AARP Online Community: GailSheehy - The Colberts: I Can't Do This Anymore

GailSheehy

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The Colberts: I Can't Do This Anymore

(Part 4 of 5)

Are you overwhelmed? Can’t sleep? Ready to walk out on your job?

All caregivers are under stress. I remember being so pumped up during the first months of the rollercoaster, when my husband was in the ICU with pneumonia, I was firing off emails at 2 in the morning and running—literally running across Central Park to the hospital even before Starbucks opened—to be sure the doctor didn’t slip through my net.

In the short term, stress hormones charge us up with the energy and alertness to rise to the emergency—we are suddenly smarter, faster, more organized and efficient than ever. We turn into Heroic Harriets and bask in praise and respect from others.

But when we remain on alert around the clock for months at a time, the stress goes wild, until we can no longer turn it off. We feel overwhelmed, completely out of control. Our immune system becomes so overloaded, it begins to shut down. We are inviting illness and/or depression. We have come to the turning point in the labyrinth of caregiving that I call "I Can’t Do This Anymore."

Fortuitously, back in the hippie Sixties, I had had an experience that came to my rescue when I was in stress overload. Who’d have thought that sitting on a tin roof of an ashram in the Himalayas in 1968, crooning a mantra with the Beach Boys and a tiny bearded monk in a white silk dhoti and a flower necklace, would teach me how to de-stress myself as a caregiver in 2005? I had been sent to India by a magazine to write a story about the Beatles’ spiritual guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi gave birth to the transcendental meditation movement—he called it then "bliss consciousness." Although he was later mocked as "the giggling guru," serious scientists studied his method and found it clinically sound in reducing the health consequences of stress.

Dr. Herbert Benson was the earliest pioneer in mind-body medicine to link this method of reducing stress to fostering good health. In the late 1960s he began at Harvard Medical School to study subjects who sat quietly for 20 minutes and meditated, interrupting their stressful thought patterns. Dr. Benson reported astounding results. The "fight or flight" response that stirs up the toxic chemical soup that raises blood pressure and metabolism, speeds up breathing and can quadruple blood flow, was turned off. What replaced it he called "the relaxation response." It became the title of his most famous book.

At one turning in my caregiving journey, in 1997, when my husband was scheduled for radical cancer surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, I went to see Dr. Benson. By then, he was offering wonderful courses for caregivers and cancer patients at his Mind-Body Medical Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Both my husband and I enrolled. We learned a number of meditative techniques that we practiced every day, before and after the surgery, with blessedly calming results. You can, too. Three basic steps are necessary, and are used in almost every culture to relieve stress:

Sit quietly and breathe deeply from your diaphragm.
Repeat a sound, a word, a phrase, a prayer, or several sung notes.
Put aside your mind chatter and keep returning to the repetition.
Stay in this practice for 20 minutes, every day.

Below are the most reliable signs that unrelieved stress is getting to you, starting to trigger illness in your body and mind, and you’d better do something about it:

You’re exhausted but you struggle to get to sleep.
You’re anxious all the time.
You feel miserable.
You can’t find hope for the future.

Harriet Colbert had all those signs. The last one—no hope for change in her future—led her to thoughts of suicide. Once you convince yourself there is nothing you can do to change the situation or escape the unrelieved stress, even for an hour or a day, it is absolutely human nature to believe that you have failed. It’s your fault. But it’s not.

It’s the Caregiver’s Catch-22. The longer you try to do it all, on your own, the less successful you will become. Heroic Harriet turns into Peevish Paula – tired and ticked off all the time, prone to mistakes, sluggish, self-pitying, snapping at others, including doctors, nurses, social workers and family and friends who are offering to help, and finally, possibly, ranting at your loved one. If you remain stuck at this turning, the end point is despair.

There is another impact you might not be aware of: Stress overload actually makes us stupid.

Solid research proves that unrelieved stress floods our brains with stress hormones and makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral. Why? Our heart rhythms become chaotic. We may not even feel it, but when those chaotic signals are sent from the heart to the cortex—the smart part of our brain—it scrambles our thinking. That’s when we make dumb decisions or forget the emergency number to call or revert to childlike behavior.

But you can reverse this downward spiral, just as Harriet Colbert eventually did. She sent an SOS to the rest of her family that snapped them to attention. She also found a breakthrough program set up specifically to help people care for their loved one at home, with one-stop medical care and social support.

Come back to AARP.org/gailsheehy later this week to see the next video of the Colberts and discover these tools for yourself.

More on the Colbert family:

Part 1: Shock & Mobilization