A caregiver at all times

It's the holiday season in the US and I saw Jessica Seinfeld has come out with a new recipe book called "Vegan at Times." Now this book caught my attention for a number of reasons. I happen to like Jessica's recipes and I am definitely interested in a vegan book of hers. I was also captivated by the title which seemed to imply to me, "I am not a vegan all the time but I do aspire to be more plant-based and I would like to make it a bigger part of my life."

Now since I am constantly obsessing about the caregiver predicament and how to make our lifestyles a lot better, I started to think about a book for caregivers called, "Caregiving at Times" and I realized that we don't have the luxury to think about something that we can dip into from time to time because many of us are doing this 24/7. This then led me to think about the two problems that I know caregivers are up against from the outset.

The first is that we don’t initially identify with this role but rather see caregiving as an extension of our existing relationship with our loved one. Ie we don't see ourselves as vegan or even close to being one and therefore we don't get the manual and we don’t actively seek support or skills or a new mindset for the job.

The second problem is that once we are in the role, either because we are too stressed or because we believe we don’t have time or because we can’t face the work required to change ourselves or because we think we need to just endure and grin and bear it, we caregivers don’t actively look for ways to help ourselves. ie. we'd like to become vegan and we know it would be good for us but we don't buy Jessica's book and we don't start to follow her recipes and make it part of our new lifestyle because ..... you can fill in the blank).

Now humor me for a minute. I just went on caregiver.org and found a very interesting article about self-care that says caregivers have a risk of dying that is 63% higher than that of people your age who are not caregivers.

That's not a small number which indicates to me that we caregivers do not have the luxury of thinking about a new caregiver lifestyle as something we dip into. This isn't MORE OF THE SAME WITH A TWIST. Rather what it tells me is that we need to be taking our mental state, behaviors and lifestyle seriously and since this work is 24/7, guess what, we need to be doing whatever it is that will take us out of our heads and feeling better about ourselves DAILY.

Now imagine a manual (or let's call it a system) that provides more knowledge, more awareness, more practices and more direction on how to create and set goals, along with human support that will help you integrate all of this into a new daily lifestyle… we might actually find that we are doing better than ever before.

That’s not because caregiving isn’t hard or that we are denying the grief we may feel, but rather we see the likelihood of caregiving to bring us down is actually forcing us to take very deliberate actions to bring ourselves up daily. When you are that focused on staying in a good mental space (BTW scheduling a massage in two weeks time is not enough), I promise you things start to change. That’s not because Tanya feels great these days... that's because there is evidence-based proof.