Are Care Responsibilities Consuming Your Life?
Are you wondering how to stop caregiving from taking over your life? Do care responsibilities consume your daily activities? Are you repeatedly stopped in your tracks by random events related to the care of an aging parent or managing your health just when you think you are making progress with your life?
Random events can kick off caregiving responsibilities and
unexpected health problems. Learn what you can do to cope and manage through the choices before you so that you can stop caregiving from consuming your life.
A Caregiver’s Life
What can caregivers do to manage and cope with the responsibilities? The context of each care situation is different. Here are several scenarios.
Adult Children
Adult children fall into the role of caregiver for an aging parent. In many cases, there was no thought given to the decision of agreeing to become a caregiver. Caregivers say, “It just happened.” These caregivers either say they had no choice but to become caregivers, or they make a conscious decision and a plan to stop caregiving
Young Caregivers
Young adults in their twenties and thirties find themselves in a position where they started out caring for grandparents and then moved into caring for middle-aged parents with health issues. These caregivers’ lives are consumed by caregiving responsibilities. They watch their lives pass before their eyes and may be uncertain how to stop caregiving.
Spousal Caregivers
Some spouses have been caregivers for a disabled or sick spouse for years. Some of the situations grow to be abusive or neglectful, with the caregiver spouse verbally abused by the sick spouse. Spouse caregivers who were financially supported all their lives feel they
cannot stop caregiving and leave an abusive situation, so they stay.
Burned Out Caregivers
A caregiver spouse who is burned out, exhausted, or who is managing their health problems can be unintentionally neglectful of a sick spouse. An adult child in a similar situation may be abusive or neglectful of an aging parent.
In these cases, the sick spouse or aging parent may be too frail or have a diagnosis of dementia to express concerns to family members or others outside of the family.
Often, the caregiver spouse or adult child lacks the physical or emotional energy to stop caregiving and make a better plan for the care of the sick person. These situations are the most dire because vulnerable older adults cannot advocate for themselves and suffer from ongoing abuse and neglect.
A Patient’s or Care Receiver’s Life
A person managing health problems is not always a care receiver. People of all ages manage health problems on their own.
For some, there may be a time when having an advocate attend medical appointments to listen and offer an opinion about care, which can be beneficial. Others may need occasional rides to treatments when there are mandatory medical restrictions about not driving to and from an appointment.
Others with multiple diagnoses that result in physical or cognitive concerns may need ongoing caregiving assistance or
24-hour care.
Who Owns Problems and Solutions?
In any of these scenarios, the caregiver, patient, or care receiver can learn how to stop caregiving and health problems from taking responsibility for their actions. Daily practice of personal desires can achieve results. There are also times when drastic changes in unhealthy habits are necessary.
Caregivers can be empathetic about the needs of parents and elders who have difficulty managing their lives or health. Still, caregivers do not have to accept the responsibility for solving these problems by becoming overburdened.
Problems belong to the people who created them. The person with the problem is responsible for finding solutions.
Caregivers who do too much and want to stop caregiving create the problem of doing too much. They can create the solution.
People with health problems may have more to learn. What habits created the problem? What habits must change to result in a solution or improvement of a health condition?
Enablement
An enabler may lurk in the middle of identifying problems and solutions. Enablers make individuals more dependent.
They downplay personal responsibility. Instead of encouraging others to take responsibility and be independent, enablers help too much. Enablers want to be needed.
An enabler can be a spouse, an adult child, or a lifelong friend. These relationships may not be uncovered until random events happen and more people become involved in creating plans and finding solutions.
Emotions
Caregivers who become too
emotionally involved and do not focus on the facts can become very good at practicing worry, damaging family relationships, and creating drama. Who hasn’t at one time felt responsible for the problems or pain of another person?
People experience unfortunate events. They live in the moment and don’t plan for tomorrow—until one day, tomorrow comes. There are problems and no plans.
A lack of planning results in unfortunate situations.
I see this daily in my counseling with aging adults and caregivers. When one does not consider the necessity of planning, time passes, and previously available options disappear.
The clock doesn’t run backward. Being realistic about working with what you have is the best approach in difficult situations.
