Self-Compassion Buffers Against Caregiver Burnout

Self-care is personal, it’s your thoughts and feelings (your self-worth), it’s being kind to yourself (your self-compassion), it’s growth and taking action (your self-love) and it’s your beliefs and purpose, who you are (your values). Once you understand all the parts of self-care, you will be able to see your path. 

In last week’s episode I shared ways to  increase your self worth.  And….  Self-compassion is a wonderful place to start. 

Self-compassion is the ability to be kind to yourself and actually say and do kind things towards ourselves the same way you would a good friend versus being self-critical.

Self-Compassion is a tool for resilience and self-love.  The more you practice self-compassion, (nourishing peace of mind, patience, love, and kindness within yourself), the more you can buffer against caregiver burnout. 

Get all the show notes including self-compassion practices to prevent caregiver burnout.  https://www.cathylvan.com/episode148

Transcript

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Well, hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of the Caregiver Cup podcast. Last week's episode, we started our series on self-care by beginning with self-worth. If you didn't listen to episode 147, I would suggest you listen to that one too. You don't have to do them in any specific order, but I think that they flow nicely together. This journey of self-care is not just about morning walks and drinking water. It's not just about journaling and meditation. It's not just about taking a break and eating healthy. Like I said last week, self-care is a personal thing. It's your thoughts and feelings, which are your self-worth. It's being kind to yourself, which is self-compassion. It's growing, it's growth and taking action, which is self-love. And then it's your beliefs and purpose of who you are and your values. And once you have those four components down, which are parts of self-care, you will be able to see your path, especially now when you are caregiving and trying to go ahead and do, I'm quoting, do this self-care thing. And I'm not trying to be condescending, but it is so hard. So today I'm talking about self-compassion. Like I said in last week's episode, I shared ways to increase your self-worth. And self-compassion is one of those ways, and it's a wonderful place to start when it goes to taking care of yourself. I love this quote by Chris Christopher Germer, and I'll quote him again at the end with another quote, too. But self-compassion is simply giving the same kindness that you give to others that we would give to. I'm sorry, I'm trying to paraphrase it here and I should just read it. So let me say it again. Self-compassion is simply giving the same kindness to ourselves that we would give to others. So self-compassion is the ability to be kind to yourself and actually say and do kind things towards yourselves the same way you would like to a good friend versus being so self-critical. Well, Sunday afternoon, I got so down on myself. I just was, I got up in the morning and I went ahead and did what I call like my morning chores or my morning routine. And I was humming along pretty good. I went ahead, we went for a walk, Dennis and I did. I went ahead and did some posts for my business. I even did some of my yoga and meditation. And then I did some like chores around the house, like swiffering the floor and vacuuming and doing like odd jobs like that. Well, by the middle of the day, I just felt lazy. My mind was fighting me. I wanted my ambition to do something, but I didn't want to do anything. I kept thinking I could go ahead and focus on this, or I could go ahead and get this done, or maybe I could pull out a hobby and work on a hobby if I really didn't want to go ahead and do any work. And I just wanted to just glaze and sit and be lazy. And I felt so much guilt. I felt so disappointed in myself and even some shame. I started pouting almost and feeling sad until I had to have a serious talk with Kathy. And I'm always about embracing my thoughts. And I tried to understand why I felt the way I did and what I needed on this Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening. I learned that, and I journal it every day. I released my thoughts, especially those negative thoughts of shame and disappointment and the untruths. And I just let myself be. There was nothing urgent I needed to get done or do that day. I had got everything that I wanted to do done in the morning. So self-compassion is kindly holding out a hand to yourself when you need it the most. It's being kind and patient with yourself, regardless of what you're expecting. You know, I needed to go ahead and be kind and patient. Maybe my body just needed to rest. Maybe my brain just needed to stop. As caregivers, though, being patient with yourself is so important. The path that through like our daily things that we do as caregivers, and then we shift to another role. Maybe it's another caregiver role, like you shift from nursing to budgets to, you know, medication refills, or maybe you're shifting from caregiving to your job, to your family. And it is most importantly being on, being on when you need to. It's like you have to be on all the time as a caregiver. And being able to shift and being patient with yourself is really, really hard. I want to share, and I don't know if I've shared this with you or not, and maybe I did in a different episode with a different context to it, but I want to share when my mom, when I started taking care of my mom and getting her back to the doctor on her visits after dad had passed away, she would always she would always come home with the list of all the medications that she had to take. And they were in like a table format. What was