When was the last time you remember sleeping soundly at night? If you’re a family caregiver for an aging parent or other family member, you will likely be dealing with tremendous stress that can often impair your ability to sleep.
Stress is often considered a normal part of life.
While that may be true, it doesn’t make it healthy. Prolonged stress can lead to anxiety. Prolonged and intense anxiety can lead to panic disorders. It can also cause sleep difficulties, including insomnia.
If you’re sitting up at night, staring into the dark or flipping on the light and trying to read a book because you can’t get everything done during the day, it’s going to affect other aspects of your life.
Sleep challenges can affect your health, relationships, and career.
Caregivers: Sleep Troubles May Be Related to Your Efforts as a Family Caregiver
There are millions of people who bravely claim they don’t need a lot of sleep at night to function. However, medical research and science dispute those claims. The average individual should be getting at least seven hours of sleep each night. The optimal time is between seven and nine hours of sleep at night for healthy adults.
If you’re scraping by on just three or four hours every night, how is that going to impact every other aspect of your life?
The next day you’ll likely be unfocused, short-tempered, and have difficulty remembering things. If you’re struggling to sleep at night, you might start rushing to get ready in the morning, missing deadlines at work, forgetting about important phone calls, and making more mistakes.
If sleep has become an anomaly for you, how do you think it affects your relationships? If you’re not remembering conversations, requests, or answering questions from your spouse, your own children, or your friends, is that going to bode well for them? Sure, they will hopefully be patient with you, understanding the stress you’re dealing with as a caregiver, but give it enough time and many people lose patience.
If you’re dealing with sleep challenges that are the direct result of your new life as a family caregiver, and it’s causing you to have trouble sleeping, creating problems at work and in your relationships, and affecting your health, it’s time to consider home care options.
A home care aide can help you, alleviate the burden you have, and free up time so you can rest more comfortably and stress free at night. A home care provider can offer companionship, medication reminders, mobility assistance, light housekeeping and more while you can get back to taking care of yourself and your own needs. Consider home care for your aging loved one today!
When you are in need of care for a senior loved one, consider caregivers provided by Golden Heart Senior Care. We have offices nationwide. For more information, call us today at (800) 601-2792.
