Benefits Of Practicing Gratitude As A Caregiver

November is National Family Caregiver Month and National Gratitude Month.  

National Gratitude Month  encourages us to embrace the power of gratitude.  Gratitude is more than simply saying “thank you.”   Gratitude’s amazing powers have the ability to shift us from focusing on the negative to appreciating what is positive in our lives. Practicing daily gratitude gives us a deeper connection to ourselves, the world around us, and to our spirituality.  

Research has shown that gratitude can enhance our moods, decrease stress, and drastically improve our overall level of health and wellbeing.  On average, grateful people tend to have fewer stress-related illnesses and experience less depression and lowered blood pressure, they are more physically fit, they are happier, have a higher income, more satisfying personal and professional relationships, and will be better liked.

National Family Caregivers Month recognizes the dedication of family members who provide round the clock care to loved ones. When medical conditions demand attention, family steps into roles, they are often unprepared to accept. They become caregivers instead of partners or friends. Sometimes this change occurs suddenly or over time.

Caregivers rarely have time for themselves. There’s always another thing to be done. However, a caregiver requires rest, too.

So this month, I want to spend time on The  Caregiver Cup  episodes to talk about one of the best practices you can incorporate into your daily routine and that is gratitude.  

Gratitude is the human way of acknowledging the good things of life.  But you just can’t say I am grateful and you see positivity and feel happier.  It requires a practice and you need to want to do it.  

It’s a muscle you have to build.  Then it requires practice to do it naturally and the result will lead to a mindset that focuses on positivity, good and more happiness.    