the name of the drug, the description, and then how often she had to take them and how much how much she had each month. And so I had to understand her long list of prescriptions since I would be her primary caregiver and the supplements she was taking, for example, iron because she had anemia and stuff like that. Then finding the best time for for me and her to take them all in and really take what all of them meant and what that we they would do for her. And I kind of just wrote on that graph to say, you know, she's taking this for her high cholesterol, she's taking this for her high blood pressure, that sort of thing. And then determining, does she have to take them once a day, twice a day? Does she have to take them in the morning, the afternoon, before supper time, at the end of the before bedtime? It was so, so confusing. And so we got that, we got it down, and I thought I had trained my mom and told her because she wanted to be independent, she wanted to go ahead and fill her own little prescription box thing with the prescription. So we got her the morning, the noon, and the night so that she would know. And, you know, I would get the prescription bottles and I would highlight things on there saying that you have to take these morning and at night. But it was a Friday, probably about a few months later, that Susan, her friend in her apartment complex, called me and said mom was not being herself. And I said, What do you mean by mom not being herself? And she said she's staggering a lot, she's slurring her words. And so I went over there and and visited mom, and I agreed with Susan that something wasn't right, but we were gonna kind of watch her and I got her to sleep. Maybe she just is not feeling well or she overdid it or whatever. I could kick myself now, but then I went ahead and went home when she went to bed, and I got a text at 3 a.m. from my mom that made no sense at all. That something about the car and I'm sorry and whatever it would be. And then so I went over there at 7 a.m. I have the key to her apartment, and I sat at her kitchen table until she woke up and she talked to me really fine. Then she didn't seem like she was slurring her words or nothing at all. But she had said, Kathy, I am sorry. I took the car out last night and I hit, I smashed it, or I had an accident. And I'm like, an accident? Of all things, to make a long story short, is she um took the car, drove over a bridge by her place, and was on her way to visit my dad at his grave site. And on the way back, she hit the stay on this side of the road sign. So it's just like a sign in the middle where there's an um like a little uh curb embankment, and she hit that sign. And I'm like, oh my gosh, now I have to deal with an accident and shit was a hit and run. Um, and there's more to the story. She says she remembers seeing a cop, and so she hurried up and got back into the parking stall. I went down to see her car, and it was her front passenger side was all messed up. It was all mess up. And then um I called the police department right away explaining the situation, and they said more or less it was a street sign. Don't worry about it if there was no harm. Uh, they took my name and number, but they they're not going to do anything about it. Well, I sat there during the day with her and I said, Mom, did you take your pills this morning? And I didn't look at the pillbox, I just assumed she filled the pillbox. She took her medication within two hours. She was seeing butterflies and bumblebees and so on. And prior to that, uh after that, then we took her to the ER because something was seriously wrong with my mom. We took her to the ER, they did blood work, everything. They said, hmm, doesn't look like anything is wrong with her, maybe earlier signs of Alzheimer's, and they sent us home. And we sat, we sat at home, and then I stayed overnight. The following day, mom was not herself again, and she was the same way, but she was screaming about bumblebees in the house and they were going to get her and so on. And so we took her back to the ER and said, okay, we need to go get her into observation. Something is seriously wrong with her because something is not right. Well, they kept her over for 24-hour observation and they stopped all of her medications and eventually she came out of this. But to make a long story short, she did not put the right medications in the slots in her pillbox, and she actually was overdosing every time, and it was affecting all of her, all of her mental abilities, as well as she was losing her her bladder and her stumbling and her balance and all that kind of stuff. I remember in the 24-hour observation sitting with my brother, and I felt so guilty and shame, especially when the doctor said, Is who is her primary caregiver? And where's she taking the right amounts of medication? And I just assumed it was because she filled her pillbox. And to make and to really think about it, I was getting angry because we found out that mom wasn't understanding her whole prescription. Well, when there's like 20 prescription drugs that you have to go ahead and manage, which is totally out of control, and so we went the following week to see her doctor and said, something has to change. She is so independent, she's really healthy, but something is not right. And we have to figure out a better way because I can't be there 24 hours, 7, 24 seven. And so we ended up from a solution perspective, finding her this pill box. Um, it looks like a book, and you open it up and it says, here's Monday morning, Monday noon, Monday, supper, Monday, at the end of the day. And she popped them out, almost like birth control pills, and then she was perfectly fine. But oh my gosh, I was so paranoid and so hard on myself. I had to learn to grant myself