Healthy Habits For Caregivers

Habits are small decisions and practices you follow regularly, often daily. They can be helpful or harmful and get to the point of being automatic – something you don’t even think about. 

As a result, habits can be a powerful way to make large changes. Accumulating positive habits and decreasing negative ones can have surprisingly dramatic impacts on your life. 

Today, we’re interested in healthy habits for caregivers. These are the practices that can help to boost your health, make you feel better, and generally help you to thrive. They’re a little like hobbies in that sense, except that today we’re focusing on small tasks you can complete regularly.  

Before we start, this isn’t a definitive list of habits (a complete list would be seriously insane). We’re simply focusing on habits that can help the most, particularly ones you mightn’t have thought about. We’ll also touch on new ways to approach the habits you already know.  

Habits vs Routines

The term habit often refers to behaviors that become automatic – the ones we practice almost on autopilot. Routines are repeated behaviors too, but they’re not necessarily automatic. They’re often things we do as the result of willpower, like taking the garbage out. 

For this post, we’re treating habits and routines as being the same. After all, habits aren’t automatic when you first get started. New habits take time to develop. 

Our Favorite Healthy Habits for Caregivers

Practical Habits

These are the functional habits that make up your life, things like brushing your teeth, making the bed, getting dressed, cleaning, and the like. Here are some to consider. I’m sure you know of others. 

• Spend 15 minutes cleaning or tidying. If you struggle to keep things clean and tidy, try a habit of simply doing so for 15 minutes at a time once per day. This is enough to feel like you’re getting somewhere, without being overwhelming.  
• Make a to-do list. Organizing tasks can often help you feel calmer and make you more productive. 
• Make your bed.
• Keep important items where they can be easily located. For example, you might have an area for the items you need when you go out or a designated cupboard for incontinence products. 
• Use a calendar to plan events. This is particularly important if you have multiple people’s schedules to think about. For example, you might have your own work or tasks, plus your children’s needs and doctor’s appointments for an aging parent. Being organized can save you time and noticeably decrease your stress levels. 

Restful Habits

Habits don’t all need to relate to personal growth. Sometimes you need to slow down and rest instead. The following approaches are good places to begin. Remember, even five minutes a day can make a big difference over time. 

• Watch a movie you love. 
• Spend some time sitting in nature. 
• Chill out with a good book. 
• Have a bubble bath (or a long shower). 
• Have a nap.
• Work on an adult coloring book (like this one) or a puzzle.
• Focus on your breath for a minute or two. 
• Listen to soothing music. 
• Have a cup of tea. 
• Listen to a podcast. 

Habits For Your Health

In this category, we’re lumping together all the habits that help with health, including physical, mental, and emotional health. After all, those three areas are interrelated. 

Increase Your Exercise and Movement

This one is no secret, staying active is an important part of promoting health. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to do so. 

The trick is to choose approaches that actually resonate with you. Here are some ideas to kick you off:

• Go for a walk or a run. 
• Dance to an upbeat song. 
• Try a workout video in whatever style you enjoy. Zumba is a popular choice
• Put on some high energy music, then combine dancing and cleaning. 
• Join a local gym. 
• Sign up for boxing lessons. 
• Start going to local fitness classes.
• Do 10 situps per day.
• Start swimming regularly.
• Play energetically with your kids. 
• Climb a tree.

The best activities will also be influenced by your current activity levels. In particular, you might not need much extra activity if your caregiving role is already physically intense. You might choose to go for a walk instead, so you can stretch your legs and get some fresh air.  

Develop a Memory Journal or Gratitude Journal Practice

Gratitude journals work as the name suggests – you’re recording what you’re most grateful for. They’re particularly powerful if you look for new things to add each day, rather than simply repeating the same list. 

If journaling isn’t your thing, try simply speaking out the things you’re grateful for each day. 

Memory journals can be powerful too. One style involves recording details about everything that happened on the day that was worth celebrating. What were the exciting things? The good things? The unusual things? 

Notably, these don’t have to be big things. They could be the tiny beauties in life, like a sparrow you saw in the garden or the way that sunlight filters through the leaves. 

Recording such moments regularly helps to shift your attention. Before long, you’re actively looking out for these moments and noticing them much more than you would otherwise.  

Schedule in Time for Sensuality 

This topic is often overlooked, yet it’s highly relevant for caregivers. Here we’re talking about the importance of human touch and intimate connection. Ideally this is a habit you make with people you love. However, some spousal caregivers may need to focus on what they can do on their own – or get a little creative with their partners. 

Touch is a big way that we connect with those we love, helping us to bond and feel like we belong. Touch also helps to decrease stress, improve mood, and promote resilience, so it’s incredibly important.

Most caregivers will benefit from finding ways to incorporate touch into their lives more. This could include hugging friends more often or even looking into professional cuddlers (yes, that’s a thing!). 

If you’re a woman who wants help with the sexual side of things, check out the book Come As You Are. It’s an insightful book that helps to decrease some of the stigma around female sexuality.    

Other Healthy Habits

Here are some other habits that help to boost your health. 