Three Tips For Stopping Caregiving or Health Problems from Controlling Your Life
Let’s look at three tips for stopping caregiving or health problems.
1 Practice bringing more of what you want into your life
Practice can mean saying no to more requests for your time so that you can spend time on yourself and what you want your life to look like. Work on your physical and mental well-being. Remaining healthy and positive takes daily practice and work. It’s not easy. If it were, everyone would be healthy and have a positive outlook on life.
2 Practice boundary setting
Personal boundary setting can be anything from saying, “I don’t want to spend time with negative people or complainers,” to limiting your time with these people.
Make new friends.
Limit time with an elderly parent whose behaviors can be harmful or draining. Visit, complete your tasks, and leave.
3 Realize the cause and effect of life
Make cause and effect work for you rather than against you. People cause things to happen in their lives through their actions.
For example, you attend college. You graduate if you study, write papers, pass tests, and show up for class. You might practice a musical instrument to play an entire song, play in a band, or conduct an orchestra.
But, occasionally, some random event that could not have been predicted takes you away from an intended path.
Do You Want to Be a Caregiver or Have a Life?
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Pamela’s YouTube ChannelRandom Events
A random event can turn you into a caregiver in the blink of an eye. Random events make you a person with a health problem who needs care or help.
Let’s talk about a cancer diagnosis to make randomness easier to think about. Where does cancer come from?
- Only 5 to 10% of cancers are considered hereditary, caused by family genetics—passed down from your grandparents to your parents to you. You pass the genes down to your children and so on.
- Most cancers, 90%, are random.
- Random cancers arise from environmental factors like smoking, diet, sun exposure, and exposure to pesticides or chemicals.
- Copying errors occur when the body’s DNA produces a new damaged cell. This imperfect cell causes cancer.
Cancer strikes people who live healthy lifestyles – nonsmokers. Persons who eat healthy diets have healthy weights and exercise. People with no family history of cancer are diagnosed with cancer.
Cancer also strikes individuals who are unhealthy.
Random events have no rhyme or reason. This is why planning for aging and health is so important.
Responses to Random Events
So, in the middle of having a random event affect your life, you can
- Be consumed by the event. Let it drag you down into a dismal place of depression, worry, or anxiety where you are unable to cope or manage.
- Fight to regain your life status or position before the event.
This random health event can be a heart attack, a stroke, or a car accident that results in paralysis. In any of these situations, the person with the health problem and the caregiver must
make hard decisions.
When unexpected events occur and uncertainty prevails, the mind experiences a high-stress load to process. Stress results from feeling threatened, not having solutions, and experiencing a lack of control.
Dealing with family conflict, managing difficult work situations, being uncertain about job security, or staying in an unhappy relationship are examples of high-stress situations.
According to
Peters, McWeen, and Friston, “When certainty is not restored, the ability of a person to cope with uncertainty is damaged. High blood pressure, cognitive dysfunction, and a depressed mood can accelerate illness and disease progression.”
Manage Thoughts to Gain Certainty and Stability
Managing thoughts and controlling the mind is the next area to stop caregiving or health problems from taking over your life. This is a practiced and learned skill that many people don’t know is possible until they begin implementing this concept in daily life.
How the mind processes random events and difficult choices is critical to surviving and returning to a normal and certain life.
- For example, a random cancer diagnosis can be traumatic. A person might practice thinking about cancer every day. Constantly thinking about the threat of cancer impacts how the body will respond to surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation.
To equate this to caregiving, think of life as a caregiver. Your focus is on being resentful about being consumed by responsibilities and giving up parts of your life to perform caregiving responsibilities.
- As a caregiver, you can focus on maintaining the important things in your life by limiting your involvement. Instead of doing you help the person who needs care help themselves. You help them find other options for assistance.
If a loved one has serious health problems like dementia, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, or others, they may not be able to themselves. In this case, you can follow a similar path, although you may be more involved in a
legal decision-making capacity.Effects of Caregiving
When you think about caregiving, daily responsibilities can consume more and more of your time. Eventually, you forget the person you were before caregiving.
