Tips To Inspire A Lazy Wife To Be More Active
You may wonder how you can motivate your wife to be more physically active. It can be a complex subject to bring up, and you may not know how to inspire changes that last. Read on to learn useful tips that may help your wife be more active and how therapy can support her as she works to make meaningful changes to her behavior patterns.
What can you do to motivate your wife?
When trying to figure out what you can do to motivate your wife, you may not know how to discuss the topic without hurting her feelings. She could be having emotional or physical problems that are affecting her energy levels or dealing with something that makes activity or decision-making feel overwhelming.
Talk to her—is her laziness a habit or a sign of another issue?
The best place to start is by talking to your wife. Sit down and have an open, honest conversation where you express your concerns and listen to what she has to say. Is she having trouble with depression? Low energy is one of the symptoms. If she isn’t dealing with any underlying issues, she may have a pattern of lazy behavior. Perhaps she never had to complete chores or be active before.
Calling her lazy will likely result in an adverse reaction, so consider saying something like, “I’ve noticed that you haven’t had a lot of energy lately. What can I do to help?”
Conditions that can cause lack of energy may include:
- Anemia
- Depression
- Grief
- Some medications
- Persistent pain
- Sleep disorders
- Thyroid issues
- Alcohol or substance use
- Various medical conditions
— Mount Sinai, Causes of Fatigue
Is she lazy or overwhelmed?
Many people who feel overwhelmed can avoid tasks until they feel insurmountable. When this happens, they may not know where to start, which can result in not doing anything at all. Is her lack of activity new behavior? Has she been through a significant change in her responsibilities lately? If so, maybe she is having trouble feeling overwhelmed.
Help her find her ideal self
While talking to your wife, try to discover what she views as the ideal version of herself. What does she want to improve? How does she want to behave and present herself to the world? Who does she want to be? For some people, visualizing the best version of themselves and working toward it can help inspire meaningful changes.
Inspire by example
Asking your wife to be more active when you aren’t willing to do the same can lead to conflict in your marriage. Instead, try leading by example and asking her to make this lifestyle change with you. Studies show that an inactive partner is five times more likely to take up an active lifestyle when their partner is active.
Suggest exercising together
If you’re hoping to get your wife to be more physically active, suggest exercising together, either at home or in a gym with a personal trainer. Working out together can help you get healthier while making activity part of your normal lifestyle. Try making exercise fun. Race each other through the park or find fun ways to be active together.
Ask her to complete specific tasks around the house
While trying to inspire your wife to be more active, ask her to complete specific tasks around the house. If you don’t have time to do something, like doing the laundry to have clean work clothes, try asking her if she could do it for you. A direct, specific request may make it more likely she will help. Over time, she may do more around the house independently because it feels natural.
Is her lack of motivation due to difficulty making decisions?
Studies show that decision-making can be cognitively exhausting. The effect can compound over time and make it harder to pick a course of action in the future. If you want her to make a choice that doesn’t matter to you, let her know that you don’t care about the outcome one way or the other as long as it gets done. For example, if you need a new couch but don’t care what it looks like, give her a budget, and ask her to pick something she likes.
Instead of assuming how the problem “should” be solved, work together
Let go of how you think your wife “should” get more active, of how you think she should behave. Remembering that you're not dealing with just yourself can be crucial. Your ideas about how she should change her habits or get more active may not align with her ideas. Abandon your assumptions about how things should work and get creative, working together to find solutions.
Be supportive as she works to change habits
Changing thought and behavior patterns can be a complicated, emotionally charged process. Your wife will likely need and appreciate your support as she works to take on a more active lifestyle. If you’ve noticed that she's made progress, offer praise. Tell her you've seen how hard she'd been working to change and appreciate the effort. Recognition and positive interactions can be motivating factors, and if she feels you notice her attempts, she may continue to work hard.
Use your knowledge of what works for her and proceed accordingly
Whether you’ve been married for years or are newlyweds, you presumably know your wife. Use your knowledge of what strategies work for her to tailor your approach. Find ways to work together to distribute household chores so neither of you feels overwhelmed. Compromise and communication are often at the core of healthy, successful relationships, so approach issues with that in mind.
Compliment her and make her feel valued
Studies show that appearance-related compliments can improve a woman’s mood but may impair cognitive function. Praise things that aren’t related to her appearance when giving compliments. Make her feel valued and appreciated by letting her know when you notice something positive. Focusing on her progress and reinforcing positive changes can help her maintain motivation.
Work on physical and emotional intimacy
It can be essential to remember that the physical and emotional intimacy in your marriage can affect her mood and behavior. If you have a healthy sex life, it can affect overall satisfaction and boost self-esteem—and it can be a great source of exercise. Studies show that sexual satisfaction can be a crucial aspect of marital satisfaction.
