Providing quality homecare services is an incredibly rewarding yet challenging career. In fact, many personal care assistants (PCAs) struggle with the reality of caregiver burnout, due to continuous stress or overwhelming feelings they experience throughout each day.
In a previous blog post, we discussed the benefits of finding a caregiving support group to help you find the professional and personal help you need to relieve stress and perform your caregiving duties to the best of your ability. Another effective way to handle the stress of caregiving is keeping a journal to write down your thoughts, manage daily tasks, and create to-do lists.
How Journaling Prevents Caregiver Burnout
- Journaling creates an outlet for reliving anger, sadness, and stress! Writing down your feelings—especially negative feelings of anger, resentment, sadness, or stress—can help reverse the effect these feelings have on you. Whether your stress is coming from the job, a family member in need of support, or even if you’re unsure where your feelings are rooted, journaling helps remove the weight of these negative emotions and lessens their hold on your emotional well-being.
- Helps you assess your job performance! When you’re able to write down what happened each day, you’ll likely see common patterns in behavior, whether this is from you, your client, or a combination of both personalities. Once you understand and see a pattern, you’re better equipped to brainstorm solutions that may help solve an issue.
- Improves your overall health! In addition to relieving stress, the act of writing out your thoughts and daily activities is beneficial for your mental and physical health. When your mind is more at ease, this allows your immune system to function better, blood pressure to decrease, and even improves sleep at night.
- Remember the good days! In addition to having a place to vent your frustrations, journaling also provides an opportunity to explore the good parts of each day. By taking just 5 minutes to focus on a few things that went well each day, you’ll automatically start recognizing these positive feelings more often and focus your thoughts on them instead.
For more caregiver tips, visit our blog section of our Best Home Care website!