• Get up and go to bed at a consistent time. 
• Practice yoga or meditation. 
• Eat more healthy food and/or eat less unhealthy food. Adding healthy food into your diet is often the easier of these approaches and the healthy food helps to displace unhealthy food anyway. 
• Drink enough water each day.
• Prep breakfast the night before. This works well if you have more time or flexibility in the evening and gets your day off to an easy start. 

Habits For You

Finally, there are the habits that make you feel good. These mightn’t be linked to health at all, instead they’re things you enjoy. 

It might seem strange to include these as habits, as it’s pretty easy to do the things you love. Yet, caregivers often struggle with this. Having time set aside for the things that matter makes it easier to actually do these.

Focus on a Hobby or Project

Do you have a long-term hobby or project? If so, put aside time for it regularly, perhaps even just 15 minutes every few days. 

If you don’t have such a hobby or don’t have one you can do for small blocks of time, look for a new hobby. Doing so is powerful, as a hobby takes your attention away from caregiving and enriches your life. Here are a few to consider: 

• Painting or drawing. 
• Knitting, crocheting, or similar crafts. 
• Writing. Whether you’re blogging, writing a book, working on poetry, or even writing fanfiction, writing is a wonderful project that often adds meaning to your life. 
• Cooking. 
• Photography. Photography is an amazing way to appreciate your environment and get out of your head for a while. 
• Upcycling.
• Creating costume pieces. 
• Learning a new style of dance. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials for this or you can look for a class in your local area. 

These don’t need to be hobbies that you’re good at or even ones you’ve tried before. Learning a new hobby and finding your way with it can be engaging in its own right. 

Other Personal Habits

Beyond hobbies, what other things make you feel good? Try paying attention to your physical and emotional responses. What daily habits spark joy and are meaningful? 

Dancing is certainly one for me. There’s something stunning about the combination of music and movement. 

Moments of connection with your loved ones are often relevant too. Why not look for ways to get more of those connections in your life?

How To Create Lasting Habits

So, how do you create good habits and stick to them? Here are a few tips. 

Find Short-Term Rewards

New habits can be tough because the reward is in the future. 

To make them easier, you need some type of reward that’s here and now. Something that keeps you going with the habit. 

Some of the game-based habit trackers are designed based on this idea. They allow you to level up an avatar, grow a plant, or something similar, which gives you just enough of a sense of being rewarded. 

Even regular habit tracking apps can be helpful, as there’s a sense of accomplishment from checking tasks off. 

Beyond this, you might reward yourself by reaching certain levels of progress. Or, you might focus on habits that bring some measure of joy on their own. For example, I’ve never enjoyed exercise, so exercise-based habits are tough to keep. But, boxing, dance-based exercise, and Tae Bo are exceptions. I find habits around those types of exercise much easier to stick with. 

What about you? Can you find habits that help you and also light you up? 

Start With Just A Few Habits

It’s often best to start with just a couple of habits or even one, then increase as you go. This way the momentum from completing one habit successfully can help to drive you forward into the next. 

With many habits on the table, there’s a higher risk that you won’t meet them all, which then drags you down emotionally. 

These habits should be easy and realistic too. You might even start with ones that are so simple they feel silly, like drinking a glass of water when you first wake up. Even if the practices are simple, the momentum will help. 

Tailor Your Environment

Little tweaks to your environment can make good habits easier to follow and bad ones harder. 

A classic example is hiding treats in the cupboard while keeping healthy food in easy reach. You could go even further, like putting the book you want to read in the middle of your bed, so you have to at least move it to go to sleep. 

Little tweaks to your environment can make a surprisingly big difference. 

Plan For Chaos

This trick comes from James Clear and is particularly relevant for caregivers. 

The idea is to design your habits based on the idea that life is going to be busy and a bit nuts at times. So, if you can’t practice your habit at the time you hoped for, you might do it later in the day or do a smaller version. 

And, if you don’t meet your target that day, then simply try again the next day (and so on, if needed). An off day doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Even if you miss your habit as often as you hit it – you’re still practicing the healthy habit more than you were before. 

In his habits work, James Clear suggests planning what you’ll be doing and when, then sticking to it. However, as a caregiver, you might need to be more flexible than that. I often use the app Habitica and focus on habits that I complete regularly, rather than ones that are specific to a day or a time. 

I find that approach works better with a hectic life and often being overloaded. 

Besides, caregivers often struggle with doing too much, rather than being unmotivated. Pushing yourself even harder could easily be harmful.

Find What Works For You

Finally, experiment until you find the approaches that are the best fit for you and for your needs. This is crucial because we’re all so different from each other. 

And honestly, the habits that help you the most mightn’t be the ones you expect. So, try them out. See what sticks. 

You can think about your values too, along with your long-term goals. These areas can help you discover the best habits to focus on. 

Final Thoughts

Now that we’ve gone through these healthy habits for caregivers, what do you think? Are there other habits that should have made this list? Ones that you personally resonate with? 

And, what about following habits?  

Most of us get stuck somewhere. What areas do you find hardest as a caregiver? Where do you feel like you’re doing well?

If you want to learn more, check out James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. This looks more at the science behind habits and specific ways you can make habit formation easy. While the approaches he suggests aren’t revolutionary, they might provide the nudge that you need.  

Or, check out the guide on James Clear’s site. You might even find this more helpful than his book.