“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions.”  Zig Ziglar

Transcript

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Well, hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of the Caregiver Cup podcast. And happy November. Gosh, it's already November. Where did 2022 go? We only have two months left. But November is probably one of my favorite months. Not saying it because of my birthday, but that's it's my birthday month, but it's Thanksgiving month. And then when I look up what are some of the national things that we celebrate in November, two of them are near and dear to this podcast and what I'm really passionate about doing. November is National Family Caregiver Month and National Gratitude Month. And so let's talk about gratitude month or then November being gratitude month. You know, it gratitude encourages us to embrace the power of gratitude. So in November. And gratitude is more than just saying thank you. Gratitude has these amazing powers to give us the ability to shift us from focusing on the negative and to appreciate what is positive in our lives. When you practice gratitude, it gives you a deeper uh connection to yourself, to the world, and to our spirituality. We all know because if you hang around people that are negative, they kind of bring you down. Or if you continue to think about negativity, you don't really see what's really in front of you. And research, there's tons of research on gratitude. Things like it can enhance it enhance your moods, decrease stress, it can drastically improve your overall level of health and well-being. Because on average, grateful people tend to have fewer stress-related illnesses, they experience less depression, and lowers it lowers blood pressure. There are more physically, the people are more physically fit, they're happier, they may even have higher incomes or more satisfying and professional relationships. And the most important piece, too, is when you are hanging out with a grateful person or somebody that practices gratitude, you tend to draw in more people. And so let's talk about the flip side though, because it's National Family Caregiver Month, too. And that recognizes really the dedication of family supporting their loved ones. And most of the time they're supporting their loved ones around the clock. You think about it, if you're caring for your loved one, you're dealing with their medical conditions, you step into the role of their caregiver and are often unprepared to accept it. They're unprepared to accept the fan the physical aspects of caregiving, the financial aspects of caregiving, and the emotional support of caregiving. And when you think about a caregiver, a care when you're caring for somebody, it can happen suddenly, like somebody has a heart attack or a stroke or has a chronic disease just diagnosed. Or it can be something that happens over time, like you're dealing with an elderly person or somebody that has a chronic condition and it progresses over time. This month sheds light into the demanding days of a family caregiver, but it also identifies their needs. From morning to night, if you're caregiving, caregivers have to balance the needs of their loved one and the rest of their family. They also, like I said, have to deal with financial situations. Oh, you could we could list them all the household demands and so on. I love um too to share some stats because I think that it's really important because caregivers often never take care of themselves, or very little do they take care of themselves, and they it they don't give up give themselves the rest that they need. Probably not telling you nothing you don't already know. Uh, but um in America, more than one in five Americans, which comes out to 21.3%, are caregivers, and they have provided care to uh from their adult parents to their their spouse to a family member all the way down to a child with special needs. And uh this totals an estimate of 53 million adults in the United States were um surveyed in 2015, and now this survey now um shows that there are even more than that in in 2020, and we're hitting the the the 60 million mark in 2020. Now, when it comes to I looked at stats in the UK as well, and there's estimates of 13.6 million in the UK, and in Canada, Canada, there's over 6 million Canadians Canadians are balancing paid work and unpaid caring responsibilities. In Australia, there's more than 2.65 million carers, they call themselves in Australia, so which means one in 11 people are caregiving in Australia. So it's just really mind-blowing to know that there's millions and millions of caregivers across the world. And so that's why President Clinton in 1997 declared November as National Family Caregiver Month so that we could go ahead and create some awareness around caregiving and the importance of providing support to family caregivers like you and I going through that. Which brings me to why I bring brought both of these up today, because this month I really want to focus in on the caregiver and the best practices that can help the caregiver, most importantly, gratitude. And since it's a gratitude month, I really want to dig into that. So I know what you're thinking when you think about, oh, Kathy wants to talk on the Caregiver Cup podcast about care about gratitude. And if you're rolling your eyes, I have I've been in your shoes as well. It's another routine you're probably saying to yourself that I don't have time for. Or you might say this positivity and this gratitude is just fluffy stuff. How can I be grateful when I'm living my life that feels upside down right now? Well, I want to go ahead and ask you to just listen. Just listen to the neuroscience and the science behind gratitude and some of my analogies behind it, because I find the practice of gratitude is like so fascinating. How something as simple as thinking about training your brain doesn't really cost anything but time, and it doesn't require any extra resource to do it. Gratitude is the human way of acknowledging the good things in life. If you've followed me at all on Instagram or on Facebook, I always try to focus in on what the good things are happening. Let's look at the glass half full versus half empty. But you can't say I'm grateful and you see positivity and feel happiness. You can't just look at that and do it once. It requires a practice, it requires you to rewire your brain and you need to want to do it. You need to want to do it, and then once you feel it, and once you start sensing it, it there's so many benefits. It's like a muscle you have to build. You have to build it. Then it requires practice to do it naturally, and the result will lead to your mind focusing on positivity and good and more happiness. It's kind of like a you for me, it reminds me of when I in back in when I was 45, I just had this inkling that I wanted to run. And I thought to myself, it's not gonna cost me anything to run except for a pair of shoes and really maybe a good sports bra. But it didn't require anything else. I could do it anytime, anywhere, whenever I wanted. I could create my own plan. But when I first started training to run, I thought, well, this is gonna be easy. Everybody can run, right? And well, I got out there and I realized that your legs feel like cement, you can't breathe, and it takes a lot of practice. I could run down to the end of the block, and then I had to walk because I was so winded, I was so tired, it didn't feel good, and it took me practicing. And for me, I was more like a turtle running, and so I would say, okay, for the next five days, I'm running down the street, and then I'll walk the rest of the block. The next day I would do it the next day, week