Still Fighting Over Trivial Things With Your Partner? Here’s How The 5 Second Rule Can Save Your Relationship

Researcher Anna Mccuray says a 5 second break between couples is equivalent to a 10-15 minutes long break!

Fights in a relationship can be inevitable and almost unavoidable as you move forward with your partner. Fighting with your loved one can be hard to imagine while one is in the ‘honeymoon phase’ but after that gets over, things can get tricky. It’s unfortunately quite often that a small fight between couples can turn into something big. Have you and your partner ever had a minor disagreement but then out of nowhere it turned into something bit when it wasn’t even intended? However, new psychological research has found a way to break this pattern!

What Is The 5 Second Rule In Relationships?

Lead researcher Annah McCurry and her supervisors Robert May and David Donaldson set out to investigate the processes that exacerbate disagreements between couples—and, more importantly, what can be done to prevent such escalations—in an August 2024 article published in Communications Psychology. To look into this, the scientists used a technique meant to examine aggression ethically and ran over 6,000 trials.

The format was straightforward: each couple played a face-to-face, 30-round reaction-time game while donning headphones. The victor of each round then had the option to loudly and loudly, at their volume, blast a loud, ‘noxious noise’ into the loser’s headphones. According to the researchers, this arrangement permitted couples to act aggressively in a morally and legally compliant setting. It may sound excessive, but it was a useful tool for measuring hostility without actually doing any damage.

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The researchers discovered that couples tended to mirror each other’s anger during minor disputes. The problem is that this opportunity’s timing was not consistent. Couples in one group might start blasting noise as soon as they win the game. In other cases, they had to hold off on sending the sound for five, ten, or fifteen seconds.

McCurry said, “This approach does not apply to domestic violence scenarios, this is about managing the mundane, everyday arguments that couples have and that can escalate.”

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First Published: September 19, 2024 3:35 PM