Why do caregivers fall apart?

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist and researcher wrote a best selling book called Grit a few years ago. The main thesis of the book claims “grit is passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. It combines resilience, ambition, and self-control in the pursuit of goals that take months, years, or even decades.”

Now I don’t know about you but something about this speaks to me as a caregiver. We’ve got plenty of persistence and passion and we’re incredibly resilient and not interested in rewards but the place where so many of us find ourselves “falling” or “losing ourselves” is the self-control and pursuit of goals bit.

I think caregivers need to think about this long and hard because we aren’t supposed to burn out and fail but in the face of adversity without self-awareness (and that includes practices that allow us to slow down so that we can take our finger off the addictive stress button) and a constant reassessment of our goals (and these can be daily micro goals by the way), I believe we are probably setting ourselves up to have a pretty miserable ride. Some of you may say to me, “but Tanya, caregiving is miserable, I am looking after someone who is sick or with significant challenges.” I won’t disagree with you about that... but at some point, you may start to think, I am still healthy, what about me?

When Duckworth wrote her book many of her examples refer to success in the workforce, but let’s face it caregiving is a job too. The reason why we don’t invest in making it the best experience ever is because we place all of our focus and attention on goals around our loved ones. This is fine but only if those goals are genuinely things we are passionate about (and not just doing from a place of stress and fight or flight) and I still believe we need to throw personal goals in the mix too.

Think about what goals, interests or practices you would like to engage in that will enable you to focus on long-term achievement. I believe the caregiving role provides us an extraordinary opportunity to dive into these questions with real purpose.