After a breakup you can feel stressed – how stressed are you really?  Take the  Holmes-Rahe Stress Test to see where you are on the scale.  You might be surprised to discover that in addition to your breakup there are a whole lot of other things that affect your stress levels – moving homes, your money situation changes, and ever the number of arguments changes!  All these things affect your stress levels.

After I broke up with Toshi my ex husband, I scored off the chart – there were so many changes in my life!  And stress for me shows in different ways:

• I get sick
• I have accidents!
• I can’t sleep
• or I sleep too much
• I eat far too much
• or I lose interest in food
• I party
• I get obsessive about something – creating a new look, buying a house, a crush, finding a new job, starting a new business – anything to keep my mind busy!

Not of these things are great for me, and so it’s good to be aware of the reasons why I am obsessing or drinking or not sleeping so I can at least minimize the damage.  I can be sure I take a taxi, I can understand that the cute guy in accounts may not be my next true love just because he looked at me, I can take some action to help my insomnia.

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I’ve been reading Sarah Water’s gothic tale The Little Stranger.  It is classified as a ‘literary ghost story’ and that describes it well.  A slow but absorbing read, with layers of meaning.  Not a quick book to read on the plane, but instead one you can enjoy once you are on your holiday and have time to linger over it.

There is a breakup in the book and Waters describes the feelings and thoughts you go through straight after perfectly:

My mind, sober, felt as though it would burst.  The simple loss of Caroline was hard enough to bear, but the loss of her was the loss of so much more.  Everything Id planned and hoped for, I could see it – I could see it, melting away from me!  I was like a thirsty man reaching after a mirage of water – putting out my hands to the vision and watching it turn to dust.  And there was all the stab and humiliation of having supposed it to be mine.  I thought of people who must now be told:  Seeley , Graham, the Desmonds, the Rossiters – everyone.  I saw their sympathetic or pitying faces, and I imagined the sympathy and pity turning, behind my back, to scandal and satisfaction…I couldn’t bear it.

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Learn to fight without hostility and derision, but if staying married means constantly fighting, from the point of view of your health, you’re better off out of it.

Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, clinical psychologist

I stumbled upon this article about myths and marriage – if you are in an unhappy marriage or relationship, this research may make think twice about sticking together at all costs.  You’ve probably read articles about research that shows that  marriage may make you happier, healthier and richer.  But it seems it isn’t quite that simple – a happy marriage may give you those benefits but staying in an unhappy marriage may be bad for your health.

Firstly the benefits of marriage are skewed towards men:

• ‘married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men, and married men suffer less alcoholism, drug addiction and depression than single men.’
• BUT ‘ For women, however, marriage means more depression, less career success and less good health and, until recently, a greater chance of dying a violent death – usually at the hands of the men they love.’

Next, research shows that unhappy marriages can be very bad for your health.  Clinical trials have shown that for both men and women bad marriages or marriages with high relationship stress affect your health.

• Blood tests in women in unhappy marriages show that their immune systems are weakened (and this applied to women still hung up on ex-husbands – so do the work you need to do to purge that ex from your life!).
• After stressful arguments, couples were shown to have lowered immunity, with the body taking longer to heal.

So how you fight and how often you fight is important to your health – and if you have already broken up, you can focus on the stress you are not putting your body through now.  It is a relief to let the arguments go.

You might be considering giving up your relationship -  The Smart Woman’s Breakup Program includes a section about deciding on staying or going, giving you 4 strategies to work through, as well as good decision-making techniques.  The program is based on over 100 interviews with women facing breakups just like you and includes the advice of over 25 experts.  You can download a sample chapter here.

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We’ve been looking at how your body can give you signals that all is not right in your relationship.  Becoming more absent minded or clumsier is a common side-effect of stress.  Or you might be like Alicia, my beauty therapist with her explosion of curly hair, more accident-prone.  Her face lit up when she heard I was writing a book about breakups and she launched into her breakup story:

‘I got together with Clint when he was still with his girlfriend,’ she said in her lilting English accent. ‘Now close your eyes,’ she said and she applied tint to my eyelashes.  ‘We’d been together for about seven months, and something was up.  But I was busy…I didn’t want to work out what was bugging me.’

Alicia barely took a breath between sentences, talking quickly as she worked on my eyes.

‘Then I had three car accidents in two weeks.  I was driving my old Escort, came to an intersection and another car didn’t give way and plowed into me.  The driver was one of those builder guys, handle-bar mustache, builder’s crack…you know the kind of guy.  ‘Jeezus lady, you were flying,’ he said.  He was in the wrong though so I got his details and raced off.  Then I had another one!’ She said, taking a break from shaping my eyebrows.  ‘I was on the way to work in the morning, came up a hill and just went straight through a give-way sign without stopping.  I hit another car.  So I bought a new car, a little black Mazda hatchback. This time I was pulling out from a parking space, when I heard this almighty crunch,’ she emphasized her point by leaning in and plucking an errant crop of eyebrow hairs.

