When Life Throws You More Than You Can Handle

In today’s episode, I’m talking about those unexpected challenges that come up while you are deep into caregiving.  Those ones that you just want to throw in the towel or run away.   But instead your forced into dealing with whether you want to or not.  

If you do it all everything yourself, what happens - stress, overwhelm, exhaustion and then your emotions start up - you get angry, and even resentful    You feel lonely and not appreciated.  You get frustrated and overwhelmed with all you have to do.  It becomes a downward spiral to burnout.   

 Burnout defined as “A state of emotional and physical exhaustion caused by a prolonged period of stress and frustration.  

Check out Episode 21:  The 3 Stage of Caregiver Stress

What can you do to find your team?   
Listen to Episode 96:  Why Asking For Help As Caregiver is Hard?  

When you release and reduce the stressors, you protect yourself from Caregiver Burnout.  When you embrace your thoughts and feeling and let go of the negative thoughts and untrue thoughts, you protect yourself from Caregiver Burnout.  

 When you are in Caregiver Burnout, you let those feelings that don’t help you.   Like Anger and Resentment.  Like Fatigue and Exhaustion.  And like Isolation and Loneliness. 

If you are there or on the track towards it…  you can reverse it.
 
I want to help by offering my free workshop called GOODBYE Caregiver Burnout.  I’m sharing 3 of my shifts that took me from stress to more joy   from burnout to gratitude.  

