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Home » Five Tips for Balancing Your Career and Caregiving
Just because your elderly family member needs your help, that doesn’t mean that you have to give up your career. Balancing caregiving and your career may sound difficult, but it doesn’t have to be.
Make Sure You’re Getting Sleep
Sleep is usually what suffers when life gets complicated, but you really can’t afford to let your sleep suffer. You have got to make sure that you’re allowing yourself plenty of time to get enough rest. If you are having a tough time getting to sleep or staying asleep, talk to your own doctor. There may be a medical cause for what you’re experiencing.
Fuel Your Body Properly
The other big factor in keeping you going as a caregiver when you also work is to keep your body properly fueled. This means that you’re not relying on fast food or convenience foods. It’s tough to remember to eat healthy, home-cooked meals when you’re constantly on the run, but it is possible. Keep your meals simple and try to focus on eating a majority of fruits and vegetables while rounding everything out with lean proteins.
Find out Whether There Are Options through Your Employer
As more and more of the current workforce become caregivers, employers are realizing that they can help. Your employer may have some programs that can help you, whether that’s with helping you find home care providers or putting you in touch with programs that can help you to eat better and handle other aspects of caregiving more effectively.
Hire Home Care Providers
Home care providers can be instrumental in helping you to ensure that your senior family member is taken care of while your focus is elsewhere. They can keep you apprised of changes in her daily routines, make sure that she’s eating healthy meals, and take care of transportation when she needs to go somewhere.
Stop Trying to Do it All
One of the biggest problems that you can face when you’re trying to balance caregiving with your career is continuing to try to do everything yourself. You need to start delegating as much as you can and allow those people to handle the tasks you assign them.
Being a person in the world today requires you to fulfill a lot of different roles. When one of those is being a caregiver to a family member, it can put a lot of strain on the other roles in your life. How you deal with that strain is the important factor in all of this.