When National 'Pressure Cooker' Stress Enters the Home: How to Preserve Your Marriage

Life in Israel is always challenging, but the sequence of events in recent years — from the coronavirus pandemic, through deep social rifts, to the October 7th war — has put the mental resilience of the country's citizens to an unprecedented test. Inevitably, public pressure seeps through the cracks of the front door into all of our homes, taking a heavy toll on the place that is supposed to be the most protected of all: the couple unit. Dr. Maayan Boyman-Meshita describes the phenomenon and offers an applied toolkit for maintaining the home fortress.

In a new episode of the Re:Israel podcast from Reichman University and Calcalist, Dr. Yossi Maaravi, Dean of the Adelson School of Entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship and business administration student Yonatan Haber hosted Dr. Maayan Boyman-Meshita, a psychologist, couples and family therapist, and host of the 'Doing Psychology' podcast. In the conversation, Maayan explained the phenomenon based on neurological stress mechanisms and offered a practical solution.

A confession from the clinic: 'ADHD is my superpower'

As part of the program's tradition 'You won't find this on Wikipedia', Maayan began with an unusual candor about her personal challenges, which are completely contrary to the image of a psychologist, holder of advanced degrees, and media personality: 'I have terrible ADHD, and I am the most disorganized person in the world. The most common word in our house is 'where?'. It is important for me to say this because life is not perfect and not sparkling, and it has a lot of absent-mindedness and difficulty with time. But I learned that it is also my superpower. A person with ADHD is simply unable to do something they don't really love. This prevented me from compromising and shaped my life in a way that must be exactly right for me'.

The problem: when the limbic system manages the couple's dialogue

When approaching the core of the national problem, Boyman-Meshita outlines a serious phenomenon of 'displacement' — a human defense mechanism where people experiencing difficult and suppressed emotions in the face of factors they have no control over (such as the government, the war, or the economic situation) bring this aggressive energy home and vent it on their spouses or children. 'It reminds me of a child who functions amazingly all day at kindergarten, and comes home and breaks down in a tantrum because home is a safe place. Except that between adults, the spouses are often unable to bear this tension, and the result is a mutual flare-up'.

The difficulty is increasing due to the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to attribute the negative behavior of the spouse to their character ('he is just not okay'), while we attribute our own unreasonable behavior to circumstances ('I am nervous because I had a hard day').

The neurological explanation for this is based on a constant pendulum movement in the brain:

• The amygdala (limbic system): the center of stress and anxiety, which identifies threats (real ones like a siren, or psychological ones like a hurtful word) and activates a stress response.

• The prefrontal cortex (frontal part): responsible for high functions such as self-regulation, impulse control, creativity, and the ability to show empathy and put ourselves in the other's shoes.

'As the level of stress in the body rises, the activity in the prefrontal cortex decreases in a survivalist way,' explains Dr. Boyman-Meshita. 'The brain does not distinguish between a lion in the wild and our spouse. When we are under high stress, the parts that see the other simply turn off for us. This is why people say terrible things in a fight that they regret half an hour later'.

The solution: a stopping protocol and increasing deposits in the couple's bank account

Dr. Maaravi and Dr. Boyman-Meshita agreed that the state should invest dramatic resources in education for couples and family support. However, at the immediate level, Maayan offered concrete tools that any couple can adopt:

1. Self-monitoring protocol: to adopt a habit of stopping several times a day to examine the level of internal stress. Once you identify that the pressure stems from an external factor, you must communicate this clearly: 'I am very nervous right now because of work, it has nothing to do with you, but I need half an hour of quiet'.

2. The 7 rule and the stopping skill: 'If on a scale of 1 to 10 your stress level has crossed 7, there is no point in continuing the conversation. Everything you do beyond this point is to hurt each other hard'. The rule requires: whoever asks to stop — gets it without the other side trying to insert 'just one more sentence'. During the break, go do a calming activity (shower, breathing, a walk outside) and after the body calms down, resume the conversation.

3. The couple's bank account model: according to the theory of couples researcher John Gottman, every positive interaction is a deposit in the account, and every negative interaction is a withdrawal. The ratio required to create a positive and stable relationship is 5 to 1 — for every withdrawal, at least five positive deposits are required (a compliment, a hug, a kind word).

Source of hope: a people that manages to rise from the ashes

Boyman-Meshita concluded the conversation with an inspiring message: 'What gives me hope is the Holocaust. We rose from the most terrible event in human history, we recovered, we managed to grow, to build a state and to grow. Also on October 7th, after the initial crash, we saw an exceptional phenomenon: everyone who managed to stand on their feet opened their pocket and their heart, went to volunteer and donate. We are a people with tremendous cultural and human resilience, and in the end, the connections and warmth we have between us are what place Israel year after year at the top of the global happiness index — even in the midst of a war'.