Learning to 'let go' of dreams that are unattainable may help you feel more satisfied in your relationship if your partner snores like a lumber mill.
While this may seem like a random connection, researchers from Canada found that having the mental flexibility to reassess and discard goals can help people adjust to stress being placed on a relationship by sleep-related troubles.
Many people experience poor sleep as a result of a spouse having insomnia, frequently going to the bathroom or snoring — which can create unwelcome tensions.
However, people who can easily give up on less important goals and direct their energy towards bolstering their relationship can better weather this common issue.
The study focused on 'goal adjustment'—a theory which suggests that people differ in their capacity to disengage from goals in life that are either temporarily or permanently unattainable.
Research has suggested that being able to abandon certain goals and replace them with alternatives can increase mental wellbeing, especially if new goals can help overcome a problem at hand.
Or, to put it another way, being able to reassess and adjust your goals in the face of adversity can lead to a greater general ability to cope with problems.
In their study, the team followed 113 cohabitating couples from the Montreal area over a period of one year. They asked each subject to answer surveys to measure their relationship satisfaction, sleep efficiency, relationship-specific coping strategies, and goal adjustment capacity.
The results showed that the negative impact of poor partner sleep on relationship satisfaction was stronger for people with a low capacity for goal disengagement than for those with a high capacity.
Additionally, people with a greater general ability for coping with problems were more satisfied in their relationships.
"What we measured in this study was a person's tendency to 1) let go of unattainable goals, and 2) find new goals when faced with unattainable goals," paper author and psychology professor Meaghan Barlow told Newsweek.
"So in this way, it's an individual difference variable representing how people tend to cope when goals are rendered unattainable.
"We actually conducted a meta-analysis published in 2020 looking specifically at the association between both goal disengagement and goal reengagement and quality of life," explained Barlow.
"We found that goal disengagement and goal reengagement were associated with greater quality of life."
Although the ability to flexibly change goals might allow people to put more time and effort into their relationship, being too prone to goal disengagement can have its drawbacks too, the researchers noted.
"This tendency might be maladaptive or backfire if people too quickly appraise their goals as unattainable when they really aren't, or if giving up on the goal would leave you with no purpose. E.g., with no alternate goals," added Barlow.
"As an example, we found that during COVID-19, disengagement actually backfired on purpose, suggesting that in terms of purpose, it might have actually been protective to keep striving for a goal (to give you something to strive for), even if it was unattainable."
Additionally, Barlow added, being too willing to change goals could make a relationship worse when couples experience sleep problems. This may be because it may cause people to put less time and effort into their relationship, instead of more.
The full findings of the study were published in Frontiers in Psychology.
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