareness in attention and action toward each other, they may be able to trust that their partner is emotionally available, thus calming the potentially severe stress of a partner’s emotional inaccessibility. With more mindful actions in conflict, mindful partners may also prevent intense responses of the physiological stress system that, when repeatedly activated, may cause health problems. Partners who demonstrate acceptance and compassion of each other may offer the warmth and caring to each other that is needed to soothe stress and thus prevent stress-related disease.

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In total, mindful partnering may reduce problems with physical health through enhancing security and safety in relationships. Enhancing security and thus reducing the stressfulness and threat in relationships could have stress-reducing and thus health-promoting effects. Practice mindfulness in your relationship now, and your body will thank you for it later.