Ep. 42 3 Sneaky Signs Your Relationship Is Taking A Toll On You

Is your relationship affecting you more than you realize? In this episode of Lucky in Love, I break down 3 sneaky signs your relationship is taking a toll on you—mentally, emotionally, and even physically.

If you feel tense when your spouse walks into the room, notice that your patience for everyone else is getting shorter, or find yourself daydreaming more about being alone than reconnecting, this episode is for you. 

These subtle signs of relationship stress, marriage burnout, and emotional disconnection often get brushed off, but they can be powerful clues that your unhappy relationship is impacting your health and well-being.

I share why chronic stress in a marriage can show up in your body, how emotional strain affects your daily life, and why getting support—whether from a trusted friend, therapist, or relationship coach—can help you feel clearer, calmer, and grounded.

If you’re questioning your relationship, feeling stuck in an unhappy marriage, or wondering whether your relationship is hurting your health, this conversation will give you insight and next steps.

In this episode, we cover:

• signs your relationship is taking a toll on you
• unhappy marriage symptoms
• chronic stress and relationship health
• signs your marriage is affecting your health
• different types of help for relationship problems
  
  For coaching support, visit kahoskins.com
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Transcript

Kari Hoskins (00:00.6)

Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I am sincerely so glad that you decided to join me today, especially if you are someone who is really unhappy in your relationship or your marriage, because the information that I'm going to be, or I shouldn't say information, the message, I guess I should say, that I'm going to be sharing with you is, I think, really, really important for you to hear. I actually got the idea for this podcast episode last week.

when I went in for surgery last week, seven days ago today, I had a hysterectomy and this was a really big decision for me. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, researching it, processing all of the different emotions that I had once I made that decision. And about three days before the surgery, I was still kind of wrestling with some, I guess you would call it fear or anxiety, which I realized is totally normal.

But I had really worked through that. So much so that when my husband and I were driving into the parking lot at five o'clock in the morning, we're holding hands and I just said, babe, it's like the craziest thing. I have no nerves. Like I have no butterflies. I'm not nervous. I'm so confident in my decision. I trust my doctors. I know everything's going to turn out fine. Like I was like cool as a cucumber.

Okay? And then they roll me into pre-op and I was really surprised. I'm gonna say I was shocked when they took my blood pressure. My blood pressure was through the roof. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. This cannot be correct. And the nurse is like, no, everyone's blood pressure gets high before surgery, you cause you're nervous. I'm like, but I'm not even nervous. But here's the thing. Obviously,

there was a part of me in my subconscious I wasn't even aware of that was still nervous, right? Because my body was telling me that through my blood pressure, your body knows the score. And so this is when like everything just kind of snapped into focus about today's episode. I was sitting there and instantly my mind went to all of my clients who are struggling right now trying to make the decision of whether or not they want to stay in the relationship.

Kari Hoskins (02:26.528)

or they want to leave it, whether or not they want to stay and rebuild their marriage or whether or not they want to leave and get a divorce. And I was just remembering, just thinking about all these people who in their consults told me they're not sleeping, they're not eating well. Some of them are drinking too much. Some of them are not eating enough or eating too much.

Some of them have stopped going to the gym because they've lost complete motivation. Others have other relationships that are also starting to like decline, as well as, you know, their romantic relationship is declining. And that just made me so sad. And if I had had my laptop right there in the hospital bed, I would have done a podcast episode right then and there. I almost grabbed my phone, but you know, those hospital gowns are not very...

cute. So I decided to wait. So anyway, that is kind of what spurred me on or got me thinking about this topic that I wanted to share with you today. So what I want to do is I just want to very briefly share with you three signs that people miss that can really show you that your relationship or your marriage is in fact taking a toll on you. Okay. So the first sign is that

You don't feel completely at peace or relaxed or at ease when your significant other or your spouse is at home with you or in the same room as you. So maybe they like walk into the room and you hold your breath because you don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you feel when they get home like all of a sudden you're walking on eggshells, right?

What a lot of people do is they make excuses. They make excuses to leave the room. They make excuses to leave the house. I cannot tell you some of the crazy things that people do when they're trying to avoid their partner or their spouse. And you guys, that is chronic stress. That is literally putting day in and day out stress on your body and on your mind.

