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Dealing with Anxiety as a Caregiver


​It’s a rare caregiver who doesn’t have to deal with anxiety occasionally. There’s a lot to feel anxious about, especially if your senior’s health is not doing as well as you’d like. Understanding anxiety and how it affects you is going to help you to deal with what you’re experiencing so that you can get a better handle on it.

What Are Your Anxiety Symptoms?

Everyone experiences anxiety slightly differently, but there are some similarities. For instance, some of the most common anxiety symptoms include:

  • Feeling nervous or as if something bad is about to happen
  • Trouble sleeping
  • Trouble concentrating
  • Rapid breathing
  • Accelerated heart rate
  • Gastrointestinal issues
  • Constant worrying

When you start to pay closer attention to your own anxiety symptoms, you can notice earlier in the process how much anxiety you’re dealing with at any given time. Paying attention to your personal symptoms allows you to follow whatever self-care actions you need to in order to help yourself to feel safe and less anxious.

What Kicks Off Feelings of Anxiety for You?

Once you’ve got a handle on your anxiety symptoms, you can start to notice what sets off those feelings of anxiety in you. Understanding those anxiety triggers is really important because it allows you to have a little more control over how you respond to potentially anxious situations. If you know that you’re likely to experience anxiety, you can take steps from the beginning to reduce the likelihood that your anxiety will grow and possibly become a problem for you.

Call Anxiety by its Name

As you get better and better about recognizing anxiety and dealing with it appropriately, you’re going to stop making excuses for it. Lots of times you might be in the middle of dealing with your anxiety and be tempted to say that it’s more a result of not having eaten recently or that you’re overly tired. Those can play a part, but calling anxiety by its name allows you to deal with the true issue.

Talk to Your Doctor about What’s Going On

You don’t have to deal with anxiety alone, especially if you’re having issues due to triggers that you can’t control, like health issues of your own or medications that you take. Your doctor can rule out other possible contributing factors and help you to get a handle on what’s happening.

Avoiding anxiety doesn’t make it go away. Facing what’s going on allows you to make much better decisions, both as a human being and as a caregiver.

If you or an aging loved one is considering caregivers in Lone Tree, CO, please contact the caring staff at SYNERGY HomeCare today at 303-953-9924.