Transcript

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Well, hello there. In today's episode, I'm talking about those unexpected challenges, those emergencies that come into play during your caregiving journey. When you are just in the thick of all the stresses and all of the chaos of your caregiving journey, now you have an urgent emergency that you have to take care of. Usually you're forced into dealing with it whether you want to or not, and you just want to throw in the towel or run away. Can you hear me gritting my teeth? Well, in this episode, I'm sharing a personal example with you and how my emotions and how your emotions, your feelings, and your thoughts can turn into negativity and how the stress levels can just explode or go to a level that you're not expecting. But when you come to reality and deal with it in a smarter way, you can get through it. What we don't want to happen is that all this stress and overwhelm just bubbles over and causes you more issues. I hope you enjoy the episode and find it helpful. If you like what you've heard, please, please share it with other caregivers. Let's spread the word here and let's help each other out. Or better yet, you can share it on your social media account. If you're if you're on Instagram, just go ahead and share it there. If you're on Facebook, share it there. And then just tag me on that. On Instagram, I'm at Kathy Lynn Van. On Facebook, it's the Caregiver Cup. So without further ado, let's move into today's episode. Since we're talking about life throwing you more than you can handle, that's what we're naming the episode here. I'm going to start with what happened to me. It was Sunday morning. I just finished helping Dennis and he was settled into his chair. He just had a knee replacement surgery earlier in the week. And I was all set with his ice machines. I was getting him set with his ice machine. This it kind of looks like a cooler with some tubes into it and it wraps around his knee and you plug it in. So I was getting him all set with that, getting out refilling his drinks and getting him some snacks so that he could kind of move around for the afternoon. Because I was off to help my mom and do our Sunday fun day. And if you haven't heard me talking about it, it's where I go out and help my mom run errands, do grocery shopping, do her bills, and we go ahead and I help her around the house. And then we usually go out for dinner and we call them Sunday fun days. But I had to run downstairs because my mom asked me to grab some gift bags because she had some upcoming birthdays. And I said, don't go out and buy gift bags. I uh we like to recycle them. So I run down my basement and we have a basement that looks like a family room on one side with carpeting and couches and a TV down there and all. It's kind of set up that way. And then on the other side is where I have my storage and I have shelves there, and that's where I have the bags and wrapping paper and all that kind of stuff. Well, I went down the steps and I stepped into six inches of water. The first words out of my mouth were, well, I can't really say it, they were sassy words out of my mouth. They were oh fudge. Not really, but that's what it was. Everything when I looked downstairs and I looked to turn the light on, everything was wet in our newly renovated family room. The couch, the desks, the desk that I have down there, and tables. Um, I still had boxes on the floor of photos. I could see the walls have six inches of water going up the drywall. I screamed out loud to my spouse. Um, and really I shouldn't have. Hindsight, should have I should have said, because he wasn't supposed to be on his feet. He had this drain tube in his leg yet. He's he had to keep his leg elevated, but he slowly walked to the top of the steps and told me, get out of the water, Kathy. The power is on, and we have electrical cords in the water. And I got out of the water, but I had to get to, I think it's called the electrical box with the switches on to shut off the power downstairs. And my rubber boots were floating in the water because we put them underneath the steps. I was beyond scared. I had to figure out a way to go ahead and get to the electrical box. And you know what? I just walked and dealt with it, hoping that nothing would happen, but I had to get the power uh turned off. Dennis was yelling at me from the top of the stairs. I was yelling back at him. We were both angry, upset, and beyond stressed. I just wanted to cry. I when I looked at everything, and he can't come down and help me at all because he can't get up and down steps. And I didn't know what to do. And have you had to deal with an unexpected challenge like this? Things that really put you over the top, things that are more that you can handle at your time of caregiving, especially women, when something goes wrong with the house or something goes wrong with the car and you're stuck. And I just was just beyond upset. So after a few minutes of kind of getting through the initial shock and being upset seeing that things were going to be wrecked, the reality of the day was, why is this happening to me? Right? Why now? Your your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions. Dennis is laid up and I have no idea how to tackle this huge job. I was just beyond emotional. Why on Sunday morning, when I have a full day ahead of me, I have to go ahead and help my mom with everything. Then I have to come back. I had a schedule mapped out so that I gave Dennis care in the morning, I could do my mom's care in the afternoon, I could come back and take care of my spouse again. Why is it happening now? And then what then you come back to reality and you're thinking, okay, logistically or logically, why is the basement flooding? Why is it flooded? Why is there six inches of water on the floor? Oh my gosh, my negative thoughts were just creeping in. And like I said, I was beyond upset. I could sit there and wallow in my feelings, but the water was soaking everything. Like I said before, it was soaking into the walls, it was soaking in boxes of pictures. I could see things laying on the floor that were just wrecked. The the couch had water now. You know, you have the legs of the couch. There was water in the basement. We had a drain, we had a sun pump. So why was it going up? I know some of you in the south don't have basements, or maybe in different parts of the country, but we in the Wisconsin area have basements, most importantly, because of the fact that we get tornadoes and we use it as extra space. Well, when you think about it, I could wallow in my feelings and just sit and just dwell on all of the negativity. And the same goes for caregiving. When you hear the bad news, or you're frustrated over too much to do, or you get the you or you can't let go of the negativity, or