You can always find this page at PaulDuignan.consulting/timeout.

For many people who are in relationships and who have kids, things develop in the following way. When you first get together you spend a crazy amount of time with each other and both your worlds almost entirely evolve around each other. Then one or more kids come along. Lots of things change. The focus of your world moves to the children. You are often both tired. And at the same time you are often both trying to establish your careers and finances can be tight. Some days life with a couple of young children can sometimes feel like you are both involved in an intense firefight.

Allowing each other to call ‘Time Out’ now and then is one simple technique that you can use to reduce pressure. There will be times when one of you is more stressed than the other. It may not be particularly useful for both of you to just keep struggling on and you both remaining ‘on duty’ so to speak. The idea is that you negotiate a rule that when one partner feels particularly stressed, they can call ‘Time Out’. If they do this and the other partner is OK with them calling Time Out then the following rules apply.

1. The person who has called Time Out does not just get to whatever they like (presumably there will be other times when they do get to do that).

2. The person who is carrying on being On Duty gets to determine what the Time Out person does on the basis of what is likely to de-stress them the most. When someone is tired and stressed, they are often not good at working out what is the best way for them to de-stress. For instance, just sitting scrolling through social media may not be a particularly useful way to de-stress. So the person On Duty is allow to issue instructions to the one who has called Time Out. For instance they may say: ‘go and have a lie-down because that is the best way for you to de-stress’.

The advantage of this approach is that the person who remains on duty is less likely to feel resentful that the other person is off wasting their time and not doing anything that is going to put them into a better mental space. They want them to be able to return in an improved state so that they can pick up the slack later because the person on duty may want to reduce the load on them or even call Time Out themselves. This technique is best reserved for use only when the going gets really tough. These obviously needs to be a balance so that both partners get to call about the same number of Time Out’s. The length of time for the Time Out also needs to be negotiated and reasonable, for instance half an hour to an hour, rather than a whole evening.

Please note when you are doing any type of psychological or self-development work, if you find yourself feeling overwhelming emotions, troubling thoughts or actions, you need to talk to a health professional.