So, we all know the old saying, “You can’t change your spouse, you can only change yourself”. Well, apparently that saying isn’t 100% true. You can actually leverage your self-care to feel better about yourself and consequently, improve the well being of your marriage.

Self-care is integral to the health of our marriages. There are not a lot of studies to 100% prove the link between self-care and marriage where, for example, they study exercise and measure marital outcomes, but we want to look at the overall idea of taking good care of ourselves by eating well, exercising, sleeping and making leisure time because this does become a marital issue.

You see, when we fail to take care of ourselves, our mood, stress levels, and emotional responses all suffer. This, in turn, has a detrimental effect on the people around us.

Think about how this works. Husband is stressed so doesn’t sleep well. This causes the wife not to sleep well. As husband gets tired, he becomes more quiet and withdrawn; as wife gets tired, she gets grumpy. Soon there is an attacker-withdrawer cycle going on. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

The research, as well as real-life, shows us that emotions, hormones, moods and stress levels of a couple are intimately tied together. This comes into play through a phenomenon in marriage that is known as coregulation.

Coregulation in Marriage

Coregulation is the dynamic, reciprocal interchange between partners across multiple biological systems.[i] That just means that we influence each other’s emotions and well-being.

This is an important dynamic at play in our marriages and it is happening automatically all the time. You don’t even think about it! It goes in both directions so that spouses can pull each other up or pull each other down.

The good part of this is that it helps us stay in sync and hopefully reach out to each other and lift each other up.

Coregulation Ties Spouse’s Emotions Together

A study in 2008, looked at how couples affected each other after spending time apart pursuing their own activities. They found that if a couple scored high on interpersonal insecurity (ie. They felt insecure about their relationship) then if one spouse reunited with negatives emotions the other spouse got on board with those negative emotions right away. On the other hand, if the husband was the type of guy who was willing to see his wife’s perspective and they came back together with softer negative emotions (like sadness or gloominess) then they would also match emotions.

There are other variables at play, but the point is that any couple’s emotions are interconnected pretty quickly when they reunite after pursuing individual activities.[ii]

For example, if the husband gets home and the wife is angry, he’s likely to get on board with that. If she is sad, he’ll join her in her sadness.

We don’t want to oversimplify because there are other variables at play, but the point is that generally, we do have this emotional pull on each other. We are – to some degree- tied at the hip when it comes to emotions.

Coregulation Ties Spouse’s Hormones and Moods Together

It’s funny what studies researchers think up sometimes… Saxbe and Repetti took saliva samples to measure cortisol levels in 30 married couples, multiple times a day over three days. “How’s your marriage? Just spit in this little cup right here.”

They found that a couple’s cortisol levels (cortisol is the 'stress' hormone) moved together. They also found that couples’ mood moved together.[iii]

The same thing was found when another study looked specifically at stress levels and compared the genders. It was found that wives had a greater impact on husbands than husbands did on wives. It actually was noted that high-stress levels on the wife’s part had a pretty significant impact on the well-being of the husband.[iv]

Interestingly though, these researchers did not see the link as being unbreakable. In other words,