you have a situation like I that happened, it is the same. We all fall into patterns of negative thinking. It's human nature, it's part of our our neuroscience of our brain, the negative thinking and the negative behaviors from time to time. Our brain wants to protect our our own well-being. And so it's protecting us from getting too upset, often triggered by difficult circumstances or everyday stresses. But when the pattern occurs over a long period of time and you start using all that negative thinking and behaviors, it can affect our health. It can degrade our health and our body and our mind and our spirit. When bad things happen to us, we can feel incredibly helpless, right? Sometimes the way we we fight back against these feelings is by making negative thinkings a default of our life. Oh, yeah, here it goes again. That's kind of one of the thoughts that comes to my mind. It satisfies our deep need for a sense of control over our lives. Um, or you might think about it, yeah, I'm just stuck and you know, this is the way it is. It is what it is. Those are the negative thinkings. It keeps us from being disappointed when disaster happens, like the why me statement, right? But in many circumstances and caregiving specifically, negativity can lead to more caregiver stress, it can lead to anxiety. For me, it could lead to panic attacks, it can lead to unhappiness and even more and more health issues. And so I want to really talk about when those negative thoughts finally hit me. I almost had to internally slap and wake up my face and wake up myself within minutes of feeling the why and the why me and sulking in negativity, my mind flipped into action mode. I'm almost thinking like a firefighter mode. I couldn't just sit there and I knew I couldn't tackle this by myself. I knew it because what am I gonna do? I'm there's the drain can't keep up. And um kind of jumping ahead of the story, the sump pump wasn't working. It broke, it burnt out, whatever it did. I so I knew I had to reach out for help. And luckily, two of my three boys live in town, and luckily they were both answering the phone right away. So my youngest son, Jamie or James, jumped into the solution mode and within hours had a new sump pump put in. He he looked at the sump pump, pulled it out with the help of his dad. He went to the local hardware store here and picked up a new sump pump and put it in. And obviously, the sump pump had to work really hard to get rid of most of the water. My other son, Matt, um, went down and saw that Jamie was working on the sump pump, so he immediately went to, we got to get the things up and see what we can salvage. And so he did that, and then he started once a sump pump started catching up, we could the water would lower and lower, and so he kept pushing the water to the drain. And the bad thing about it is he had to take down the wall in between where we had the family room and the drain. And so he's like, Well, the only solution here is to go ahead and get that water to drain. And so then I called my mom and said to my mom, guess what? I need your help. And at that time, this was in an earlier piece before she received her lung cancer diagnosis. So she was pretty, pretty active at that time. And she said, What can I do to help? And so she immediately got over there, and my mom is all about we'll clean it, we'll get it done. She had to the um, what do they say, the head down and keep working? The whole time, though, I felt so, so guilty. I did, and I know you can relate to this. My mom looks so forward to Sunday fun days. And it's it's her big day of the week where she gets out and we always find something fun to do. If you follow me on social media, especially on my Facebook page or on my Facebook personal page, you'll see in the past I had Sunday fun day pictures all the time. We would do something fun. We would, after we went and ran our errands, or before we ran our errands, we would do something fun. We would find a new place to eat, whatever. We couldn't do that that day. We couldn't. She had to help me and she's like, we'll get it done. But I felt guilty. And I felt guilty my boys pulling them away from their Sunday to they probably wanted to rest or they had plans, whatever it would be. It's here it is, 10 o'clock in the morning, and I'm like, get your blankety blank over here. I need your help now. And then I feel guilty because now they're really physically working and helping me. And why do I feel guilty? It wasn't my fault. I needed the help though. Why I guess my biggest question here, and we we it was it's like solving world hunger. We're never going to be able to solve it. But why do we as women, we as caregivers, we as humans, feel bad about asking for help, especially when something unexpected happens. But I had to come to reality because if you do it all yourself and you do everything yourself, especially in the caregiving world, what happens? Yes, you get stressed out, you feel overwhelmed, you eventually feel fatigued and exhausted, and then your emotions are even higher and they start acting up, and those negative emotions are feeding on that. And you get angry and even resentful, you start feeling lonely and not appreciated when you're doing everything yourself. You get frustrated and overwhelmed with all you have to do. It's like a downward spiral to burnout. And burnout, and thanks to Lisa, Lisa A, who um sent me this in a direct message. She sent it to me a couple weeks ago. And Lisa, if you're listening, I'm still referring to the burnout definition that you sent to me. It's a state of emotional and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged periods of stress and frustration. And so when you're in this burnout and it's a long period of stress and frustration, and you just keep into this, which caregivers were in a prolonged period of extra overwhelm, extra stress, extra frustration, all of that, our emotional and physical health suffer. And I'm just gonna I'm gonna link in the uh show notes. I did an episode way back in episode number 21, and I explained the three stages of caregiver stress. Sorry, I needed to drink a little bit of coffee here. In this situation, in many caregiver situations, pulling a team together makes it easier. And especially when you're in those three levels of stress, because you realize after you move from stress to burnout, because there's three levels of stress. Let me back up here a bit. There's three levels of caregiver stress. And the first one is the basic stress. When you feel stress and overwhelmed, and you're just feeling, you know, pressure and anxiety, and you're not yourself and nerves and all of that kind of stuff. Well, eventually it turns into burnout. And burnout is that prolonged period of time, you're starting to notice that you're getting irritated and uh you you