A Portable Heart Monitor?

As pressure and stress bear down on me, I find joy in your commands.

Psalm 119:143

A college professor was given a portable heart-rate monitor to wear because of his heart problems. Doctors feared that little oxygen was reaching the professor’s heart muscle, but they needed to accurately assess how his heart was beating throughout a typical day. On this day the professor attended one of his regular and far too frequent departmental meetings—something he considered a waste of time.

But this typical day revealed something the professor was surprised to find, something he was completely unaware of. He learned from the monitor that, while he thought he was cynically detached from the discussions, his heart was pounding away at dangerous levels during his meetings. He had not realized until then how distressed he was by the daily scuffle of departmental politics—even when he felt uninvolved.^a

In a very real sense, marriage can be a bit like wearing a portable heart monitor. The relationship comes with a built-in feedback system. And that’s a good thing. Why? Because marriage heightens our self-awareness. Our partner helps us see things about ourselves, especially our emotions, that we may not see otherwise. And, believe it or not, that unique insight about ourselves can actually be soothing.

How so? For starters, self-awareness diminishes the time you spend stewing over stressful emotions. For example, when you accurately identify how you feel, you recover from distress more quickly. An experiment focused on people who were laid off from their jobs. Many were understandably angry. Half were told to keep a journal for five days, spending twenty minutes writing out their deepest feelings (a common exercise in raising self-awareness). Those who kept journals found new jobs faster than those who didn’t.^bTheir heightened self-awareness lowered stress and more quickly enabled productivity.

While keeping a journal is a great method for heightening self-awareness, nothing we know of beats the loving dialogue between a husband and wife for helping us monitor our emotions and bringing us to a God-honoring place with our feelings.

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.

—Harry Emerson Fosdick

^a 114

^b 115

From the book