grace. As a caregiver, I can't control everything at that point. I assume things, which was wrong, but again, caregiving or care being um caregiving, you you only can control what you can control. So self-compassion is being patient with yourself. It means that you lovingly accept yourself as you are now, and as I was then, with little experience with this whole prescription things. And self-compassion means accepting yourself as you are now, independent of the past or the future. Yeah. Oh boy, as you know, as you are now, it's hard to hear that, right? Accepting yourself as you are now. It's hard to hear. Do you agree? I'm going to share something that I've never shared, another story here before. It's so I've been in caregiving five plus years, and it has given me so much experience and and so much of gratitude, but it's changed me from an appearance perspective, meaning my weight gain. And no matter what I do, I can't get myself back to my healthy weight and feeling good with energy and physicality and all of that. So I'm gonna get really kind of personal with you, and I'm not looking for a uh fitness coach or a nutrition coach because I'm definitely educating myself on this. It's just a point-blank statement here. Before caregiving, I was 115-ish pounds, and now I am 25 pounds heavier or almost 25 pounds heavier. And from a physical perspective, I walk three miles every day. I drink my water, I focus on healthy eating to the best of my ability. I have fails and sugar is my downfall, but I truly believe stress and burnout whacked out my body and my nerves. And I have been working with a coach and she gave me some good advice to my impatient self. And she said, Do you think that reversing five plus years of stress and burnout is going to shift really fast? It's gonna take time, Kathy. She said, And she said something else. You won't change until you accept yourself now. Accept the pieces that are broken, accept the pieces that have changed, accept the pieces that um happened, and it's so true. As a caregiver, focusing on today and finding your self-compassion for who you are now is so important for what you do now, for where you are now. Yeah, it is just so true, so true. Self-compassion, it's the most sincere and genuine form of love. Always helping you to be your best self, not only for your own fulfillment, for the for the benefits of others. Should you be experiencing challenges or emergen emotional turmoil, self-compassion allows you to cope with any struggle in an assertive yet calm and peaceful manner. You know, when you when you teach yourself self-compassion, it acts as if as like a compass that guides you in creating healthy boundaries so that regardless of what you're expecting, you're able to feel more certain about what is required of you and what is not. And I have to think that way about myself because with the exception of my weight, I've been growing back to or forward to the person that I, my better self, through those five and a half years of caregiving. It's changed who I am. And I have had so much growth and so much aha moments for a lack of a term. It's just that the weight is like the last thing, I think. So, what happens when you approach yourself with self-compassion? Self-compassion is a practice that enables you to form a healthy, solid relationship with yourself. When you approach yourself with the same consideration you should to someone else who's going through a different difficult time, you're able to form a lasting friendship with yourself. And that's, you know, that's at first for me that was weird. But you know yourself the best. You should be treating yourself the best. When you look in the mirror, that should be your friend in the mirror. One consideration to note with regard to yourself is that our self is frequently caught between happiness and contentment or joy and serenity and enduring disruptive and stressful situations. I call like this the teeter-totter effect. If you know, if you I'm aging myself, but if you go to a playground and you have this board or this device, and you get on one side, and the person that you're teeter-tottering with gets on the other side, you you teeter from one side to the other, and the other person pushes up and you go down, and so on. And so you're teetering with the happy joy, contentment of yourself to the challenges and the stress and the anxiety. Fortunately, the more you're able to practice the self-compassion, the better you'll be able to cope with your negative thoughts and your emotions and situations you experience. When confronted with like your challenging situation, situations, rather than feeling like a destructive emotional piece of you, such as shame or your self-criticizing yourself or blaming yourself, these don't help you resolve your issue. You'll be more inclined to acknowledge your mistakes and your errors or the mistakes of others in a more when you when you do that, you're able to look at the errors and mistakes in a more productive manner or a learning lesson. Additionally, when you feel disappointment or sadness or anger as a reaction for yourself, then self-compassion will protect you from acting outside of integrity and it helps us to continue honoring yourself and others. So, you know, so you want to think about it, and we'll get to some of the steps. But one of the things that you're gonna want to think about when we actually get to how can you be more provide yourself with more self-compassion is being aware of it. But that's not all though, with your thoughts. Self-compassion has an incredibly powerful impact on your sympathetic nervous system, which affects your overall health. I think that's part of my weight and my health issue because it is affect it affected my nervous system. When your mind senses like a physical