Kari Hoskins (04:44.585)

Another sign that it might be taking a toll on you is that your tolerance for other people doing normal people things has gone a lot smaller. So, you know, people that you love, your family members, maybe your kids, your coworkers, your friends, your neighbors, doing just normal people things that they've always done that used to not bother you annoys the heck out of you now. Right. So like you will notice that your fuse is getting a lot shorter. You're a lot more

quick to get angry or pissed off or annoyed than you used to be. You're snapping at the kids. You're snapping at the dog. Things just are bugging you a lot more. That's another very, very common sign that your relationship is taking a toll on you. The third sign, and this is one that is very sneaky, is that you are daydreaming more about being alone or you're daydreaming more about being single.

than you are about having more connection with your partner or your spouse. tThe reason why I consider this a sneaky sign that it's taking a toll on you is because when you are consistently fantasizing about leaving,

about being alone, about being single, you are mentally leaving and that can create more feelings of loneliness, more feelings of disconnectedness and depression. And depression is one of the things that keeps people stuck in bad relationships because when you are depressed, you don't have the motivation to fix things and you don't have the motivation to leave.

Kari Hoskins (07:08.629)

And so you end up staying in this really unhappy, unfortunate, dysfunctional scenario situation. Right. And so those are the three signs. Those are the three signs. You don't feel completely at ease or comfortable when they're around. You have very little tolerance for other people in your life and you're daydreaming about being alone or being single. So if you recognize yourself in any of those things,

I would really encourage you to get some type of help. Before you tune me out with that, let me give you my thoughts on this. Number one, pick one trusted friend that you can talk to. If talking about what's going on in your relationship makes you feel better, like it's cathartic, then please, by all means, go talk to your best friend. Go talk to your sister. I always say my sister, because my sister is my best friend, my sister and my husband.

but go talk to your best friend. But here's the warning with that. You only want to do this if it makes you feel better and you're not repeating yourself. Like, if you are calling every single day to bitch and moan and complain and cry about the same thing or get pissed off about the same thing over and over and over again, it is no longer cathartic. What it is doing, it is adding to your mental and emotional stress.

And it is adding to your physical stress. Okay. And there have been new recent studies out showing this, right? People say, it's so good to vent to get it off my chest. Well, venting is when you tell someone one person one time, venting over and over and over again, about the same thing every day or every other day, or to the same thing, to like every single person you meet that.

just kind of solidifies and like puts in concrete all those negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions that you're experiencing. So it actually doesn't make things better. It can actually have the potential of making it worse. So you definitely want to make sure that if you're choosing to talk to a friend about it, that you keep yourself in check and only talk about whatever it is like once. Don't just like ruminate on the same story.

Kari Hoskins (09:34.55)

I would also suggest if you do need to really like, ruminate and talk, talk, talk, talk, go to a therapist, go get this off your chest, talk to a professional because they're going to help direct your, hopefully give you some insight and help you come up with other ways to think about your situation because that is part of the relief. I also, of course, suggest coaching. I love coaching.

The reason why I think I prefer coaching over any other method is because  coaching is really about moving forward and moving forward in a way that will help you. So it's giving you action steps. It's giving you little tweaks that you can make, even if you're like, I'm not ready to leave my marriage or I'm not ready to start fixing my marriage. I'm not ready to do anything. What coaching can do is

We are trained to give you certain tools and things that will help make your daily life just a little bit better. So if you're going to stay in exactly the same place, you might as well stay and make it as good as you possibly can. And I think one of the things that prevents people from reaching out to a therapist or to a coach is they're afraid that they're going to be pressured to make a choice or a decision or to do something that they don't want to do.

I have to tell you this, our jobs as mental health professionals, our job is not to persuade you to pressure you or to push you into doing anything that you don't think you're ready for. It's not to persuade you to make a choice that you don't want to make. Okay? It's to help you. And sometimes the best thing we can do is just give you some coping mechanisms while you figure your shit out.

Basically, right? And so that's why I really do advocate for getting some kind of professional help so that you can at least make, you know, the dailiness a little bit easier. Like make your day a little bit easier, right? Not just for yourself, but for the other people in your life as well. Okay. All right, my friends. So I hope that if...

Kari Hoskins (11:58.189)

If you are unhappy and you recognize your signs in any of these, I hope that you would consider just getting some help from someone, talking to someone about it so that you can start to alleviate some of the chronic stress and pressure and physiological things that are happening to you that you probably are not even aware of. All right, my friends, of course, if you want any help from me,

All you need to do is reach out. You can do this by following me on social media. I'm at Kari Hoskins coaching on all the socials. That's K-A-R-I-H-O-S-K-I-N-S. I also have my link in the show notes. And then of course, if you would like to talk to me about your particular situation, you can go visit my website, kahoskins.com. The link is in the show notes.

You can reach out to me through my form or you are free to book a consultation call. All right, you guys, I hope that this got you thinking and I will talk to you next week.