By its very nature, caregiving is a challenging role. At the same time, people often find that caregiving takes over their life, leaving them very little time to take care of their own needs.
When this happens, it’s easy to end up resenting the person that you are caring for. Likewise, people often end up getting physically worn down and mentally exhausted. With the long-term nature of caregiving, these outcomes can have negative implications for the health of the caregiver.
But, what do you do about it?
One surprising answer is the process of finding joy in caregiving.
In any part of our life, job is something that can make everything seem just a little bit more bearable. As caregivers, this process is even more important simply because of the way that caregiving can be demoralizing.
Nevertheless, the idea of finding joy in caregiving probably sounds impossible to most caregivers.
How do you find joy in the middle of something that is exceptionally difficult both emotionally and physically?
As it turns out, the answer is much simpler than it seems and it really is something that any caregiver can do, regardless of their circumstances.
Pay Attention to Small Details
Regardless of your circumstances, life is a mixture of good and bad moments. If you’re lucky, the good moments are more prevalent and more noticeable. But, regardless of your circumstances, those good moments are there. It’s often just a matter of noticing them when they occur and holding onto them.
Paying attention to small details is an important part of this process.
As your caring for a person, there will be small parts of day-to-day life that bring joy. That could be something as a shared smile or a tender moment where you connect emotionally. If you start to look for these moments, then you’ll probably start to notice them more often and this alone can add joy into your life.
Realistically, we tend to find what we look for in life.
So, if we expect and look for bad things to happen, we tend to notice any bad things that occur.
In contrast, if we look for the good things, we can start to find joy in parts of our lives that seemed challenging previously.
This is an important process for anyone because life is made up of little moments and the way that you view those moments can affect how we view our life as a whole.
Make Adjustments
As you find small parts of your life that bring joy, you can also adjust what you do to increase how often this happens.
For example, when I was caring for my husband and mother-in-law, they would often fight. But, we found that everyone had fun when we put an old television show or movie on the TV. Some of the favorites were I Love Lucy or Abbot and Costello and my husband and I had great fun figuring out new options for those times.
Paying attention to what bought joy was the key reason that we found a way to connect like that.
Sometimes, finding joy in caregiving is a matter of figuring out how to give the person you are caring for something they enjoy.
That’s actually what happened in the example with my mother-in-law. We had tried to watch movies with her in the past, but she was hard of hearing and had a difficult time figuring out what was happening on screen. So, watching a movie quickly became an exercise in patience.
But, watching older movies was simpler, because she was familiar with the types of plots and the stories tended to be less complex. In fact, she’d even seen many of the movies we watched and I think that made her love them even more.
So, a first step might be to simply look for things that the person being cared for loves to do or things that they used to do that they can’t do any more.
Once you find those, you can look at ways to adjust them to make them enjoyable again. Sometimes those adjustments might be simple and other times they might be complicated.
But, if you can find something that works, it can be enjoyable for the person you are caring for and for you as well.
Have Realistic Expectations
Our sadness or our joy often comes from our expectations.
For example, we often get happy when something ends up being better than we expected. Likewise, we might get down when something ends up worse than we expected.
But, often our expectations aren’t realistic to start off with.
That’s especially true in caregiving situations, because we often end up expecting our older parents to be able to do things they used to do or to behave in the way that we remember.
Those expectations are often the reason that we are unhappy and a key reason why we feel so frustrated as caregivers.
Yet, if we can align our expectations to the situation, we can change the way that we respond and help ourselves to find joy. For example, if you are caring for a dementia patient, they may often forget things about the word around them, especially in the late stages of dementia.
However, if you can focus on the things that they do remember and the connections that you can find between them and you, then you can still find joy.
Indeed, doing this can make it possible to find joy even in the most challenging of situations.
Choose Joy
Finally, the process of finding joy in caregiving is a conscious choice.
In any given situation, no matter how horrible or challenging, there is always some joy to be found. It’s just a matter of taking the time to look for it and choosing to focus more on the good things than the bad ones.
Now, I’m not saying this is easy, it’s not, especially not at first.
But, this is a process that you get used to and over time it does get easier to find joy and simply allow it to happen.
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