If you’re a caregiver of a family member and find that the stress and strain of caregiving is taking a toll on your physical and mental health, you can take many steps to reducing health risks. Whatever step you take first toward managing long-term stress doesn’t matter. What is important is taking that first step. The next step will be easier and so on.

Carol Levine, director of the Families and Health Care Project at the United Hospital Fund in New York, offers the following steps toward healthier living with long-term caregiver stress:

  • Take stock of your strengths and acknowledge your limits. Recognize what you’re doing well can help you deal with the aspects of caregiving you find most troubling.
  • Analyze the sources of your stress. Is it th edeteriorating health of your family member, financial issues, isolation, comteting family or work responsibilities, dealing with bureaucracies, or lack of time for yourself?
  • Take a problem-solving approach to each source of stress. What can be done to ease that particular strain?
  • Enlist others in the solution. Depending on the problem, seek the support of another family member, a trusted friend, social worker, physician, nurse, therapist, home care aide, financial adviser, lawyer, or religious leader. Some solutions will be temporary or incomplete; accept that and move forward.
  • Follow a diet and exercise program that is feasible and satisying.
  • Learn some breathing techniques to use when you feel tired or overwhelmed. “Take a deep breath” is always good advise for any reason; it gets oxygen to your brain.
  • Try to find an outlet for your won interests, creativity, and individuality. You had a life before caregiving; what were the things you liked to do? Try to find a way to do them again, even in a limited way. What were the tings you always wanted to do? Try to find a way to start. There will be a life after caregiving, and these activities will help you then as well as now.
  • Develop your spiritual side, whether that is through prayer, meditation, nature, art, literature, msic or whatever takes your thoughts to a different plane. 

It is hard to put such plans into action. But every small step makes a big difference.