Your life is gone. You stopped practicing self-care, spending time with friends, pursuing a career, and doing other things you enjoyed.
You focused on being a caregiver to the exclusion of everything else in your life. This level of exclusion happens in many parts of life.
Some people pursue careers that exclude marriage, friendships, and social activities. Women with children can focus on child-rearing to the exclusion of a career and other activities not focused on raising children.
This exclusion can be temporary or last for many years. Focus equals results. Where you spend your time, you will reap results.
Practice Making Decisions
Thoughts and actions are practiced. Thoughts train the mind to focus.
It is difficult to retrain a mind that wants to worry, a mind that is scattered, a mind that says, “I’m too tired to plan. I don’t want to make hard decisions. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t want to do that.”
Putting off decisions to restore certainty or delaying decision-making may seem more manageable. However, delaying decisions kicks the can down the road.
There will likely be more significant caregiving or health problems to deal with later.
Waiting has a tradeoff factor.
Practice Care Discussions
Most families do not understand the importance of having care discussions. Caregivers jump in to provide care without saying, “Stop, wait a minute, we need to talk about this.”
Not having care conversations, not knowing how to have conversations, or not realizing the consequences of not talking makes care situations more complicated. Caregives become burned out. Disagreements occur within families. Relationships can be damaged.
To stop caregiving from taking over your life, think of being a caregiver as a short-term project or role. Put a time limitation on caregiving with a hard stop by creating a plan for the care of a loved one.
Do not place yourself in the role of the primary and only caregiver. If you are a spousal caregiver, this may be more difficult, but it is possible. You schedule time for you.
Through daily practice, you know that if you have to be at work at 8 a.m., you must leave your house by 715 a.m. 715 a.m. is your hard stop. There is no negotiating. You are out the door.
If you are a caregiver, schedule your work time. Complete your work and clock out. Then, return to doing the things you want in your life.
Habits
Creating new habits can be a challenge unless they can become contextual and automatic. For example, you wear a seatbelt without much thought when you get in your car. When you leave your house, you lock the door. When you wake up, you get dressed.
When behaviors become second nature, they are more likely to continue. I meditate twice daily, once when I wake up and once before sleep, and exercise daily.
So, when creating a
new habit or practice, determine the context. For example
, When I have a lunch break, I eat lunch and take a walk.
- When I want something sweet, I eat an apple or other type of fruit.
- When I feel stressed, I take a 5-minute break to refocus my mind and regroup.
- When I feel like I’m not getting ahead in my goal of stopping caregiving, I look at my to-do list and calendar to see everything I have accomplished.
- When I feel worried, I write down the feeling and then return to it later during the 15 minutes of worry time I schedule each day.
Hard Stops
Many caregivers I speak to think caregiving will be a short-term project for a few months, six months, maybe a year. This person is surprised to still be in a caregiving role three, five, or ten years later.
They had no hard stop or an exit plan for stopping caregiving.
Why? Because they practiced caregiving and got so good at it, they excluded everything else from their life. Family, friends, personal interests, activities, good health, career advancement, and others were left on the curb.
If you don’t want your life to be consumed by caregiving, you must create your hard stop. Create an exit plan on day one. When you realize you’ve taken on too much, create a plan to stop caregiving.
The same considerations apply to people managing health conditions. Most people don’t think about how unhealthy habits result in being unhealthier and feeling sick, tired, and exhausted.
If you are diagnosed with a health condition and you ignore it, ignoring that health problem becomes your practice. When you deny health problems, you will become more skilled at being sick. Eventually,
one health problem after another will begin to show up in your life.
A better option is determining what habits or practices will improve the condition. Then, set a hard stop for engaging in any habit that destroys your health.
Boundaries
If you don’t want caregiving or health problems to consume your life, you have to set boundaries for yourself. You must be willing and committed to changing your daily practices and habits.
Practice more of what you want to do. Stop practices that contribute to more health problems.
If you are feeling stuck and you don’t know what to do. I can help.
Schedule a consultation with me today.Looking for More Caregiver Tips and Inspiration? Check out the Articles in Pamela’s Caregiver Library.
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