start feeling you're constantly worrying. There's tons of uh of lists there. And then the third level is care compassion fatigue. And that's where you're in trouble. You're in trouble. You're at the point where you need extra help from uh maybe you have chronic depression, chronic uh uh chronic meaning um it's been happening for a long time. I have I had digestive issues, I needed to go ahead and go on antidepressant medication when I was into compassion fatigue. All three of these can be reduced if you pull a team together or if you think about how you can get the extra help so that it's not all on your shoulders. I think of a person carrying a big, heavy backpack on their back and they can't go ahead and carry it anymore. It's heavier and heavier and heavier, and they they can't physically do everything anymore. So, in my basement scenario, we all had special skills, talents, and passions. Like I said, my mom is that my mom was the happiest when she was helping people. My gosh, when she was in her apartment complex, she she got joy out of helping people, cleaning their apartments, cleaning their windows, running errands for them when she was healthy and all that kind of stuff. So that's my mom's talent. She was there to serve and help. My boys knew their dad couldn't help and were removing the items that were wrecked and putting up the things that they could salvage. Jamie's talent was the fixer upper. He had the mechanical mind. He could go ahead and he can pretty much figure out anything, which is just amazing to me. Matt is my heavy list lifter. Matt's my middle son. He's my heavy lifter, and he can see what needs to be done first and second and third. He can prioritize just like that. And my mom, she was holding the squeegee and the broom, and she was getting rid of the water and um all of that kind of stuff. She was hooking up the fans, and so she was that one. I was so grateful for their help because I was like a person uh that was scatterbrained and couldn't focus because when you're in burnout, you can't even see what's straight in front of you. You're so frantic and and flustered. But what I did do is I was so grateful for them. And uh just something simple. I ordered pizza, I ordered drinks, and I'm like, it it was an all-day affair. Think about the challenges and struggle times of your caregiving, you know, when what can you do? Even in a normal channel, and I shouldn't even say normal because our our lives are not normal, in our season right now, in our caregiving right now, there's gonna be challenges and struggles. They may be at different levels during depending on the season that you're in. But each season, you should be looking at what you can do to find your team. Your team may be maybe specific people, your team may be um advocates or your doctor's teams, your team may be electronic, digital things that can help. And let me just give you some examples. And the ones that come to my mind is during that season where the flooded basement happened, my husband had knee replacement surgery. That was hectic for me because Dennis needed a lot more help to go to the bathroom, to change his clothes, to get his meds, to go ahead and have the ice. I had to change the drain tubes off of him and take him to the doctor's appointments and therapies. The big things for for me were errands, you know, like the groceries and the pharmacy runs and all that kind of stuff. So, thinking about that, how could you make that easier if that's an example for you? Or you have to bring them to appointments. I think of us as chauffeurs, right? Or the house cleaning or the yard work. How are you doing all of that? Or is there somebody that can help you with that? The cooking, the holidays now that are happening right now, the nursing. So, how can you do that? I have another really good episode where I get into all of the details, and that's episode 96. Why asking for help as a caregiver is hard, but I get into different scenarios that way. Sorry, I got a sore throat today. So I'm trying to drink a lot more here once. My suggestion to you is list out, and I I try to encourage my coaching clients. I try to have them list out every three months or so, list out what you are currently doing. How how full is your plate, or how many things are you managing right now? And then I tell them to open your mind to possibilities to think outside of the box when it comes to things. I know, for example, my hairdresser, she always talks about ordering her groceries and she picks them up on the way home from one of her working days, especially during like the holiday seasons or school season when school season's starting, because as she cuts hair, she's busier and the time is busier. And so she has to figure out where she can go ahead and salvage some time. You know, is there possibilities where you don't have to be at appointments or therapies? Can somebody else do that? Maybe you look at housekeeping cleaning differently or yard work differently. All of those things are important. So listen to episode 96. I'll put that link in the show notes as well. So let's fast forward to after that busy day of cleaning out the basement and trying to get as much dried out as possible and sidebar. It took us a week or so, the boys a week or so because they had to rip down all the drywall and and get all of that out. And we had to we had to move out all of the stuff that was damaged and get rid of all of that. But after we were done fixing the sun pump and we had the water under control, uh, I had to jump back upstairs. And Dennis needed help with the his restroom, the meds, changing the ice machine, and and all that kind of stuff. But my mom also needed I do her bills on Sunday, we take her grocery, I take her grocery shopping on Sunday, and those had to still be done. So I had to do that. I thought, hmm, I can go back into this negative mindset, or I could think, what can I do to make things easier? So I went ahead while we were eating our pizza and all that kind of stuff. I ordered groceries online with my mom so that we could just pick them up that day. And so we saved ourselves like 45 minutes in the grocery store. Sure, she didn't get to browse and buy her extra stuff, but we got our necessities, and that was the big thing. I was able to go ahead and give Dennis's meds while we were all sitting there. And I once I got back from my mom's, I could go ahead and do that. And then most of my mom's bills were automated, but that day it clicked. I had to go ahead and automate 99.9% of them. So that day it only took a few minutes to to check in with her account and pay a few more bills. So I didn't, I did them at my house before driving mom home and getting all of that done. While I was doing mom's bills, I again asked for help. I said, Mom, can you go ahead and fill Dennis's ice machine? Because