‘I couldn’t see anything – you know those low hatchbacks have a blindspot.  The driver’s door was stuck so I had to climb out the passenger door to see what had happened.  I’d hit a big lamppost, right there in the middle of the back of my car.  A bloody big lamppost.  There were bits of my car on the ground, I picked up the tail light and jumped back in and took off.  I was having all these accidents.  Something was up.’

She stopped speaking to check the evenness of my eyebrows and wiped the dye off my stinging eyes. I looked at her blurrily and she smiled.

‘You look good.’

‘So, what happened?’

‘Something was up all right,’ she said as she bustled around cleaning up.  ‘Clint was cheating on me – with his ex-girlfriend that he left for me!  Can you believe it?  I should have known he was no good.  Long story but after those accidents I started to pay attention and eventually tracked him down at her place one afternoon when he said he was at the gym.  What a bastard!’

If you are worried your partner or spouse is lying and cheating on you – then check out The Breakup Bitch’s latest site about Catching Them Cheating. You don’t have to put up with lies anymore.

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There can be a lot of stress during the stages of breaking up.  I’ve posted advice on not sleeping, well what about if your mind just goes crazy and won’t stop thinking when you are trying to sleep.  In fact sometimes you just can’t stop thinking those thoughts all day.  Stress causes this – your mind just won’t shut down.  Thoughts of what you could have done differently, worries about anything from never finding the right guy to having enough money.  All of these stress factors can swim around and around your mind.  Your heart rate goes up, your shoulders stiffen, and you feel stressed. It can be very unhealthy to be very stressed – check your stress levels out with the breakup stress scale test.

One exercise you can try is imagery training.  This is when you train your mind to think about something soothing and let those stressful thoughts go.  You might have a particular thought that is soothing for you – a fantasy about a holiday abroad, remembering a wonderful beach you have stayed at before, or just a nice place you can escape to in your mind.  It shouldn’t be stimulating, it should be relaxing.  I went through my breakup with T fantasizing about houses I wanted to buy – it was a dream, I couldn’t actually handle the real stress of buying a house, instead I would imagine how I would decorate my dream house.  It was the thing I returned to, especially at night when I wanted to sleep.

The stressful thoughts though, can be addictive, so we need to train ourselves to let them go.  So how do we do this?

1.  Think of your pleasant thought or scene

2.  Concentrate on using all of your senses

- the smell (in my case: fresh paint)

- the touch (newly polished floor boards)

- the sound (the sound of hammering as I did my renovations)

- the taste (dinner as I invite my guests to a dinner party for a house-warming)

If you have stressed out thoughts try to invade your wonderful fantasy, don’t involve yourself, just let them enter and leave.  Patience is important at the beginning – you will improve your focus over time.

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The breakup of a major relationship is one of the most stressful events you can have in your life. I’ve been reading an excellent book, Stress Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Wellness, by Edward Charlesworth and Ronald Nathan, which goes into detail about how to handle stress.

The death of a partner is the only thing that rates higher than divorce (and I would imagine any serious breakup would be almost as high) on the Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, which was developed as a way to measure the effects of major life changes on our lives. It ranks life events according to their intensity and the time people take to adjust to them. You look at how many stressors you have experienced in the year and add up the score – 150-300 is indicative
of normal stress, anything over 300 is seen as an indicator of someone much more likely to contract an illness afterward – accidents, alcoholism, cancer, or something less serious, like a cold or flu.

Try this yourself: Your stress score

I have listed the life events that most likely happen in the year you have a major breakup.

1. Complete the chart and work out your score.

1. If you have a score that is over 300, you are going
   to need to be very careful with your health and stress management over the
   next few months.
2. If you have a score of between 150-300, you are in a
   better situation, but you still need to manage the stress in your life to
   make sure you stay healthy.

I’ll be writing more on stress in the next few weeks, and how you can deal with it.  I have a diary entry about the signs of stress I had when I was thinking about breaking up with my ex-husband.  If you have insomnia, you might want to check out the post on sleeping badly and what you can do about it.

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T and I were still together when I wrote this, but things are quickly going downhill.  3 months until we breakup...

The signs of stress are starting to infiltrate all parts of my life: moods, sleep, wellness.

3/25  So much for riding my bike to work today.  I didn’t get to sleep until 1am, so wasn’t feeling up to riding.  Also no organized enough to go.  Damn cold today, so just as well.  Body feels like it could do with a rest.  Keep having dreams that I have a meeting and I am not prepared.  I don’t have my presentation ready.  A bit like having the going to an exam dream, but not studying.  Wonder what it means?  I’ll have to check on the internet.  Maybe my depression yesterday was that I have no crutches – no sugar, no sex and no drinking at the moment.  So nothing to divert me – so a mood hits me, like those awful black crows I saw hanging around.  Weird how I don’t notice the crows on a good day, but on a bad day there they are hanging around.  Looking evil and disgusting.  Is that what happens when you’re bummed?  You only notice the bad stuff?

Read about the background to my Diary of a Breakup, or read all my breakup diary entries.

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