Caregiving is many things. The role can be a privilege, the chance to support a family member that you care about, one who may have helped you in earlier life.
Yet, the challenges of caregiving cannot be denied. As any caregiver will know, the role can be overwhelming and exhausting. You often end up doing things that you never imagined, like helping a loved one to clean themselves.
Much of the time, the biggest issue isn’t the practical difficulties that come with caregiving, but the way that the role can affect you as a caregiver.
Many people experience burnout, compassion fatigue or both. These issues make everything much more difficult, leaving the caregiver stressed and unable to cope. The care that they provide can suffer as a consequence, along with their quality of life.
Approaches like self-care, finding support and having respite time are important tools for making caregiving easier.
But honestly, they only go so far.
As many caregivers know – support isn’t always available. And self-care, well, critical as this may be, self-care is near impossible during some intense caregiving crises.
Sometimes the trick isn’t to change your caregiving role. Instead, you need to focus on how you respond to it.
I know.
This sounds like a platitude, akin to the idea of thinking positive.
But, the human mind is powerful. It doesn’t just influence what we think about the world. It can even shift what we notice and where we place value.
An Introduction to Resilience
To talk about this idea of changing your responses to caregiving, we need to start with resilience.
While there is no universal definition, resilience generally refers to the way people can bounce back after challenges. In fact, resilient people often grow and even thrive after experiencing extraordinary difficult challenges.
Research has shown that resilience can influence how a person responds to caregiving.
Resilient people may see fewer negative health outcomes from caregiving. Many may also be less stressed and see more good things about their role.
Even more importantly, resilience doesn’t seem to be an inbuilt trait. Some people may be more naturally resilient than others, but resilience is also something that you can increase over time.
This pattern is powerful for caregiving, as this means you can dramatically decrease the stress and burden of caregiving without changing your circumstances at all.
Self-Talk and Resilience
Changing your self-talk is one tool for doing improving resilience. We’ve covered this in another post, but the general idea is that you need to change the patterns of your internal voice.
People are often needlessly harsh on themselves, blaming themselves for things that they could not control or for simply being human and making mistakes. Having a negative focus on the situation is another common pattern that is just as damaging.
Using mindfulness or meditation apps may help you to get in the right space, giving you the chance to slow down. Self-compassion is also an important practice. This focuses on the idea of being kind to yourself.
Thinking and Resilience
There are other resilience techniques too (some of which we’ve covered in another post). But, today we’re going to focus on one specific area.
The topic comes from a short book on Amazon, called The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness.
This book doesn’t focus on resilience or caregiving specifically. It talks about an interesting approach to life as a whole, one that goes against traditional approaches.
The book struck a chord with me, as it is very similar to an area that I’ve been working on in myself. I suspect that doing so is a key reason why my stress as a caregiver was often much lower than you might expect for the situation.
The Joy of Not Thinking
Tim Grimes opens The Joy of Not Thinking by talking about an experience that he had at the age of 16. He calls it a mental breakdown, where he experienced a dramatic fear surrounding life and suffering, following by a sudden loss of the sense of self.
He explains the sensation like this:
You couldn’t describe this. Any description was pointless. Everything was perfect just as it was, but at the same time, it wasn’t that. Because there was no everything. There was nothing at all. There was no need to describe anything ever again because there was nothing. Words and description were meaningless. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered!
Grimes, Tim. The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness (p. 2). Kindle Edition.
The idea could sound horrible – as it suggests that nothing has a purpose. Yet, Tim doesn’t take that approach at all. Instead, he talks about how everything just simply is.
And this was perfection, beyond any belief, rationalization or label I could ever put on it. It made no sense, and it was perfect. It was before time itself. It transcended thought, was past my comprehension. Thought created all this suffering—and thought itself was not real.
Without thought, all was grace—always. It was all blissfully and blatantly simple, yet totally illogical. I sat on that beach, thunderstruck. It was laughable. Whatever you thought, it didn’t matter. Thought had nothing to do with anything real. Everything was always perfect, no matter what you thought…
Grimes, Tim. The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness (p. 3). Kindle Edition.
The concept doesn’t make sense. And yet, in a strange way, it does.
One way to interpret Tim’s perspectives is the idea that thought isn’t real.
Tim isn’t the first person to talk about this idea. Other writers have suggested that suffering often comes from believing our thoughts.
After all, we often get anxious or upset about things that aren’t actually happening. Our responses are linked to what might happen and to our interpretations. If we can drop back from the stories we tell ourselves – then a lot of our suffering can disappear in the process.
For example, some caregivers struggle with the idea that they shouldn’t need to give up their own needs or that life shouldn’t go this way. Others may be frustrated that family members don’t help out when they should.
Yet, these perspectives are all just stories. The idea of ‘should’ doesn’t really make that much sense. Life often isn’t ideal. Many people suffer from incredibly challenging situations.
So, Tim is suggesting that suffering comes from thought and that thought isn’t real.
Practically Applying the Concepts
Tim’s book The Joy of Not Thinking isn’t a philosophy book in the traditional sense. Tim is much more interested in practical approaches, ones that use the idea of thinking and not thinking.
