Read the full transcript of Dawn Smith’s talk titled “Why “Never Go to Bed Angry” Is Bad Advice” at TEDxWilsonPark 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Familiar Conflict Scenario
I’m curious if this sounds familiar. You come home exhausted after a long, hard day of work. You walk in the door and you’re like, “Crap, that pile I asked my partner to put away this morning, it’s still sitting right where it was.” You walk in the kitchen, you open the fridge and you’re like, “It’s the wrong kind of milk again.” And then you turn around and you look and the sink is still piled high with the dishes that you asked to have put away. And before you know it, you two have gotten into it, voices are raised, somebody walks away and suddenly you’re sleeping in two different beds and you’re like, “How do we get here?”
How many of you have heard of this golden relationship rule that you should never go to bed angry? What if I could prove to you that it’s a lie, that your relationship actually has a better chance of deeper connection, of more communication, of true partnership with the right timing.
Introduction to Relationship Coaching
I’m Dawn, I’m a relationship coach. I’ve worked with about a thousand couples around the country of just about every background, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. And here’s how it started. A few years ago around the time the pandemic shut things down, I was working as a premarital counselor and a career transition coach, both of which I’d been doing for many years. When I realized I was starting to hear from more and more couples in real crisis, people that were actually struggling and were finding that for different reasons, traditional couples counseling wasn’t reaching them or didn’t feel like a fit.
And I decided to bring together the emotional safe space of good couples counseling with the really practical solutions oriented tools from the world of coaching.
So I dove deeper into studying more of the neuroscience of habits of effective decision-making of patterns and why we seem to repeat ones even when they’re not working for us. And of how and why it can seem to be like the person we think knows us best in the whole world often doesn’t seem to see or hear us at all.
The Problem in Two and a Half Parts
Bringing me here to share with you the problem first in two and a half parts.
Part One: Waffle Spaghetti
Part one, waffle spaghetti. Waffle spaghetti is shorthand. It was coined by relationship specialists Bill and Pam Farrell to describe the very real ways in which men and women’s brains tend to be different. There are many of them. And one of the people who writes about this a lot is Dr. Gregory Jantz. Dr. Jantz is a member of the White House Roundtable on Opioid Abuse and the founder of The Center, a place of hope focused on whole person care.
Dr. Jantz writes, and I quote, “Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity, while female brains utilize nearly 10 times more white matter. Gray matter areas are localized information and action processing centers that can lead to tunnel vision. White matter areas connect gray matter areas and other processing centers. And the gray white matter difference may explain why in adulthood women make great multitaskers while men excel in highly task-focused activities,” unquote.
We have two different lenses. I say this recognizing full well that to say men and women, that’s a huge generalization. Clearly there’s a spectrum here. But even when working with same-sex couples and those identifying across lines of gender and sexual orientation, we find that we tend to be dominant in one over the other, and we tend to be drawn to our counterpart.
So one of the first things can be, find the language that resonates for you. I have a spaghetti who says, “I think I’m more of like an angel hair.” I have another who says, “My brain’s like that dry spaghetti. You have to break it to stuff it into the pot.” Real Italians are cringing. I have a waffle who says, “It’s rainbows and unicorns most of the time in there. And when it veers from that, it starts to feel really chaotic.”
So what comes from this is that because waffles tend to make a decision, process, compartmentalize, and move on, a lot of that tends to happen internally and only really need to talk things out if looking for solutions. Spaghetti’s, we form associations all over the place. So one thing is going to remind us of similar scenarios, past, present, and future, other people where we’ve seen this, and we often need a safe space to talk things through, to unravel it, not because we need it fixed.
So remember those dishes in the sink. Spaghetti comes home and is like, “Why aren’t you listening to me? I don’t understand. Why are they still there?” And waffles like, “Whoa, I had a busy day. I forgot. I’ll do it right now. What’s the big deal?” At which point spaghetti is like, “I don’t get why you don’t hear me. That pile is still sitting by the door. The wrong kind of milk is in the fridge. That thing I asked you about last Tuesday, you still haven’t done that. You know what? This used to happen in my last relationship. I had to keep asking for stuff and it kept not happening, and I was getting so resentful, and then I have to make a decision. Do I just let things go? Do I just keep nagging? And eventually I got so resentful we broke up. Is that what’s going to happen here? Am I just going to keep asking you things and they keep not happening and we’re going to break up?”
At which point waffle is like, “What? If you can’t trust that my heart’s in the right place and I just had a busy day, maybe we’re not as good as I thought we were.” And then what happens is both people end up feeling unheard, unappreciated, maybe a little disrespected, right?
Part Two: Decision-Making Capacity
Number two, various sources, including the Harvard Business Review, estimate that we make between 33,000 and 35,000 decisions per day. Professor Dan Ariely, who’s given TED Talks of his own on choices and decisions, his work has found that we have about two hours of peak productivity in a day, what he calls our golden hours. And work by Dan and the science writer Jen Ackerman have found that those hours start not right when we wake up, but about an hour or two after we wake up.
So if our capacity for critical thinking is used up by, let’s say, 11 a.m., what the hell are we doing trying to make decisions at 9 or 10 o’clock at night? Kouchaki and Smith found that specifically our capacity for moral and ethical decision-making diminishes as the day progresses and replicated their findings in four different studies.
