6 Ways to Lighten Your Caregiving Load

The burden of caregiving can affect nearly every aspect of your life. On top of being physically and emotionally exhausted, you might find your personal relationships becoming strained or your career starting to flounder. Knowing how to minimize your caregiving burden makes it possible to maintain a better life balance that helps you enjoy your role.

1. Reduce the Load of Decision-Making

Being someone’s sole source of support for major decisions can be stressful. At some point, your senior loved one may need you to make major medical or financial decisions that impact his or her future. If possible, find out what your loved one wants now and get it in writing. If you can’t, put together a team of people who are invested in your loved one’s wellbeing to serve as a source of guidance.

2. Identify Which Tasks You Like & Dislike

If you’ve already started caregiving, you probably have a few tasks that make you cringe. Feeling frustrated as you wash dishes or clean the bathroom is a sure sign you need to delegate these responsibilities first. Finding someone else to handle them gives you more time to do the parts of caregiving you enjoy, such as playing a board game with your loved one.

3. Ask Friends & Family Members to Help

You don’t have to do everything on your own. This is a statement caregivers can’t hear often enough. Families often put the burden of caregiving on a member of the group who appears to have more time to dedicate to the role. While everyone may think you have more available time, the truth is you get only 24 hours in each day, just like everyone else. Pick out a couple of tasks you don’t want to handle and ask someone to do them for you. You’ll benefit from feeling like you’re a part of a team rather than the only person doing everything. Caring for a senior loved one can be rewarding, but it can also be overwhelming for family caregivers who have other responsibilities they need to focus on. For these families, the perfect solution is respite care. Winnipeg families rely on our caregivers whenever they need time to rest, work, run errands, and even go on vacation. 

4. Bring in a Home Caregiver

Professional caregivers are a major asset for making sure family caregivers get a break. In-home caregivers are trained to handle many different aspects of senior care. They can show you how to make life easier at your loved one’s home, and you’ll always know you have less to do when they’re around. Caring for senior loved ones can be challenging for families who don’t have expertise or professional training in home care, but this challenge doesn’t have to be faced alone. Family caregivers can turn to Home Care Assistance for the help they need. We provide high-quality live-in and respite care as well as comprehensive Alzheimer’s, dementia, stroke, and Parkinson’s care.

5. Pay Attention to Your Finances

People often focus so much on the physical and emotional toll of caregiving that they forget about potential financial consequences. Having to take time off from work when you’re in the prime of your career could affect your own retirement. In many instances, it makes sense to hire a caregiver so you can continue to work at least part-time. There may also be resources such as paid vacation time or family medical leave that make it possible to take time off without damaging your financial standing.

6. Revise Your Plan after Major Changes

If you start to feel burdened after taking the previous actions, you’ll want to identify what has changed. New responsibilities tend to stack up when a senior gets hurt or sick. Planning to add new home care services or ask for more help from your family helps you avoid having that overburdened feeling creep back into your life again. If you’re the primary family caregiver for an elderly loved one and need additional assistance providing high-quality senior care, Winnipeg Home Care Assistance can help. We are a leading home care agency committed to changing the way seniors age. To create a customized care plan for your loved one, call us at (204) 489-6000 today.