threat or an emotional threat or even a spiritual threat, whatever it would be, it will automatically defer to the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system. And if you've heard of like fight or flight, that's kind of one of the pieces of that. When this happens, the mind perceives emotions as physical threats as well, as well, and unable to cope with these problems reach retreats into itself. So it's going to say, you know, it's going to go ahead and and when you get a physical threat, it's going to go ahead and attack your emotions so that you're thinking it's all about you. As a result, you tend to isolate or doubt yourself, thinking solely of your own welfare and needs, which can be good sometimes. But it can affect you. That means that when you criticize or inflict shame and blame on yourself, you're actually hurting yourself. You're hurting those nerves. You're hurting your internal health. And when you are hurt, it is much more difficult to apply self-love and self-compassion to yourself. I want you to think about a couple of times challenges got the most of you and your emotions kicked in, making your mind start critical thinking, or started, you started blaming yourself or faulting yourself. And it caused stress, burnout, and fatigue, or the causes of them are stress, burnout, and fatigue. I'll give you just a simple example where you can do this sometimes in everyday life. It could be something as simple as you're in a traffic jam and you're supposed to be at the doctor's office in 10 minutes, right? To check in, or there's an accident on the highway and now you're sitting there going, We're never going to be on time for the doctor's appointment. In your mind, you know logically that it's not your fault. But what does your body do? God darn it all. You're saying, I'm late. You start stressing, you start sweating. You may even call the doctor's office to say, we're on our way, but there's a traffic jam. And then you start saying, I wish I would have left early. I wish I would have taken a different route. Uh, you know, that sort of thing. And then on top of it, your loved ones probably getting irritated with you, right? And when you check in at the doctor's office, what do you do? You take the blame. I'm sorry, we got in a traffic jam. We probably should have left early, but we're here. Can you can we still be seen? What is your stress and anxiety like? That's a simple example, but if you think of the challenging times, you probably can go ahead and find some in the last few days that cause stress and anxiety for you. It could be something as simple as a tech issue on your computer, and you're saying, I'm not techie, I'm I'm stupid when it comes to tech, blah, blah, blah. And you start doing that to yourself instead of providing self-compassion, saying, It's something new, I've never experienced this before. I gotta learn how to do it. Now let's talk about how to use self-compassion as a tool for resilience and self-love. The more you practice self-compassion, which means nourishing peace of mind, nourishing patience, love, and kindness within yourself, the more those same sentiments will spill over into all of the other parts of your life. Instead of making decisions or behaving from a place of shame or critiquing yourself, a place of fear or anger, your life will be guided by understanding calmness and patience and acceptance. Doesn't sound wonderful. By practicing self-compassion, you begin to accept yourself just as you are, right in the moment. As you change day by day, you'll continue to learn more about yourself and accept your characteristics, accept your values, your habits, your thoughts. And the big piece here is without judgment and pressure. That means that when you're enduring pain or discomfort, you approach yourself just as you should someone you love rather than using harsh critical words with yourself. You begin to be kinder and more understanding with yourself. Why I'm laughing? I have to share a story with you. And it just happened today. So I'm recording this on Monday, right? And I've had such a great morning, and I am looking forward to my now retired self being a full-time business owner, taking care of myself in the morning. I did so much good for myself this morning. And I part of my self-care is meditation and yoga, and then I've been adding in things like legwork and core work, like sit-ups and stuff, and arm work. And so I today was doing my arm work and I have resistance bands, and I have a hook on the back of my office door that I've been doing. I hang the band on the back of my hawk hook on the door, and I've been doing stepping back and pulling my arms back and using my biceps, and then I turn around and I pull push my arms out, and um, just with these resistance bands. Well, I was in like I was doing I was in the 15th kind of pull, and didn't the hook come off the back of the door? And I had the hook come off, and I don't remember a lot of what the move motion was because all I remember is getting hit in the lip and in the face with the bands, I think. I got something in the neck, I got something in the breast, and I couldn't in slow motion stand up. The band took me back, and I fell down, hit pulling again my hamstring that I'm still recovering from, and hyperextending my right knee, and I couldn't get up, and I'm like, oh my gosh. And then I, you know, I called my husband, took a picture of my bloody lip and the the uh my tooth hurt and all of that to make a long story short. I'm perfectly okay. I'm just extremely, extremely sore. But what does your mind want to do? My mind is like, you stupid person thinking that this one-inch screw that's holding the hook on the back of the door is going to take care of a hundred and forty-five-pound woman pulling a band on