How Being a Home Caregiver Balances Your Mind, Body, and Soul
When the United States was a farming society, as many as three or four generations lived close to each other and provided care for each other when it was needed. Today, people often live hundreds of miles away from their families and have no one to help when it is needed. Whether it an act of love or a career, home caregiving can be a demanding, but rewarding, job. As the old saying goes, though, you can’t give what you don’t have. To successfully care for oneself and another person requires balance and self-care, as well as empathy for the other person.
Home care services can include any or all the following tasks: preparing meals, shopping, laundry, housekeeping, and running errands; helping with personal care, such as bathing, grooming, and exercise; or providing respites for other caregivers. Home caregivers may take care of ages ranging from infancy to elderly, and individual needs vary greatly. As difficult as the job may be, it can be quite rewarding to the giver and the receiver, but it requires a commitment to one’s own soul, mind, and body.
Empowering Your Soul
Home caregiving is more than a job — it’s a vocation, a calling. By helping people remain in their homes while they recover from illness or while they age, home caregivers provide a valuable service. Home caregiving is, essentially, a type of work that requires you to lead with love.
Everybody has a different way of taking care of spiritual needs, but they all lead to greater inner peace. Above all, make time for yourself, find things to enjoy, and be a part of a community. Especially when home caregivers are coping with stress, they need to be easy on themselves and find other people who understand and support them. You might find listening to soothing music relaxing for you and for the person you are caring for. Happy people are more likely to say they have a sense of purpose or enjoy helping others, and that is good for the people they encounter.
Empowering Your Mind
If you can see things clearly, concentrate on problem-solving, and find creative solutions, you will be of the greatest service to others. Home caregiving requires constant mindfulness and creative thinking. Each client is unique and requires a personalized form of care. What works for one client may not work for another. Due to the nature of home care services, home caregivers hone their critical thinking skills on a daily basis.
Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Every day, around 50,000 thoughts go through our heads, and we only must listen for a short while to realize many of them are negative and untrue. If you talk kindlier to other people than you do to yourself, it’s time to look at the things you are telling yourself.
The same practices that empower your soul will also help you empower your mind. Are you a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person? Challenge your negative thoughts by asking if they are true. If they are, make changes in your life. If they aren’t true, try to be more aware and remind yourself that having a negative thought doesn’t make it true. Being mindful strengthens your home caregiving skill set and allows for a higher quality of home care services.
Empowering Your Body
A study at Harvard University tracked 268 sophomores at the school for almost eighty years, from the middle of the Depression to the present, adding offspring as the decades passed. The study included people with schizophrenia, alcoholics, successful lawyers and doctors, successful businessmen, and others. Researchers found that one of the best predictors of the participants’ health, regardless of their successes, failures, and transitions along the way, was the quality of their relationships with other people. In other words, helping people through home caregiving is good for your physical, as well as your mental and spiritual, health.
Aside from a strong body and a desire to help others, home caregiving demands stamina and energy. That means staying in good physical condition is one of the requirements for the job. Eating right and exercising is important, of course, but so is taking care of medical problems when they arise instead of putting them on the back burner to take care of everybody else.
Good nutrition nourishes the entire body, improving brain function, nourishing organs, and providing energy. Even small bits of physical activity improve concentration by enhancing circulation and increasing the flow of oxygen to the cells. The right exercise routines also prepare caregivers for strenuous tasks like lifting and stooping and make injuries less likely to occur, and special training may be needed for some physical tasks.
Home Care Services in California
Having a healthy body and a willingness to help other people reduces stress, provides a sense of purpose, and keeps you mentally stimulated. Feeding our souls, our minds, and our bodies give us the physical, mental, and spiritual strength needed to provide home care services to others.
If you are interested in becoming a home caregiver with Alegre Home Care, please be in touch! We have positions available and we provide the best training in California.
Looking for home care services in California? Please reach out today!
