Resources

Hints That May Help

Managing Caregivers’s Emotions

Anxiety

Managing Anxiety for Caregivers - Caring for a loved one can be a rewarding experience that brings meaning and purpose. Caregiving while also handling your responsibilities, feelings, and concerns about your loved one’s illness can cause anxiety or stress.

8 Ways to Relieve Caregiver Anxiety and Improve WellBeing - To help you reduce and manage anxiety, we found eight valuable tips in an article from Lifehack.

Guilt

Caregiver Guilt, Causes, Getting Help & Ways to Cope - Guilt frequently occurs because caregivers’ self-expectations are unrealistic and unsuccessful. Determining how to accurately reassess your abilities and create a healthy balance in your life can alleviate the emotional pain guilt creates.

Ways of Dealing With Caregiver Guilt That Improve Health - We tend to hold ourselves to unreasonable standards like doing everything without help, having a solution for every problem, always making the “right” decision, never getting upset or frustrated, and more.

Anger/Resentment

What Causes Caregiver Anger and Resentment - Identifying and understanding factors that can cause caregiver resentment is the first step to developing healthy coping strategies.

Caregiver Resentment is Normal: Why It Happens and How to Mitigate It - Resentment can stem from various issues regarding caregiving for a loved one.

Fear

Caregiver Fears and How You Can Overcome Them - Caring for a senior family member can be overwhelming, and worrying about their well-being, safety, and quality of life is not uncommon.

Fighting Fear in Your Caregiving Life -Fear comes from a feeling of threat, pervading our existence in often unacknowledged ways. We may not leave our loved one home with another caregiver because of our fears that they won’t be adequately cared for. Or perhaps our loved one has developed fears that they won’t be safe if we’re not there

Sadness/Grief

7 Tools for Processing Grief - No matter how well we go through the grieving process, it will still hurt. But there are some tools, aids, and, you could even say, some gifts that can help you in the grieving process

Coping with Grief - If you were a busy caregiver, you might feel lost when you have lots of unscheduled time. These feelings are normal.

Hopelessness and Helplessness

Coping With Feelings of Hopelessness as a Family Caregiver - Although serving as a family caregiver can be highly gratifying, there may be days when you feel helpless while watching your loved one’s condition grow worse.

Recognizing Caregiver Burnout The signs and symptoms of caregiver burnout are similar to those of stress and depression. They include emotional and physical exhaustion and withdrawal from friends, family, and other loved ones.

Managing Aging Adults’ Emotions

6 Emotional Effects of the Aging Process Aging sometimes impacts emotions in ways that require some extra care and attention.

Understanding the Emotions of Aging - As the Baby Boom generation enters retirement, family members and healthcare workers face a learning curve in understanding the emotions of aging. As people age, they experience physical strength, senses, and appearance changes, and they grieve the losses.

The Seniors Guide to Emotional Healing - No age group is immune from experiencing depression, but it is not a regular occurrence for anyone, including seniors, the NIH says. Nor is loneliness only experienced by those advancing in age.

7 Ways to Address the Emotional Needs of Seniors - All seniors have different values and priorities, so the needs of your loved one may not be the same as those of another individual. However, there are some core needs that virtually all older adults lean on.

What Primary Psychological Needs Do Aging Adults Have? - It’s just as important to pay as much attention to the psychological needs of an elderly loved one as you do to their physical needs. Seniors' Psychological problems can potentially affect behavior, sleep habits, concentration, cognitive functions, and many other aspects of daily life.

NewsWorthy Articles

Aging is Inevitable, But Let’s Make it Better. While no one’s aging process is the same, aging happens to everyone. Results from the Belmonte lab suggest more focus on the epigenetic drivers that affect aging.

Seniors Are Alive and Well: Laying the Ageist Myths to Rest - Key factors contributing to increased life expectancy are better health care, improved hygiene, greater emphasis on a healthy lifestyle, adequate nutritious food, better medical care, and reduced child mortality.

Yet, even as people are living significantly longer than ever before, many of the age-old and ageist stereotypes about senior citizens are still alive and kicking.

The Secrets of Aging Well -With a longer, healthier life as a goal, perhaps you should be turning more of your attention to making friends, waging war on your waistline, and extinguishing your cigarettes for good.