Examine the words you use
Paying close attention to the words you use when speaking to your wife can significantly affect how well she responds to them. Studies show that language use in romantic relationships can affect communication and satisfaction.
Tips to help motivate a lazy partner
- Try making a good-natured bet to inspire them to reach a goal.
- Build up their ego.
- Talk to a couples therapist for help.
- Identify lazy habits and provide alternatives.
- Set small, achievable goals.
- Celebrate progress
- Create a plan of action
- Focus on their strengths
- Promote a healthy diet
- Prioritize self-care
- Develop practical coping skills
- Talk to a professional
- Avoid comparisons
- Promote healthy sleep hygiene
Reach out for help
Inspiring your wife to make changes to her behavior patterns can be challenging. You may not know how to bring up the topic without hurting her feelings or effective methods you can use to inspire her. If that’s the case, you may benefit from speaking with a therapist for the support and guidance of a mental health professional.
How therapy can help change behavior patterns
If you’ve been trying to inspire your wife into a more active lifestyle but haven’t had much luck counteracting laziness, consider working with a licensed therapist online through a relationship-focused virtual therapy platform like Regain. Individual or couples therapy can help identify whether an underlying mental health condition causes her lazy behavior, teach practical coping skills to manage stress, and offer helpful tips to change behavior patterns.
According to researchers at the American Psychological Association, online and in-person therapy offer similar results, though virtual treatment is often more cost-effective with shorter wait times. Studies show face-to-face and online therapy also provide comparable outcomes. Digital platforms also offer access to a much wider variety of therapists, making it simple to find someone who fits your personality and situation well.
Takeaway
Many people want to inspire their wives to be more active but don’t know how to help them make meaningful lifestyle changes. The information in this article may offer insight into how you can motivate your wife to get more daily activity and how therapy can help change behavior patterns.
FAQ (Frequently asked questions)
What to do if you have a lazy wife?
The wordlazy is a negative phrase. If your wife is acting unmotivated, there could be many reasons for this. If you’re a loving husband, it’s important not to judge your wife because there could be a reason that it seems like she’s not active. Perhaps she works full-time, or she’s at home with the kids working 24 hours a day? However, this isn’t a sign of laziness. When you call your wife names, it doesn’t make it better, and if you use passive aggressive jabs to make her feel bad about not being active, that also doesn’t work and is not productive. When you get home from work, you’re probably exhausted, and that is understandable. But, you don’t need to act out on your wife because chances are, she’s also tired.
It’s difficult when you come home from work. Particularly if you have children, it can be challenging to work full-time jobs and maintain a marriage and a family. One thing that you can do if you’re dealing with a “lazy wife” is to talk to each other about what’s going on. Marriage is a full time job. You need to communicate with your partner. When you ask your partner multiple times to help, and they seem to be ignoring you, that’s frustrating. Maybe there is resentment happening. Maintaining a family is hard work, and the person who stays at home with the children is working as well. You may be thinking my wife is so lazy, but that’s not correct. It’s difficult to be doing the household chores and taking care of the kids full time.
It’s important to be a good role model for your kids. That means being active and taking care of the home, whether you are the husband or wife. Household duties, putting away toys and clothes, dealing with tantrums, cooking, and cleaning, possibly caring for pets, all take a lot of energy. There are probably days you wanted to give your partner a break but felt exhausted yourself. There are so many different roles that you have to take on when you are staying home with your children as a full-time stay at home parent. It can become a 24-hour job when you are breastfeeding or pumping milk or when babies don’t sleep through the night, or if you are caring for a child with special needs or chronic illness. Just because you stay at home doesn’t mean you don’t work.
In fact, stay at home parents work 24 hours a day. Perhaps your wife is also working her way through school or certification and has assignments or research to complete in addition to caring for the children. Bottom line: if your wife is cooking healthy meals and being a role model and doesn’t give you the attention that you want because she is focused on cooking and cleaning and then when you get home, she wants you to set the table, that’s not laziness; that’s asking for help or delegating tasks to get things done more efficiently. So, when you get home, it may look like your wife’s submission to lazinessis real, but if you’re a loving husband, you need to understand that being cruel and making her feel put down because she’s having trouble getting things accomplished doesn’t work.
Marriage is a long term commitment. You want to invest the emotional energy into making it work. One thing that you can do is go to marriage counseling and talk about these issues with a couples’ counselor. Both of you may feel hurt, but what the other partner is doing or not doing. You may not know what it feels like to stay at home with kids all day, or you may not be doing the cooking and cleaning or grocery shopping. Likewise, she may not understand what it is like to be in your shoes, and a licensed professional can help you to communicate your respective points of view and come to an understanding about what your partnership could look like. Going to marriage counseling can help you and your wife talk about these issues. It’s a long term solution that helps both partners.
