Looking for how to avoid caregiver burnout? This Review Reveals the best ways how to avoid caregiver burnout. We need to avoid burnout to take care of our loved ones.
As many as 43.5 million Americans care for older parents, grandparents, spouses, and other older adults.
Do You Recognize The 14 Early Warning Signs Of Caregiver Burnout?
Some older adults need only a little assistance, such as help with shoveling snow or rides to and from the grocery store. Others need a lot of help with daily activities like eating, bathing, dressing, taking medications, and managing money. Over time, some older adults with increasing medical problems often need significant help from caregivers in performing activities of basic living.
While caring for an older family member can be one of the most rewarding experiences of a lifetime, it can also become stressful at times. This is especially true if the older adult has dementia or needs around-the-clock care. Most caregivers are spouses/partners or adult children. They may have health problems of their own, have children to care for, work outside the home, or all of these. The additional duties of providing care for an older person can lead to excessive physical or emotional fatigue, called “caregiver burnout.”
In this article, we’re reviewing how to avoid caregiver burnouts in 2021.
Causes Of Caregiver Burnout
Along with the heavy workload and emotional demands of family caregiving, these issues also can contribute to burnout.
• Conflicting Demands
Conflicting demands as you try to balance the needs of the care recipient, coworkers and employers, family members, and yourself.
• Lack Of Control
Lack of control over money and resources and a lack of the skills needed to effectively manage a loved one’s care.
• Lack Of Privacy
Lack of privacy because caregiving may leave you with little time to be alone.
• Role Confusion
Role confusion, difficulty separating your roles as caregiver and as the parent, sibling or spouse of the care recipient.
• Unreasonable Demands
Unreasonable demands are placed upon a caregiver by other family members or the person being cared for.
• Unrealistic Expectations
Unrealistic expectations about the effect caregiving efforts will have on loved ones with progressive diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.
Sources: Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine
Signs of Caregiver Burnout and How to Prevent It
Out of love, out of obligation, maybe out of a sense of just doing what’s right, you might be one of more than 40 million adults in North America taking care of an elderly, chronically ill, or a disabled loved one, according to Pew Research Center.
In fact, 70 percent of family caretakers take care of one person over 65, while 22 percent help two people and 7 percent care for three or more people. Thirty-two percent (32 percent) of caregivers describe the experience as stressful.
You’re on the road to caregiver burnout. It’s not taken lightly by psychologists—who define it as “a debilitating psychological condition brought about by unrelieved stress”—and should not be taken lightly by you. By the time most caregivers suspect burnout, they’re already suffering myriad symptoms.
In addition to coping with a loved one’s illness, they might also deal with financial pressures, changes in family dynamics, and general disruption in family life. It’s a recipe for caregiver burnout that would negatively affect anyone’s ability to provide good care and potentially place the caregiver’s health at risk.
If you know what caregiver burnout is, you can protect yourself from burning the candle at both ends.
14 Warning Signs of Caregiver Burnout
- Lack of energy
- Overwhelming fatigue
- Sleep problems (too much or too little)
- Changes in eating habits; weight loss or gain
- A feeling of hopelessness
- Withdrawing from, or losing interest in, activities you once enjoyed
- Neglecting your own physical and emotional needs
- Feeling like caregiving is controlling your life
- Becoming unusually impatient, irritable or argumentative with the person you’re caring for and/or with others
- Anxiety about the future
- Depression or mood swings
- Difficulty coping with everyday things
- Headaches, stomachaches, and other physical problems
- Lowered resistance to illness
Caregiver Burnout Prevention
Now that you know what to look for, here are some tips to help you pre-empt caregiver burnout.
- Ask for help! Needing help doesn’t make you a bad caregiver. It simply means you can’t do it alone (no one can do it alone).
- Give yourself permission to take breaks. Get out of the house. Visit with friends. Pamper yourself with a massage. Take a long bath.
- Take care of yourself. Don’t skip your own doctor’s appointments because you’re too busy. Exercise, eat well and get enough sleep.
- Get up 15 minutes earlier and use the time just for you. Sit with your coffee or tea and enjoy it. Journal about your struggles and feelings. Meditate, pray, stretch. . . . Do whatever you want to do.
- Make a list of your daily activities and tasks. See if you can delegate any of them. Perhaps your spouse can make dinner twice or a week. Maybe a friend or relative can run errands or help with laundry. People often want to help—take them up on it!
- Check into family-leave benefits from your place of work. Take a huge weight off your shoulders by giving you more hours in your day.
- If your loved one is receiving hospice care, ask your hospice provider about local support groups. Communicating with others who are in your situation helps immensely, as does opening up and sharing your frustrations—and your joys!
- If an opportunity comes along for a brief getaway for you, consider hospice respite care for your loved one. Your hospice program should offer short-term inpatient admission for your loved one (meaning more than 24 hours and up to five days and nights maximum) to relieve family members or other persons who are caregivers.
There is support, there are shortcuts, and there are strategies for reorganizing your priorities to make you a happier person and a better caregiver.
Conclusion
Do You Recognize The 14 Early Warning Signs Of Caregiver Burnout?
Educate yourself on the signals of caregiver burnout to protect you and the one you are caring for.
The consequences are too severe to neglect this.
Good Luck…
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