Home Care Matthews NC
While hiring home care providers is one of the fastest ways to decrease your stress levels as a family caregiver, another is to analyze your stress. You can do that by keeping something called a stress journal.
Make it a Daily Habit
The first step in keeping a stress journal is to make sure that you’re writing in it regularly. If you’re not, then you’re less likely to notice patterns and to make any progress. You need to have a variety of experiences that you can review later and learn from so that you can make the changes that you need to in order to get your stress under control.
What Caused Your Stress?
For each entry, you should start out by answering the question, “What caused your stress?” This could be a full description of the situation in as much detail as you’re comfortable or you might list out a one or two word description that you’ll understand later. The more detail you use, the more likely you’ll be able to spot patterns more quickly.
How Did Your Stress Make You Feel?
Next you need to examine how the stressful situation made you feel. This could be your physical responses, such as nausea or lightheadedness, but it could also be the emotions that the stress inspired in you. Don’t worry about analyzing any of the information just yet. It’s enough to put on paper how you were feeling during the situation that stressed you.
What Was Your Response to the Stress?
Now it’s time to document your response to the stress. Don’t worry about whether your response was appropriate or not. What you’re trying to do at this point is simply put everything down on paper. You might have overreacted, which you realize now, but at the time you felt the response was appropriate. This is important because you can start to see whether overreacting is another pattern for you.
How Did You Resolve the Stress?
If you were able to resolve the stress, or at least make yourself feel a little better, what did you do? If this is a technique that you can use in the future for other stressful situations, you’ll want to remember it. It’s important to note that not all solutions will work in all situations, so you may need to develop a toolkit of responses that help you to deal with stress.
When you have a few entries, make sure that you go back and see if your responses are changing or if your stress levels are as severe.
