Skip to main content

How Does Caregiving Stress Affect Your Career?

Lots of caregivers believe that the stress they experience as a part of caregiving is something that they only experience in that situation. But stress doesn’t care where you are or what you’re doing. If you ignore it, you’ll find the effects of stress following you even to your career and that can be bad for multiple reasons.

Stress Is Everywhere

Stress is a normal part of life. It’s literally everywhere and it takes the form of both “good” stress and “bad” stress. So-called good stress makes you alert to dangers and can keep you from making mistakes that could prove harmful to you. Bad stress is stress that takes a toll on you mentally and physically. It’s a result of being hypervigilant for too long.

Stress Doesn’t Stay in Categories

Something else to understand about stress is that it doesn’t stay boxed up neatly. Your stress as a caregiver will flow into the rest of your life, including your career and your other relationships, unless you take steps to manage it appropriately. Ignoring stress is not going to work. You have to actively do something about it.

Managing Your Stress Keeps it from Getting Out of Hand

When you notice that you’re experiencing greater amounts of stress than usual, that’s your sign to start doing something. Ideally, you’re already engaging in self-care, which can help you to be proactive about stress management. If you’re not making stress management a priority, it’s highly likely that you’re finding yourself to be easily overwhelmed in all areas of your life, not just caregiving.

What Can You Do?

The big question, of course, is what do you do? It’s slightly different for everyone, but you need to be taking breaks from caregiving. You also need to be ensuring that you’re taking the best care of yourself that you can. Eating well, sleeping enough, and moving more are the three pillars of the bare bones of a self-care plan. From there, figure out what helps you the most when you’re experiencing the bad form of stress. If that’s exercise, determine how you can get more exercise into your daily and weekly routine.

Your stress as a caregiver doesn’t have to significantly impact your career and the rest of your life. But it will if you’re trying to ignore it or otherwise neglecting the self-care that you need so much. This can be a painful lesson to learn, but it’s one that will serve you well throughout your caregiving journey.

When you are in need of care for a senior loved one, consider caregivers provided by Golden Heart Senior Care. We have offices nationwide. For more information, call us today at (800) 601-2792.

The post How Does Caregiving Stress Affect Your Career? appeared first on Golden Heart Senior Care.



from Golden Heart Senior Care https://ift.tt/3bHcVAT
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sleep in the Elderly: What is Normal?

If you are a caregiver for a senior, or even just have elderly people in your life, you may wonder about their sleeping habits. It sometimes seems that the elderly don’t need as much sleep as the average person. You may feel like the elderly in your life are sleeping a lot, or sleeping too much during the day. Unfortunately when it comes to sleep in the elderly, what is normal may not necessarily be what is healthy. Excessive sleep or daytime sleeping in the elderly are all related to sleep disorders and can be helped. How Many Hours of Sleep Does an Elderly Person Need? A pervading myth related to sleep claims that elderly adults need less sleep than the average adult. It’s not quite clear how this myth began. Perhaps because elderly adults tend to nap in the afternoons and sleep less during the night. Perhaps because the elderly tend to wake up earlier in the morning, it appears they do not need to sleep as much. Whatever the reason, it remains a myth. From the mid-’20s onward, do...

Dads and Pops: Your Good Health Matters to Us 

Did you know  June is  Men’s Health Month  and Father’s Day anchors Men’s Health Week ?   Celebrate dad on Father’s Day and thank him for all he  has  done, but  also  make sure to seize an opportunity sometime this month to have a conversation with him about his health. This awareness campaign has the critical purpose of informing men   that avoiding preventive healthcare puts them at real and serious risk of  contracting a disease or  acquiring  a chronic condition.   Studies consistently  show the numbers go against men , particularly as they advance into their senior years.   Even with dramatic advances in diagnosis and treatment over the past 100 years, men’s life expectancy still lags significantly behind women. According to  Harvard Health ,  the gap is widening. In 1900, the life expectancy for women was 48.3 years vs. 46.3 for men. In 2017, it was 81.1 years for women vs. 76.1 for men. Harvard...

Film Screening at Samvedna Senior Care

On 30th September, 2019, Samvedna Senior Care Foundation hosted the 2nd film festival of generations in association with Heidelberg University, Germany. The film Sputnik Moment – 30 years and beyond was screened at our senior citizen centre in Gurgaon for our members and staff. The film highlighted how senior citizens in Germany and the US were taking up second careers to fill their time, engage meaningfully and also get support through additional income. Post the screening Dr. Martin Gieselmann, Executive Secretary, SAI, Heidelberg University and Dr. Constanze, Coordinator DAAD Project, Heidelberg University along with our team engaged with the audience in an interesting discussion on the Indian scenario. Members shared that in India it is not easy for senior citizens to pick up jobs after retirement, however it was interesting to see that many in the audience did have jobs post retirement. They also spoke about stereotypes and social attitudes towards ageing and shared their per...