He talks about how thinking less rationally (or not thinking) is a powerful way to deal with emotions. Doing so takes the weight and pressure off life, and can make it much simpler.
While there’s obviously nothing wrong with thinking—we have to think, after all, in order to live—we’re usually way too serious in how we think. We tend to overthink.
Grimes, Tim. The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness (p. 6). Kindle Edition.
His suggestion is that we don’t need to be logical and serious all the time.
He also talks about the way that modern society tends to be focused on the negative. There’s this tendency to talk and commiserate about the challenges of life. And yes, there are difficult parts, but the process of focusing on them makes the challenges seem much stronger and more real.
At the same time, focusing on the negative means that we entirely miss the underlying peace and positivity that life can bring. Tim mentions that feeling good most of the time is much more achievable than we expect.
Tim also mentions that the process of becoming less serious and not thinking can make us more caring, more in tune with other people. We are also able to respond to needs better, based on actual needs rather than stories that we tell ourselves.
Technique #1: Movement and Noise
Tim’s first technique focuses on our bodies. He talks about making silly noises or movements – like rolling around on the floor giggling.
Acting like this might sometimes be called childish, but perhaps children are onto something. Moving our bodies in less serious ways can do wonders for our minds. It tends to jolt us out of whatever story we are telling ourselves. It’s pretty hard to be stressed when you’re dancing around the room like a monkey.
This first technique makes me laugh a little, as it is a pattern that I have picked up over the last few years, without ever planning to. I do now have a tendency toward silly movements and noises. It’s a surprisingly freeing approach, one that does seem to make me much less stressed.
In the video below, Tim talks about this area and how it works at a physical level.
Technique #2: Self-Talk
In his introduction to self-talk, Tim mentions something interesting. He talks about the way that emotions arise often without any apparent reason – this aspect alone means that emotions aren’t as significant and profound as we often think.
Putting so much weight into emotions can be seriously problematic. We start to have all these stories about why we feel the way that we do.
Those stories tend to reinforce themselves.
For example, it’s easy to take a moment of loneliness or sadness and assume that the emotion is directly connected to being a caregiver. Doing so can promote resentment. You might start to feel lonely and sad more often because you are focusing on the emotion.
Tim takes the idea a step further too and applies it to physical sickness.
Even when our body is ill, if we’re sick and physically in pain, the real continuous pain is being caused by what we’re thinking about when we’re in that state. Our thoughts—and not our bodily issues—are what are keeping us in perpetual distress. Our body knows what to do in that situation much better than our conscious mind does, but that rational mind of ours still tries to constantly interfere.
Grimes, Tim. The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness (pp. 27-28). Kindle Edition.
Tim suggests speaking out loud as one way to promote positive self-talk. He mentions that playing around with the words and tone can help too. Look for approaches that help you. You might even find that different approaches work in different situations.
Technique #3: Indifference and Stillness
The first two techniques are fairly energetic approaches. While they’re powerful, you certainly can’t use them in every situation. This third approach is less energetic, but still has many advantages.
He explains the idea like this:
Since we’re so prone to think negatively—as opposed to even somewhat positively—about things that really bother us (such as our health, relationships or financial issues) it’s often better not to think about those things at all, unless completely necessary.
Grimes, Tim. The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness (pp. 34-35). Kindle Edition.
The advice is counterintuitive, but what Tim is suggesting does work very well in practice.
One reason is that not thinking allows our subconscious minds to figure out a solution. That solution is often better than anything we could have come up with intentionally.
Some of the time you’ll find that there isn’t really a problem anyway. For example, financial scares often turn out to be nothing. The same is true for relationship issues. You could spend weeks dwelling on a subtle behavioral change in your partner, just to eventually find out that he was really stressed at work.
How would you “remove your attention” from your problem and “turn from it in consciousness”? You simply stop being so serious about it! Drop the belief that you have to think and worry about it! Do your best to stop thinking about it in your normal, rational, stressful way.
Yet another advantage of doing this is it frees you to imagine what the solution to your problem could possibly feel like, as Neville touched upon. By dropping rational thought, you can imagine the wonderful feeling that an ideal resolution to your problem would bring; that huge sense of relief.
Grimes, Tim. The Joy of Not Thinking: A Radical Approach to Happiness (p. 39). Kindle Edition.
One variation is to limit how much you think about a problem.
This is a technique that I often use. So, I might sit down, research and think hard about a particular problem, weighing up the issues and thinking about what might help and what might not.
After that point, I set the problem to one side. I aim (as much as possible) to not think about the problem unless something changes.
Final Thoughts
There’s more to Tim’s ideas and techniques than we have the space to talk about here.
I strongly recommend that you take the time to check out Tim’s book. The eBook is only a few dollars on Amazon. It can even be read as part of Kindle Unlimited (which offers a free trial).
Even if you don’t agree with everything that he has to say, you may find some techniques that help.
I know personally that taking things less seriously and thinking less has had a large impact on my stress levels. I’m not a caregiver anymore, but I can easily imagine how useful the approaches would have been when I was in that role.
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