Gender roles are societally constructed. Society tells us that it’s a man’s job to work full-time and then come home, and his wife makes him food and takes care of him, the home, and the children. What isn’t talked about is the fact that your wife could be dealing with chronic pain in addition to all the responsibilities she has with the children. She feels the weight of that. While you’re managing other things, she is too. There are situations in which maybe it’s the dad who is a stay at home parent, and that could be you. Maybe your wife is working full-time, and you feel like when she comes home, she’s acting “lazy,” and you feel hurt because you’re putting all your energy into being there for the children and raising them while she’s at work. You may feel like there isn’t any sexual desire between you two because there’s so much resentment built up.
These are real life issues, and this is where couples’ counseling can help. It’s time to take your relationship into your hands and make it better. Dealing with a lazy wife or husband is exhausting. You want them to do more, but they won’t.
How do you know you have a bad wife?
Marriages are subjective, and each person needs to feel comfortable in the connection. Dealing with a lazy or unmotivated wife can cause resentment in the marriage. The long term goal is to develop healthy communication and trust. If you feel like you’re not being appreciated and your wife is cruel to you, then that could be a sign that something in the relationship needs to change. You simply can’t be in a relationship where your significant other is abusing you, whether that’s verbally, physically, sexually, or financially.
A partner who is a bad partner is somebody who is deliberately hurting their significant other. It’s not so much that there is such a thing as a “bad wife” as that there is a relationship where two people don’t get along. If you feel like you can’t take it anymore and you’re not the best friends you used to be, then that could be a sign that you might need to move on from the marriage. There are steps to dealing with that process, and a therapist can help. To clarify, it goes beyond cooking and cleaning or who stays at home or who doesn’t. It’s about understanding if the connection works.
What is a lazy woman?
“Lazy” can get confused with being overwhelmed. Remember, there are many steps to dealing with marital problems. Don’t assume you can fix you might think you are dealing with a lazy woman if she gets home from her full-time job, school, or other responsibilities, such as caring for elderly family, etc., and she wants to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. In reality, she is effectively at work full time, and when she’s home from work, she wants to be on the couch watching tv because she needs that time to decompress. That is not somebody who is lazy. It’s hard to work full time. No matter if you’re working from home or at the office. Full time employment is taxing on the mind and the body. It’s not lazy to want to relax. It’s that she needs time to clear her head.
It is important to remember that lazyis a negative term. Whether you stay at home with the kids or go to work, everyone is doing their part to contribute to the household. If you see that your wife isn’t doing as much work as you feel you are, then you need to say something. But don’t use the word “lazy.” A better term than lazy is unmotivated. If you’re dealing with someone who is unmotivated, it means that you value different notions of “work,” but they are not participating in being an equal partner in the relationship. When you’re trying to get your partner to carry their weight in the household, it could feel like a full time job. In this case, one person is doing more of the work that contributes in one form or another to the family than the other.
If you’re dealing with a lazy person, that means that they don’t feel like they need to do as much of the work in the marriage and or in raising the children as the other partner. There are steps to dealing with a situation where somebody is more motivated than the other partner. One of them is to work on these issues in counseling.
What is a walk away, wife?
In the same sense of labeling someone as lazy, a walk away wife is somebody who stays at home, and because of that, they are raising the children and feel they don’t have to attend to their husband’s needs. Dealing with a lazy partner is frustrating; no matter what gender you are. A husband may ascribe to a traditional sense of toxic masculinity where his wife’s submission is the most important thing, and that’s not correct. Whatever the gender, it’s important to remember that both individuals need to be hands-on in the relationship, regardless of what the roles may be.
You can set boundaries with your partner and say, I would like to have these responsibilities, and how about you take care of these other commitments? If your wife is acting lazy and you want to talk about it, it’s important to steps to dealing with the issues. Whether you stay at home or go to work, each person has their own set of responsibilities to the house. Both partners need to have equal obligations and fulfill them. There are steps to dealing with problems in a marriage, and one of them is to address the issues and look at how to fix them in counseling. When you go to marriage counseling, you are taking one of the best steps to dealing with your problems in the relationship. You may think, “I can’t take it anymore,”
Dealing with a lazy person in a marriage is infuriating. Take it one day at a time. You will get there with your marriage. Maybe couple’s counseling can help or joining a support group for married couples. Whatever you need to feel less alone is important to do.
Is laziness a reason for divorce?
How do I know if my wife is lazy?
How do you live with a lazy person?
How do you deal with an unmotivated partner?
How do you make a lazy person active?
Is laziness a choice?
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