two. I'm gonna run half of the block and then walk the other half. And it was building my legs and my muscles and my legs and my breaths and my whole way that I held my body up. The same way goes for gratitude because you can't just say, I'm gonna be grateful and wake up that day. It takes practice, it requires you to go ahead and work on the muscle in your mind. So, why gratitude? You might be asking yourself, why should I work on gratitude as a caregiver? I have so many other things that I need to focus in on. Why gratitude, right? The connection between gratitude and happiness is multidimensional. And I geek out about this kind of neuroscience stuff, so bear with me. But expressing gratitude not only to others but also to yourself induces positive emotions, it brings happiness, it makes you lift your spirits up. If you think about it as maybe I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but you think about it as you hear your your your song of the past that you love, and you just you know this song just lifts you up and brings you back to reality. That's what gratitude does, but you have to keep working on it because you can't just keep playing that loud music and blasting it all the time. Eventually, that song is gonna wear off, and so you have to keep working on it. So, gratitude by producing feelings of pleasure and contentment, gratitude impacts our overall health and well-being as well. And there's a Zig Ziggler quote that says, Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions, so it's the healthiest of all human emotions, and so there is a there's a a person by the name of Emily Fletcher, she's the founder of Ziva, a well-known meditation training site. She mentioned in one of her publications that gratitude as a it as a natural antidepressant, and she thinks it's a natural antidepressant that you could go ahead and incorporate. The effects of gratitude when practiced daily can be almost the same as medications, it produces a feeling of long-lasting happiness and contentment, the psychologic, psychological basis of which lies at the neurotransmitters levels of your brain. So if you can get gratitude planted inside of your brain, I'm almost thinking about your brain, and then you're trying to go ahead and kind of let the gratitude seep into your brain, if I can use it that way. When we express gratitude and receive the same, our brain then releases this dopamine and serotonin, which are the two crucial uh neurotransmitters responsible for our emotions, and they make us feel good, they enhance our moods, immediately making us feel happy from the inside. If you think about it, let's say something very stressful happens and you have something bad happen to you, you know, right away you have to process all of the negativity and get through all of the muck. But then once you can say, for example, when Dennis was diagnosed with you know his cancer and it came back again, we go in there and they say, Nope, it looks bad. It looks like we have to go back through chemotherapy. Well, you let the the bad news sink in, and right away, what does your brain want to do? It wants to go to that bad side, it wants to look at all of the negativity. Instead, when you look at the gratitude and you look at the things like we caught it early, we have a great oncology team. Dennis is healthy and we're able to make the decision. We have the insurance and the finances to go ahead and take care of this. All it's gonna take is us to stay positive, follow what we need to do, and lean on our faith. When we look at that and express gratitude through that, the the dark cloud doesn't seem as dark, if I can use that as an analogy. So by consciously practicing gratitude every day, we can help uh these neural pathways to strengthen themselves. Because I don't think I could have said that maybe five years prior to that, because I was already practicing about a year and a half of gratitude. And when you can go ahead and consciously practice it, ultimately you create a permanent gratitude and a positive nature within yourself. So let me break down now the benefits of gratitude. If you're still feeling like, uh, I don't know, I'm not a positive, I can't stay positive right now. First of all, let me just tell you I get it. Being a caregiver or a family caregiver, because it's National Family Caregiver Month, is not all an easy task. We all know that. There are challenges each and every day where we have to figure it out. This the our time is strapped, and we're trying to figure out how we're gonna get in all of these pieces. And then you have the challenges of care, you have the challenges of being an advocate. I could go on and on. I get it. Then your stress levels, keeping your stress levels down and keeping yourself healthy is hard because you're feeling all of these emotions and you're stressed because I need to go ahead and be with my loved one, but I also have all of these other demands. And so you have days when you feel low, you have days when you're angry and resentful, you have days where you're frustrated and want to throw in the towel, you have days where you're depressed or they're all together at one time and the day is just a big dark cloud. However, practicing, practicing something as simple as gratitude can make a huge, huge difference. It refers to appreciating the small little things in your life and letting go of those things that aren't necessarily necessary or important right now. And for me, it's also allowing myself to embrace the low or embrace the anger, embrace the frustration, understand why I feel it. And then when I go ahead and journal my gratitude, I release and allow the anger to float away. And I physically in my mind saying, Yep, it was here today, but I'm gonna watch it flow away almost like I was blowing up a balloon, and then I didn't tie it, and I just let it go, and I let that anger go. You have to be kind to yourself and others and appreciate that people who have made appreciate the people that make your lives easier and happier. Something as simple as today I went to the bank and I had to go to the post office to take care of some more things for the estate planning. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to go because who wants to stand in line at the post office? Who wants to go and run an errand to the bank and ask them for a notary? It's just kind of a pain. But you know what? I embraced and I looked for gratitude during those times. And the bank ladies today, because I'm recording this on Halloween, I know you're gonna hear it on the first. Um, but the bank ladies and the gentlemans were all dressed as MMs, so they all had these t-shirts on and they were all a different color and they had their MMs, and then they had like decorations around their stations. It was so great. And I'm like, I'm grateful that they took the time to make it a fun day for them, but also it made me smile. The gentleman at the post office, after standing in line, like six deep this time, he came up and he said, I see you're back again. Thanks for doing business with us or giving us the business or whatever he said. And he acknowledged me. So I was grateful. So when you see those things versus looking at the negative thing that you have to do, it makes it so you appreciate the people who have made our lives easier today. Um, so I know gratitude is not about ignoring though the bad things in your life. That's the big disclaimer. We're gonna have the bad things as caregivers. It's not this peachy, sunshiny, fun little thing to do, caregiving. It's not, it's hard. But we can look for the silver linings in each and every day. You can find one thing each day, two things each day that made you smile, made