Toula’s Blog
HOLIDAY STRESS REDUCTION FOR CAREGIVERS
Set priorities. Decide what is most important to you and your family, and focus only on just those things.
Stick with some holiday traditions, but let go of others. Hang on to what’s really important to you and your loved ones. This might be the year to put up a small artificial tree instead of your regular six foot real one. It’s OK, really.
Say no. You don’t have to go to every party. You don’t have to say yes to everything that’s asked of you. Remember, it’s OK to think about your needs now.
Ask for help. You don’t have to cook the entire holiday meal yourself. Asking everyone to bring a covered dish is most acceptable these days!
Use paper plates. Save yourself the work of washing dishes after the big dinner. There are some lovely but sturdy plates with holiday designs. Who really wants a lot of clean up anyway?!
Make shopping for gifts easier. Consider shopping over the Internet, so many places offer free shipping now, why face the crowds?! I like opening up my door and finding packages there-even when they aren’t for me!
Don’t overspend. Keep that promise to yourself this year! It will help decrease the stress.
Set aside time for yourself. I know it’s hard to do at such a busy time of year, but you can’t do anything better for yourself.
Take care of yourself. Do your best to eat right, get enough sleep, and get some exercise. Find a “Caregiver Buddy,” someone you can really talk to and count on for support. You probably have friends going through the same things you are. She or he may need to talk too!
Let the holidays be a joyful time of year by focusing on “just being ” with your loved one. Remember, you will have special memories of this very sweet time. This is especially important f you think it may be the last one together. If so, call your local community hospice, let them help you during this time.
Happy Holidays everyone!!
Toula
Ways to combat caregiver stress. Laugh!
Janice has been caring for her husband, Al, who has mild dementia for three years. His physical care is manageable, but she can’t leave him at “home alone” any more, and she’s finding that she has to calm him down throughout the day. She’s concerned his anxiety will escalate if she leaves him. She misses going to lunch with her girlfriends. She worries about the day when she may no longer be able to care for him. All these are caregiver stressors, and they take a toll on our health, our emotions, and our relationships…
We all know our caregiving role comes with many different types of stress. It is difficult to have your “world turned upside down” to accommodate the needs of another, no matter how much you love them and are committed to taking good care of them.
For the next several weeks I would like to offer a suggestion each week that promises to reduce the amount of stress you experience. My hope is that these ideas will bring a sense of refreshment and renewed energy to carry you through your day.
My first suggestion is to laugh more frequently. That’s right, Laugh. Laugh out loud! A good old belly laugh will always make you feel better.
Laughter is a physical, mental and spiritual tonic. Research indicates that children smile or laugh 400 times per day; adults smile or laugh 15 or fewer times per day. (Dr. Amen, amen clinics.com) Perhaps we need to be more like children and not take everything (including ourselves) so seriously!
Research also shows that laughter reduces the stress hormone cortisol (which also helps create belly fat!) and well as adrenaline. At the same time, it increases the “feel good” hormone, endorphin. Laughter has also been shown to improve your immune system as well as aid your digestion process.
So, you ask…what’s to laugh at? How about a funny movie (I still laugh at the old Peter Sellers movies!) or TV show? When was the last time you read the Sunday comics?
Take time to read a funny book, or call your friend who is good at telling jokes (everybody has one) and ask him to tell you the latest good joke he heard.
Learn to laugh at yourself, and the mistakes you make. So you spill the milk all over the table while pouring for your loved one… Laugh at your own clumsiness; laugh at your loved one’s clumsiness or the ridiculous things you now have to do together to make life work. Let’s face it, caring for a loved one can put us in some pretty funny positions! Janice and Al had a good laugh as they both had to crawl back to the bedroom after taking a fall in the bathroom. Nobody was hurt, and as Janice laughed about crawling like babies, they both went into hysterics
Caregiving’s Hidden Benefits | Paula Span
Could there be measurable benefits to your health, and to your brain in particular, from being a caregiver?
