What has been helpful to you in overcoming anxiety or depression in caregiving?

Beatty,

Was just reading about Sisu. It’s really interesting.

Do you have ancestry from Finland? I love the translation or definition of the word, Sisu.

It’s interesting that the Bishop spoke about ‘guts.’ Yeah, I can relate to how this is very applicable for a caregiver. It most certainly does take guts to move forward. I appreciate the Bishop’s outlook on trusting our gut.

I forgot about something I did a couple weeks ago to relax. My best friend knows the stress I've been under and took me "floating." It's basically sensory deprivation. You go inside a pod that's filled with heavily salted water and it's dark and you feel weightless, and it can be very helpful with stress and anxiety. I have to say it was very relaxing and helpful and I will definitely do that again to manage my stress.

Thank you, Need! I feel good about starting therapy . It is something I said I would do for years, and it was a big step for me to ACTUALLY do it. I have definitely been nervous about the idea, but I'm ready now. Just taking the step has been a big weight off my shoulders.

Thank you for your kind words about nurses. My grandma always had so much admiration for them and that probably had a lot to do with why I became one. She was still alive when my mom graduated from nursing school and she was so proud.
I always loved building relationship with my patients the most.

Professional therapy.

Professional massages.

Magnesium glycinate 400 mg in the evening before bed. It helps reduce stress and anxiety.

L theanine before bed. It helps me go to sleep.

Finding three things at the end of the day I am grateful for. This has helped change my focus. Back to what's actually important.

Some of the Scandi concepts really inspire me.

Friluftsliv & Hygge especially. Just started a book on the Finnish concept of Sisu.

OK, so I'm pretty new here, and new to caregiving, although when I think about it, I'm really not new to it. When I was a child my mom and I lived with my grandparents and my grandma had serious health problems and I helped with her. She spent a lot of time in the hospital. She died when I was 12. I became comfortable in hospitals and ended up becoming a nurse, so then I was a professional caregiver. And I always seem to be the one people come to with advice and trust with their secrets, and I don't understand it because I'm a mess myself a lot of the time! I have lived with anxiety for a long time but didn't even realize it. I've never been one to ask for help. Now that I'm caring for my mom quite suddenly and unexpectedly, since she is fairly young and was fine a couple years ago, I am having heightened anxiety and I have realized I need help and I took the big step of starting therapy. So for me, the way I'm coping is actually acknowledging that I need help and asking for it by finding a therapist. The act of actually doing that is helping me cope because I feel like I'm doing something active to help myself.
Finding this site has helped me cope so much because everyone is so helpful. It is such a relief to talk to people who actually understand what I'm going through and the advice has been fantastic.

I’m very anxious and depressed right now. My 94 y/o mother finally realized she and my dad need to put their affairs in order so that my dad can go to a nursing home under Medicaid. He is supposed to go to rehab from the hospital soon and Im worried that he might not qualify and we will have blown through a huge part if their savings. Just so scared about this. The attorney was pretty certain that we would get it so im going to try to be optimistic.

On top of that my dad seems to be declining quickly now, not sure how much time he has left. He has been in the hospital since Sunday. Today he didn’t want to eat anything which is very unusual for him. He just wanted juice or soda. He has been sleeping a lot. He was awake for maybe 5 minutes if that while I was there. He has heart failure, colon cancer and apparently now his kidneys are not functioning very well.

I’m sad that I have to do all the logistics now to get Medicaid. This is at the point where I just want to be a loving daughter and sit with him at the hospital. I think he might be dying. Just really depressed about it all.

I take comfort that I have this blog of helpful strangers who are walking the same walk as I am. Posting on this blog helps me immensely, there is not much else that helps me feel better.

Something I learned here gave me relief. It still does, actually, when I leave after visiting my mother, and I feel like I want to collapse into a puddle of despair.

“Not everything can be fixed.”

We are so programmed to think that either we have to have the answers, or work to find the answer, or BE the answer, that when dementia or long-term illness hits, we feel like failures.

We can’t fix the situation, and so many of us have lived our lives working hard, and pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, in order to clear hurdles placed in front of us.

Then comes the aging or illness or cognitive decline of a LO, and we just want to do more, be more and just plain GET IT FIGURED OUT.

We come to this forum desperate for answers.

So, when I read that “Not everything can be fixed.”, I felt like I could finally exhale. I could proceed with making arrangements for the predicament I found my mother in, instead of circling over and over back into despair about not being able to puzzle or work or worry myself into finding a solution that would just make everything normal again.

So, thank you, whomever originally posted that answer. I’m so very grateful.

Need, I am an anxious person by nature and always was--likely always WILL be. I think what was helpful to me was
A) recognizing that fact
B) accepting it.
When my brother fell ill I think I had always seen myself, in my own mind, as the NOT anxious one, the NOT needy one, the one who COULD take control when needed, the "capable" one. Yet when my bro, always the Hansel to my Gretel through our lives, in any dark wood, fell ill I felt totally helpless. Part of my love of AC was my coming here feeling desperate and helpless and hopeless, and receiving the comfort of community. If I envy "believers" one thing, it is the sense of "community" and "support" they feel in fellow parishioners.
So I suddenly was the deer literally FROZEN in the headlights, sometimes so anxious that I wanted to shout, "Please, EVERYONE just shut up; I can't hear you; I can't separate out your voices; I can't function".
So I had to recognize it. And I had to accept it. And I had to function WITH it, because it was me. A part of me. I had to learn I was no rock of anything, and I was just one more needy person who wanted help and comfort.
Odd to say that for me this recognition of all of this was a comfort, a learning experience. BUT IT WAS. And out of all of it, I treasure that. I finally can say "Hey, I have a bit of an anxiety disorder!" I can know I will never have hope of attaining any kind of perfection, and that's OK.
I thank you for this really fascinating question. Hope it gets moved to discussion where it can have a good long life. I guess for me the answer is "I think I never WILL overcome it".

I live in constant fear since last year. I fear of hospitalization. I had enough of it. Every time it’s a set back. Dad is home now but i live in fear and anxiety. I feel sad/depressed to see that he cannot do the things he used to do, even his self care. He needs full supervision and i cannot leave him alone. I no longer have a life. I used to go to the gym every day but i can’t now. Even if i am able to go, i don’t enjoy or feel happy.

I am not complaining because i want to take care of him. I just want to know how i can be happy and less anxious doing it.

I feel the anxiety and depression issues arise when long term caregiving is involved. I don’t think that I anticipated that my mother would live to be 95 years old.

Helping out occasionally usually isn’t a problem. When there is no end in sight, we can start to feel hopeless.

It is essential to take breaks. If we spend every moment caring for others we lose sight of ourselves.

I had absolutely no frame of reference when it came to caregiving.

Neither of my parents cared for their parents, so I was on my own trying to figure it out.

I was already late in the game by the time I found this forum.

Caregiving is a major change in our lives. I would never choose to do full time caregiving in my home ever again.

I loved my mom but I wish that I had approached my mother early on and told her that caregiving was taking a large toll on me and that I needed to resume my own life.