you feel grateful, made it a little bit easier. So, some of the benefits of practicing gratitudes is emotional well-being. It really helps our emotional well-beings. It helps you feel more relaxed and optimistic in general. You tend to be less envious of the things you don't have and you focus on the things that you do have. There's so many studies when it comes to health, overall health benefits, too. Uh, gratitude has has considerably uh helped people have better sleep, especially those people that are are thinking about gratitude before they go to bed. It may help you have more energy, may decline your blood pressure, just by practicing gratitude. And it may even get you to the point where you don't need medication for maybe like depression or anxiety. Gratitude is also a stress buster, a stress buster. I love the word, but uh plus it is so easy to do, requiring just minimal effort from your end. And research shows that practicing gratitude, especially for caregivers, can make you happier, healthier, and protect you from caregiver depression. And so um, even some things like um, if you think about somebody that has like a chronic condition or an athlete that just had an injury, and you think about like an athlete that just had an injury, and how this person could heal faster than the normal protocol without any extra support, they just heal faster. It has to do with positive mindset, gratitude, and really looking at things in a different perspective. I look at my husband fighting cancer now for five years and how he has gotten through this with very little complications. I know it's positivity. I know it is. Uh, gratitude can help improve your relationships if you think about it. Gratitude has uh positive impacts because when we're demonstrating gratitude, it will make your friends and your family and your partners feel good, which is in turn can make the what I'm trying to get at here is it can make Others feel good when you're grateful by you conveying feelings of gratitude and saying, Hey, I'm so grateful that we got together today. It makes me so happy. And you convey that, or when you're talking about something negative, you always find the silver lining in it. It people want to be around you. People want to go ahead and associate with positivity versus the negativity, like social media has, for example. That's just a Kathy opinion. Uh, there's been studies that show that people live longer when they're more grateful, and and it's directly related to positivity. In turn, when gratitude and positivity connect in the brain, it forms happiness. And such optimism optimism and happiness is the key to a longer and healthier life. You know, so you want to think about that, and possibly if it does increase expect life expectancy, we all should be practicing it. So in the next episode, I want to break down gratitude and most importantly, how are we going to make it stick? And making this practice stick and forming a habit and finding ways that will that you can do it that are customizable because you and I may have may want gratitude, but just like somebody that's maybe um I'm trying to think of an example, maybe that wants to run that marathon, might may practice a different way, or somebody that wants to go ahead and decorate their home, they decorate it a different way, or somebody that wants to practice healthy eating, we may have different practices. And so what I'm trying to get at is it's customizable, you know. So you have to do what's best for you and come up with your own strategy. So in the next episode, I want to talk about that. But to give you a get you thinking about gratitude, let me just kind of give you two ways that that are the most common that we'll break down and talk about. And that is the practice of prayer. Uh, think about it when you're getting around a dinner table with family, and so many families might go ahead and do a prayer, or they might go around and talk about what they're grateful for. How powerful is that? And not just saying, I'm grateful for my kids, or I'm grateful for the weather. No, getting specific, and we'll talk about that. Other people do journaling, so there are then there's many, many more ways. But my personal way, why I practice gratitude, and now it's a habit going into my sixth year as a caregiver, is it deepens my resilience. Oh my gosh, deepens my resilience. Meaning, enduring gratitude is not just about happiness and positivity, it doesn't require you to ignore or or stop or stifle your negative emotions. Practicing gratitude actually magnifies the positive feelings more than it reduces the negative feelings. So it's almost like, yeah, the negative and positive are going to be there, but which one am I going to go and celebrate with? I'm going to celebrate with more the positive feelings. And I'll acknowledge and embrace the negative, but I want to go ahead and live in the positive side. Gratitude can help you see the bigger picture, be become more resilient in the face of adversity, in the faces of your challenges as a caregiver. So, as a caregiver, I want to focus on the gift I'm giving to my loved one. I want to see the good in each day, even if that day goes to, and I'm going to say it, watch your little onesie ears, if even if that day goes to shit. I feel gratitude has allowed me to see what a beautiful bond I had with my mom and all the great memories, those Sunday, fun day memories, those extra laughs that we had. Sure, there were days where I wanted to just run away. I wanted, I was so mad at my mom. It was so hard. But I don't focus on those. I focus on the good days. I can look back with this warm heart that I have, and I can embrace the tears that roll down my eyes someday as I still grieve because I miss the great times. But I miss the great times because the because I'm looking at the positive times. I'm no longer saying, I wish I could have. Instead, I'm saying, I'm so glad I did that. I know that's what you want for yourself too. I want that for you too as well. So the practice of gratitude is free. Just take a little bit of time and focus. It'll take that little bit of time and focus. And in our next episode, I will share with you the practices that worked for me, the research that I did, and then you can customize it for yourself. And what I'm saying too, in what I'll say next week, is you can't expect the positivity to just turn on after a week. It's going to take days and months and continued work, but you're going to get there. I want to leave you with two quotes that I think are just phenomenal. The first one is from Hannah Whittle Smith, and she says, the soul that gives thanks can find comfort in everything. The soul that complains can find comfort in nothing. And then Robert Brault is the other one that I use all the time. This one's actually taped to my my desktop here. Enjoy the little things. For one day you may look back and realize they were the big things. So to end today, I am so grateful for you. I am so grateful that I can share my message. What I want you to do right now is just take a moment and think of just two things that you're grateful for in your life today. Just two things. Even if you look outside and it's the sun, even if you went to the grocery store and somebody down the aisle smiled at you, I know you can find two things. And then we'll build on that and build on that and build on that until your mind recognizes that you it's grateful, and we'll get that brain trained to go ahead and embrace it. And that's one little weapon that you can use to go ahead and be the best caregiver that you can be. So enjoy your rest of the day and your rest of your week, and we'll talk to you again next week. Bye for now.