Crisis Mode and Caregiver Stress
Prevent Burnout When Caring for a Chronically Ill Loved One
Jul 28, 2008
When a family member falls ill, the caregiver (whether it is the well spouse, adult child, or parent) goes into crisis mode. Here’s how to recognize it:
- constantly suppressing or distracting oneself from negative feelings in order to cope with caregiving, or panicking and becoming non-functional, leaving the work to someone else;
- automatically and continually putting one's own needs aside or on hold;
- dedicating everything one has to helping with the task at hand on a daily basis, even when the tasks are not emergencies;
- not thinking or planning long term, just dealing with what is happening in the moment;
- being constantly on guard for the next time the patient will need the caregiver;
- spending most days hovering around the patient and focusing on his or her every need.
Family Caregivers Can Prevent Burnout by Switching out of Crisis Mode
Though operating in crisis mode is helpful in many situations, living this way over the long term puts caregivers at great risk of burnout and illness. If the goal in the household is achieving the best health possible, that should apply to everyone in the household, not just the patient. Caregivers must protect themselves from burnout to stay healthy.
Caregivers can protect their own health by trying to be tuned in to when there is a crisis and when there is a lull, and to be flexible, shifting from crisis mode to a “new normal” mode of operating when each crisis is over.
Family Caregivers Need Support to Live a Normal Life
Normal operating mode is when one finds oneself:
- taking the time to listen to and process one’s own feelings, either through journal writing, confiding in a friend or counselor, or attending a caregiver support group;
- paying attention to one’s own body and health needs, including exercising, eating right, seeing the doctor as needed, getting enough sleep;
- paying attention to one’s emotional, social, recreational and other needs and making plans to fit them in;
- allowing the patient to accomplish as much as he can by himself, identifying tasks that other people can be enlisted to help with;
- thinking about and planning for how life can still be satisfying;
- planning for future eventualities, putting crisis plans in place.
While caregivers may not be able to do all of these things to the extent they did them before, incorporating even just a few of them can help reduce stress and improve caregiver health and peace in the household.
To the family caregiver, it may seem impossible to do these things while their family member is sick and guilt often sets in. However, making oneself sick too really does not help the care recipient. The Well Spouse Association offers help and support for the caregiver in these matters.
Accepting a New Normal
Don Piper, in his book 90 Minutes in Heaven [Revell, September, 2004] talks about the need to accept “a new normal” when dealing with long-term illness. For most who are diagnosed with chronic, life-ending illness, things are not going to “go back to normal”. Instead, some semblance of normalcy has to be established within the new framework of life with chronic illness.
This will involve taking care of financial and legal issues, familiarizing oneself with issues relevant to caregivers such as caregiver burnout, and finding and utilizing resources available to caregivers and to the chronically ill.
The definition of normal life may have changed. Caregivers need to find ways to live meaningful lives within this new normal, or they will become the ones who need care themselves.
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