It’s practically become an article of faith that the reverse is true, that caring for an elderly relative is so stressful, relentless and draining that it takes a toll on your well-being. Some studies have shown that it can increase your risk of depression and heart disease, impair your immune system, even contribute to death.
That caregiving could actually provide some health advantage is so counterintuitive that when Lisa Fredman, a Boston University epidemiologist, first saw such results emerging from her study of elderly women, “I thought, what on earth is going on here?” she recalled. “I blamed myself. I thought something was wrong with my data.”
But over several years of studying the differences between caregivers and non-caregivers in four locations (Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and Portland, Ore.), Dr. Fredman and her colleagues found that while caregivers were indeed more stressed, they still had lower mortality rates than non-caregiversover eight years of follow-up.
In another study of about 900 women drawn from the same four-site sample, even those classified as high-intensity caregivers — because they performed more functions for their dependent relatives — maintained stronger physical performance than non-caregivers. On tests like walking pace, grip strength and the speed with which they could rise from a chair, the high-intensity group declined less than lower-intensity caregivers or non-caregivers over two years.
“That was a shocker,” Dr. Fredman said.
Now Dr. Fredman and her co-author Rosanna Bertrand, a health policy associate at Abt Associates in Cambridge, Mass., have gone back to this pool of women to look at their cognitive functioning. Here, again, caregivers did significantly better on memory tests than did non-caregivers followed over two years. Though the groups were about the same average age, in their early to mid-80s, caregivers scored at the level of people who were 10 years younger.
Along with what’s called “caregiver burden,” gerontologists and psychologists use the phrase “caregiver gain” to reflect the fact that this role, which often exacts such high costs, can bring rewards. But they’ve typically described those rewards in psychological, emotional and even spiritual terms: growing confidence in one’s abilities, feelings of personal satisfaction, increased family closeness. That caregivers can walk faster or recall more words on a memory test — that’s news.
Dr. Fredman has begun referring to this notion that caregivers are not invariably beaten down by their responsibilities as the “healthy caregiver hypothesis.” Taken together, her studies provide some evidence that caregivers, however stressed, may be stronger and stay stronger than women of the same ages who don’t undertake those tasks. The interesting question is why.
You can’t randomize studies like this, assigning some old women to serve as caregivers but not others. So it’s likely that a big part of the differences, Dr. Fredman said, stemmed from self-selection: Women become caregivers because they are healthy enough to shoulder that responsibility. “If you’re not healthy,” she said, “it goes to your daughter or daughter-in-law.” It’s not surprising, therefore, that even high-intensity caregivers have and maintain more physical strength.
It’s also true that Dr. Fredman’s definition of a caregiver sets a fairly low bar, including anyone who performs even one “instrumental activity of daily living,” such as helping someone with bill-paying or phone use. Hands-on help with bathing or toilet use is clearly more stressful, physically and emotionally; caring for someone with dementia can be particularly arduous.
But caregiving itself may provide real benefits. “Most caregiving activities require you to move around a lot,” Dr. Fredman pointed out. “It keeps people on their feet, up and going.” And exercise is known to improve physical health and cognition.
Moreover, Dr. Bertrand added: “Caregiving often requires complex thought. Caregivers monitor medications, they juggle schedules, they may take over financial responsibilities.” That, too, can ward off cognitive decline.
Plus there’s the whole matter of people benefiting from having a purpose. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s real.
So it’s fair to say that the question of how caregiving impacts the caregiver is more complicated and individual than we think. Both could be true, the burdens and the benefits, depending on how demanding the job is and a host of other factors.
That caregiving is a very tough job is beyond debate. “We don’t want to overstate this and say it’s good for caregivers and have governors across the country rush to cut support programs that help families,” said Steven Zarit, a Penn State gerontologist who has studied caregiving. (Of course, governors seem all too eager to do that anyway.)
Still, “it may not be as predictive of their demise as previously thought,” Dr. Bertrand said of elder care and caregivers. “There are potentially some positive aspects.”
Source: Paula Span
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