The Half Part: Additional Factors
And now the half. Let’s put a layer on all this. Past relationship baggage, childhood trauma, different attachment styles and love languages. What if one or both of you has some mental health challenges? Can we throw a little OCD or depression or anxiety or ADHD into that mix? What about your cultural backgrounds? What were each of you brought up with around the expectations of being open about your needs and emotions in a relationship?
And then we begin to see this was never a matter of right and wrong, of good or bad. It was always two different lenses on the same situation.
A Real-Life Example
I’m currently working with a couple who seems to exemplify a lot of this. They’ve come to me with issues around communication, around trust, but primarily around intimacy. They’re both in the medical world. They have high-stress jobs. They’re tired a lot. So at a recent session they come and they had just had a huge blow-up because they actually scheduled their intimacy and it still didn’t happen.
So she starts and she says, “I just don’t think he’s attracted to me anymore.” And then chimes in and says, “She’s beautiful. She’s super hot. I tell her all the time.” And then she goes into straight spaghetti mode. “I just don’t think he looks at me the same way. I just don’t feel it anymore. I think he’s noticed that I’ve gained some weight and he’s surrounded by beautiful women all the time. They just moved him to another part of the building. There’s so many beautiful women all the time. I know he’s looking at them. There was that time earlier in our relationship where I thought he was talking to other people still. And I didn’t believe him about that. And so at one point I had gone through his phone and then we had trust issues from there. And we’re just rebuilding from that. And now I think it’s happening again. He’s going to leave me for somebody hotter.”
Finally it’s his turn to speak. “I ate too much for lunch and got sleepy,” he tells me.
Personal Connection
It can seem funny in retrospect, but when it happens to us, it can feel frustrating and personal, right? No wonder I feel a connection to all of this. I’ve struggled my whole life with anxiety. I’m saddled and gifted with over-the-top ADHD and sensitivity. I feel intensely, I speak my mind freely, I run like a motor and hyperdrive about 23 hours a day, and patience, not one of my virtues. I’m also a spaghetti like all the way on that end of the spectrum.
So I have had more than one waffle partner see me get a little worked up and say some version of, “Relax, chill out, maybe a little space here.” If that person walks away and I’d been feeling a 7 or an 8, now I feel like an 11.
Solutions
The good news is, solutions are simple. Doesn’t mean they’re easy, because we are wired to repeat our old familiar ways. So give yourself some grace as you try these out.
First thing, just see if you can start to notice these different lenses and call it out. A lot of my couples use waffle and spaghetti as verbs now, like, “Oh, I can see the waffling, there you go spaghettiing.” And sometimes just that takes the edge off a little.
Next, use time out to your advantage. So have maybe a mantra, something like, “Oh, I can see we’re doing that thing. I love you, we got this. Let’s take a break for X amount of time.” And if that feels like way too much to say when you’re already dysregulated, just have a sign that means that, right? Time out, maybe a heart hands. But decide in advance how long is that window, okay? I recommend 20 or 30 minutes or an hour.
So I’ve got your first homework. If you are partnered up, you’re going to make a commitment to get with your boo by the end of the day today. And you are going to decide, are we doing a mantra or a sign, and how long is that window? And the commitment is, when that time is done, we check back in with each other. But it might be to say, “I need another hour.” It might be to say, “I’m back, but let’s drop it.” And it might be to say, “All right, I’m ready to talk.” In which case, maybe do a check that it’s around those golden hours. And if it’s not, assign it a different time.
When you do sit down to talk, I recommend doing active listening. Active listening is super basic. Many of you have probably done this in some way, shape, or form through a business setting or at school. But it works because it’s designed to stop our brains from figuring out what we want to say next and being defensive and reactive and actually staying present.
So one of you is partner one and is going to share how you’re feeling about the situation, even if you feel like you’ve shared it a thousand times. But concisely, my spaghettis, that’s for you. One to two sentences max is about how much our partners can remember. Partner two, you are just listening. And when partner one is done, you’re going to try repeating the actual words. No paraphrasing, no assumptions, no putting it through your filters. And once partner one is able to say, “Okay, you got it” or “Close enough,” you switch. Partner number two, you share your side. Partner one, you listen and repeat.
Then you two move into solutions mode. One of you comes up with a rough draft of a concrete, measurable solution. Remember those dishes? I don’t mean “listen to me better next time” or “stop making a big deal out of things.” I mean, how about something like, “You know what, for the next two weeks at 7 o’clock, let’s both spend five or ten minutes cleaning up whatever’s left in the kitchen.” Or “How about we finally put up that chore chart we’ve been talking about and we can check it off?” The other person repeats what they heard, and then they can accept or reject it. But if you reject the solution, it’s on you to propose a counter concrete measurable solution. You two don’t leave the table until you’ve agreed to something that works for the partnership.
Conclusion
So to sum up for you, the next time you and your sweetheart get upset about something, see if you can notice each other’s lens, use timeouts wisely. When you do sit down and talk, share concisely, listen deeply, be creative in your solutions, and give yourselves some grace.
Thank you so much for your presence and your energy. I see you. We got this. I’m going to step away now, and maybe we can talk tomorrow morning over coffee.
