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Caregiver burnout, and what it actually looks like
It does not look like crying. It looks like not feeling much, forgetting your own appointments, and a blood pressure reading that surprises the nurse.
Most descriptions of this are a list of feelings, and by the time it has you properly the feelings are the part that has gone quiet.
Here is what people describe instead.
What people actually report
Not sadness. Flatness. A good day and a bad day arriving at the same volume.
Missing your own appointments while managing three of theirs perfectly. Caregivers notice this one late and find it the most unsettling, because it is not forgetfulness, it is a self that has quietly stopped being on the list.
Getting ill and staying ill. The chest thing that has been there since February.
Dreading a sound. The bell, the walker, a particular tone of voice from the next room. People describe a physical jolt at a noise that is not an emergency.
And the one almost nobody says: waiting for it to be over, and then hating yourself for the thought.
Why the usual advice bounces off
Take time for yourself. Do something you enjoy. Remember to fill your own cup first.
None of that is wrong exactly. It is just addressed to somebody with a spare hour and a spare person, and if you had either you would not be reading this at half past one in the morning.
Advice that begins with something more for you to do is one more thing to fail at, and caregivers describe it as actively demoralizing. The useful question is not what could you add. It is what could come off.
Hours off, not an attitude
The single change people credit is unglamorous: actual hours where somebody else is responsible. Not resting harder in the same room. Being off duty.
Three hours a week, reliably, is described as doing more than any amount of better perspective. The reliability matters as much as the hours, because an unpredictable break is still a shift you are on call for.
How people find those hours is its own subject, and there is a separate piece on it.
Get your own blood pressure taken
This comes up so often it is worth its own heading. Caregivers routinely discover that their own numbers have gone somewhere alarming while they were watching somebody else.
One described a nurse asking whether she had been under stress lately, waiting through the laugh, and then asking who takes care of you, which she could not answer.
If you have not seen a doctor about yourself in over a year, that is the most concrete thing on this page.
Say the true number out loud to one person
Not a post. A person. How many hours it actually is, how long it has been, what you have stopped doing.
People describe the reaction they get as the useful part. Said out loud to somebody who is not inside it, the size of it becomes real in a way it does not while you are living it and calling it normal.
What it is not
It is not a sign you love them less, and it is not a failure of temperament. It is what happens to a person doing a job that three people used to do, without shifts, without pay, and usually without being asked.
Every caregiver who says they are fine and is not says it for the same reason: the alternative is admitting the arrangement does not work, and nobody has offered them another one.
If you recognized more than two of these, the next step is not a better attitude.
It is telling one person, this week, an accurate number.
Everything here is what worked for people doing this at home. It is not medical advice, and Kind Soup is not a medical or emergency service. If somebody is in danger, contact your local emergency number.
Also on Kind Soup
- Why won’t mom shower?Not the clinical answer. What actually worked for people who fought this every week for years.
- Sundowning: what actually helps at four in the afternoonShe is fine all day. Around four it starts. Here is what caregivers do about the hardest two hours of the day.