Rest Your Mind

Is your daily life as a caregiver chaotic? Do you struggle to relax and clear your mind? Try one of these caregiver mindfulness suggestions to reduce the stress in your life:

• Practice Meditation. Sit still in a quiet space, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing for five minutes.
• Visit a calm place in nature, like a park or botanical garden.
• Do something physically active and challenging to take your mind off a difficult day.
• Spend quality time with loved ones to help shift your mood.
• Get a good night’s sleep to feel more refreshed the next day.

Rest Your Body

Do you feel stressed, tired, fatigued, rushed, drained, zapped? You need REM sleep and deep sleep to rest your body, and perhaps around seven to eight hours total to support a strong immune system. Like food, rest is required for your survival. Your body needs both sleep and rest. Think of taking a rest as giving yourself a break or time-out from the hectic pace and pressure of daily life – caregiver mindfulness is a must!

Rest Your Soul 

There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the body. When we stay up too late and rise too early; when we try to fuel ourselves for the day with coffee and a donut in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon; when we refuse to take the time to exercise and eat fast foods that clog our arteries; when we constantly try to guess which line at the grocery store will move faster and which parking space is closest to the mall entrance, our bodies grow weary.

Our souls were not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle:

• Things seem to bother you more than they should.
• It’s hard to make your mind up about even simple decisions.
• Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave will be harder to resist than they otherwise would.
• You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that will leave you with long-term costs.
• Your judgment suffers.

When you give your soul rest, you open your self to inner peace, so remember as a caregiver you need to rest your mind, rest your body, and rest your soul – in other words caregiver mindfulness is a must for managing the stress of caregiving!