you got to fill it with water and ice, and then you gotta plug it back in, that kind of thing. So she was able to do that. So then after I ran her back and after a long day, at the end of the day, all I had left was helping my husband change his clothes and get him settled in for the evening. And so, versus if I would have had to go ahead and grocery shop, I probably would have added another hour onto my my docket. If this happened to me in my first year of caregiving, I don't know if I would have handled this situation the way I did. However, I did say the old fudge word and I was pretty angry, but I want to think I would have handled it. But I learned so much in my initial two years before this had happened, thinking, how could I pull in a team? I don't have to do the entire loan. It's okay to ask for help. It's okay, things won't be perfect. It's okay to think about yourself and trying to shortcut things and prioritize things. When you release and reduce the stressors, you protect yourself from caregiver burnout. When you embrace your thoughts and feelings and let go of those negative thoughts and the untrue thoughts, like worrying that what people are thinking or feeling bad, you can protect yourself from caregiver burnout. When you are in caregiver burnout, you let those feelings that don't help you in. So you want to think about what I can do to reduce my stress? What can I do to protect myself from caregiver burnout? You almost want to go ahead and think about it so that because caregiver burnout, I truly believe it's almost like a disease that just continues to eat away at you and eat away at you and eat away at you. And when you go ahead and feed yourself with negative thoughts and stressors and triggers, and you're not taking care of yourself, uh, then you're letting that in. And when you let in caregiver burnout, you're letting in the other things, and you're you're gonna notice other emotions and things uh simmering inside of you or bubbling inside of you, like anger and resentment. You can't get rid of it, it just becomes this extra component, or you're so fatigued and exhausted, and now it's affecting your health, or better yet, you feel isolated and lonely, and that loneliness turns into depression, and uh you you just lose touch with socialization. If you let in those feelings and let them simmer inside of you, like I said, it can lead to trouble. I've been there. I became, like I said, depressed. I had panic attacks prior to this flooding thing happening. I gained 30 pounds in my first couple years as a caregiver, and I was diagnosed with digestive issues and burnt out my adrenal glands. I'm still working on those to this day, five and a half years into my caregiving journey, where I was burnt out in within that first year. If you are there or you're on the track towards it, I want to let you know, first of all, I get it. I get it, and I understand, and you can't blame yourself for it. But one good thing you can do is you can reverse it. It's gonna take time. It's not like you I've heard some people say it's not like going to the gym for a week and hoping that you have these big biceps if you are lifting weights. You have to continually work at it and work at it and work at it and work at it to see results. Same goes for caregiver, a reversing caregiver burnout. The other side, the other side is so much better. Um, even with the flood and losing over 10k of personal belongings and furniture, you can still find joy in the gratitude. And what I'm getting at with the other side is when you look at reversing it and you shift your mindset and you start working towards a better you, you can start looking at challenging situations. Like there were small moments of joy. There were there was so much gratitude and warmth in our the team of four working together. Sure, I lost over ten thousand dollars worth of personal belongings and furniture, and the family room is still not uh a family room anymore. It it's cement walls and right down to the the bones down there. But you know what? I didn't get electrocuted. Uh my husband didn't didn't help, and my kids were able to go ahead and fix it for me. So I want to help you by offering you some more suggestions when it comes to caregiver burnout. I'm actually doing a free workshop called Goodbye Caregiver Burnout. In this in this workshop that I'm offering next, or actually today, uh I'm I'm taping it on Sunday. So it's it's today, Tuesday, Thursday, or Wednesday, and I'm doing this workshop, and it's about an hour long, and I'm sharing my three shifts or the my top three of my shifts that took me from uh from stress to more joy. And these shifts gave me less stress, more joy, more gratitude, and a whole different perspective when it comes to trying to go ahead and protect myself from caregiver burnout. And I want to share that with you. Like I said, these sessions are today, and today I'm in set the central time zone in the United States. So it's today at 3 p.m. If you're listening to it before 3 p.m. Central Standard Time, or Thursday at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, or Saturday at 3 p.m. Central Standard Time. So there's three sessions to pick from. I'm gonna have the link in the show notes, or if you're listening to this, just go out to KathyLvan.com forward slash workshop to register. Like I said, it's free. I think it's going to get your mind going. It's going to have give you a better understanding of what burnout is. And then it's going, I'm going to share my just my top three shifts that worked for me to go ahead and try to go ahead and reverse your caregiver burnout. I want to end today by saying, imagine what it would feel like if you had less stress in your caregiver life, if you didn't feel that guilt in your caregiving. If you embraced more joy and gratitude, think about what that would feel like. If you had a place to connect when you felt stuck. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about many of these things uh today and Thursday and Saturday. So I hope you can join me. So that's what I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed my episode. And for you going through challenging times, please don't throw in the towel. The the whole objective here is you only can handle what you can handle. And when you open your mind up to ways that can help you reduce and release the stressors so that you don't get to caregiver burnout. It's so important. I named the Caregiver Cup podcast specifically that you have to fill your cup with little bits of care each and every day for you, so that you can go ahead and be your best self. And when you're your best self, then you can go ahead and find more joy and more gratitude in your day, even when things are challenging. Have a good rest of the day and we'll talk to you soon. Bye for now, friend.