Caregiver Resource Page
Here’s help to get through your day (and night)
Burnout prevention and rapid stress relief techniques for family caregivers, recovering former caregivers, and professionals who serve seniors with family caregivers.
“As a nurse and a family caregiver for my mom, dad, and husband, I know how important it is for caregivers to connect with tools and services that improve well-being via stress management. Both the caregiver and their loved ones benefit!”
-Gale Lyman, RN, BSN, HNB-BC
Free! Free! Free Resources! Click on the bars below!
Say “NO” to burnout: respite is closer than you think
For family caregivers responsible for loved ones with physical, emotional, or cognitive limitations, taking regular breaks is absolutely necessary and is officially called ‘respite.’
click on the links below for more information:
Respite relief from compassion fatigue
Substitute caregivers: respite when family caregivers need a break
Mini me-time for family caregivers
Away with you! Respite travel for family caregivers
Home alone for Valentine’s Day?
Stress Relief Tools
- Calming recorded guided meditations you can listen to over and over
- A gallery of stress management practices. Select what appeals to you!
- Simple soothing ideas for when you just can’t relax
Link: Free Stress Relief Tools
Recovering after caregiving is done
Being a family caregiver for a loved one who needs help with medical, emotional, physical, or cognitive challenges can be amazing. It can also take a toll on your body, mind and spirit. When family caregiving is done, the challenges that arose don’t magically go away.
click on the links below for more information:
Tips for Recovering After Family Caregiving
Four challenges to recovering from family caregiving
After Caregiving is Over, Create a Comfort Zone for Yourself
The Race to Recovery for Family Caregivers
How to stay healthy during hard times, including pandemics
What Healthcare Doesn’t Know About Recovering After Family Caregiving
After Caregiving, Choose People who are Easy to be With
Key points pertaining to the transitional life phase of family caregiver recovery
More burnout reduction for caregivers
Blogs to help you and your loved one. Click on the links below for more information:
Guided meditation for adults and their caregivers
Fall Back to find what’s missing
Helping long term care residents with dementia feel calm, safe and happy
Helping the pros reduce burnout benefits you and your loved ones
Burnout affects professional caregivers too – nurses, CNAs, physicians, first responders and more. Understand their burnout and offer them these free and helpful links. They probably you’re your compassion and a strong reminder to take care of themselves.
Click on the links below for more information:
Nursing in stressful work environments
Soothe yourself and relax the family members you care for
If you need a break from stress, you are not alone. In a 2015 survey of people caring for family members, 42% requested assistance with coping and managing stress for themselves and their loved ones. (Source: Caregiving in the US 2015).
Helping your family member is not for the fainthearted. Nor is your family member’s experience, whether they struggle with physical, emotional, aging, or cognitive limitations. Here’s how you can both take a break from the stress while developing greater resiliency to the challenges you face.
With less stress, you can
- Enjoy better quality sleep
- Feel calmer and in more control
- Mindfully use your interpersonal skills
- Be more resilient to life’s challenges
- Allow your natural compassion to shine through (rather than irritability and anger!)
- Benefit from more focus and better attention span
- Enhance your creativity, both in the arts and in problem solving
- Support a loving and compassionate approach to life…and to caring for your loved ones.
Burnout is a stress response to overwhelming responsibilities – like juggling work and caring for family members. People who are burned out describe being ineffective and inefficient, and feeling physical, emotional, and/or spiritual exhaustion. The resources on this page will help you carry on, preventing or reducing burnout, with creative solutions and free stress relief.
Are you a caregiver?
Do you help someone who cannot do certain things for themselves? Then you are a Caregiver!
Informal caregiver and family caregiver are terms used to refer to individuals, such as family members, partners, friends, and neighbors, who take care of loved ones with functional, emotional, and/or cognitive limitations due to illness or injury (FCA, 2014; NCP, 2018, p.62). Because of those limitations, they may need help with groceries, cooking, driving, scheduling appointments, taking medications, bathing, or more. Caregivers may live with or nearby the care recipient, while some offer care long-distance.
Gale’s caregiving story
Click here to read my experience as a family caregiver
By TLC Founder Gale Lyman, RN, BSN, HNB-BC
Once upon a time, one of my caring colleagues told me how lucky I was to be experiencing such sacred quality time with my husband. This was immediately after my husband’s first open heart surgery, and my reflexive reaction was, how insensitive could she be? He had been discharged early, because I was a nurse, and was still in fairly critical condition. I was so worried, so busy caring for him, so afraid of making a mistake, and so exhausted that I was barely hanging on. Later, her meaning came to me. For the first time in our married lives, we were not working, we were spending nearly 24/7 together, and we were traveling the sacred path of healing (and in his case, curing, as he made a full recovery.) I had to make a decision nurses must make over and over: did I want to be busy, stressed and task oriented? Or did I want to be compassionate, present, and relationship oriented?
My aging parents
A few years later, my parents were in their eighties and needed a lot more help to remain in their own home. With Dad’s help and my nursing support, my Mom was able to live and die at home. Dad lived to be 93, the last 6 years living with my husband and me. My Dad was loving, sweet, considerate, and until the end, alert and only mildly confused. Still, my oh my, some of those days were highly stressful. His fragile medical status and frequent health crises offered too many opportunities to use my nursing skills.
Being a nurse and helping my parents
As a family caregiver, I was so grateful for my nursing knowledge, not only of illness and injury, but also about home modifications, accessing home care, and providing care coordination. I was well-prepared for family caregiving because throughout my career, my work has been with family caregivers and their loved ones. I have nursed people with both traumatic injuries and with chronic effects of aging in acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, home care, long term care, my private practice and my programs for caregivers. For many years at the C.A.R.E. Program, my ‘patients’ were nurses who were out of work on workers’ compensation or long term disability. My nursing experience provided the knowledge I needed; but my wisdom came from my patients and clients, their families, and my family. Families know what works and what doesn’t.
So, I chose to be a healing presence, compassionate, and family oriented not only when caring for my husband but a few years later when caring for my mom and then my dad. It wasn’t easy. Tasks still had to get done. My expectations and those of my family and their healthcare providers were often unrealistic. Resources of time, money, support, and needed knowledge were woefully inadequate.
Now I’m here to help you
I learned a lot along the way, through my work, my caregiving experiences with my own family, and throughout my journey with holistic nurses and healers. I know first-hand the joys, stressors, and fatigue of family caregiving. I would do it again – without a doubt – but I would wish for more support and less burnout. That’s what I am offering to you: the caregiving wisdom, creative solutions, and stress relief tools you can use to create well-being and quality family time with your loved ones.
In peace,
Gale