it. And then, you know, so all of those things came up. So it's rather than being harsh and critical with my words up to myself, I have to be kind and more understanding of myself. And that's why I'm giggling, because what a perfect episode to go ahead and do. How many times have you done something with great intentions and it went to crap? That doesn't mean you don't hold yourself accountable, right? Though, because that's an important distinction to make. Just because your compassion with yourself and others does not mean you don't hold yourself accountable and question your decisions and your judgments. For me right now, like for my weight, it doesn't mean allowing myself to binge on sugar and soothing myself and saying, Oh, you deserve to go, Kathy, and just have some comfort food since your butt is sore and you have a fat lip and you just need to go ahead. No, it doesn't, but it it deserved for me to say it was an accident, Kathy. Be grateful that you didn't get hurt, sit on some ice on that hamstring and get that back to normal, and just be grateful that you didn't hit the face, I didn't fall into the desk and hit knock myself out. And I just need to figure out a better way to put my bands around something so I don't go ahead and fly out the window the next time. So, what does it mean though? Let me get back on track. What does it mean is that as you continue to approach yourself with compassion rather than your mind and body going to a fight or flight mode when a challenging situation occurs and you go, you you feel anger or you fear, feel fear, or you feel negative emotions, or you start criticizing assessing your your bad self, resolve the situation with a sense of calmness and clarity and really understand the situation. So question, so the question is how do you how do you go and how do you step into practicing self-compassion? Well, that's one way, but how do you do that? And but I think the very first thing that you have to do is realize that you're not practicing self-compassion as much as you should be. The compassion you show to yourself will eventually spread out if you provide self-compassion throughout your caregiving environment. When you're more self-compassionate, the way you approach the world will evolve as you practice and learn from your compassion, eventually helping you to show more compassion and love to others as well. And so, have you ever been with a person that's just so negative all the time? Yeah. If you're with that person all the time, you eventually start being that person. And so if that's you, you need to kind of flip that script and go ahead and figure out how to do that. I wish there was a book on self-compassion that works for everyone and all people. But you and I are very, very different. And so some things will work for you and some things will work for me, some things will work for us together, and some things will not work for us together. As you heard before, I'm continuously working on this, and I think caregivers in general are too. We could get into the whole psychology of self-compassion too, but just know that whatever your past and your history is and your experiences are, you can shift that. You can shift your self-compassion. The very first step you want to do is treat yourself as a friend. If you were truly talking to a friend with the challenges that you had, what would you tell her? I like to use, and I love to go ahead and take a sheet of paper and really go ahead and talk about first. Think about times when a close friend feels really bad about him or herself and is really struggling. How would you respond to your friend in that situation? Think about that. You could write that down if you wanted to practice self-compassion. Now, think about times when you feel bad about yourself and you're struggling. You have that box or that extra sleeve of cookies, and then you feel bad about yourself. Or you just blew up at your loved one because you just couldn't take it anymore. You couldn't take it anymore, and you were just so stressed, and now you feel really bad. Or you uh shut down in a uh doctor's office when the doctor didn't give you the pieces that you should have been responding to and asking more questions to. You have to give yourself some compassion. So write down the thing so being aware of it. Did you notice how you treated yourself differently than if you would have treated your friend? What factors or fears or what were the pieces that made you treat yourself differently? You want to really pay attention to it. And it's almost like once you are to an awareness piece, you can better change that. So when you when you're aware of that, why not treat yourself like a good friend and see what happens to yourself when you go ahead and do that? Another piece that if you find yourself treating yourself really bad and getting really down on yourself, and you can't get rid of those thoughts because I journal every day. I embrace my thoughts and feelings, but I release the negativity and the untrue thoughts. You may need to go ahead and think about in difficult, difficult, challenging situations that are causing you stress. You might have to go ahead and saying, I need a self-compassion break. How funny would that be if you said to your loved one, I just need a self-compassion break? You're not going to tell them that. But between you and I, you need to go ahead and touch base with yourself and look at why you're beating yourself up so bad. You know, you might have to think about what is your moments? What are your moments of challenges and suffering and why are you being so hard on yourself? You know, that's part of being human. We we do that to ourselves. And but what you can do is saying other people feel the same way as I do. I'm not alone. We all struggle in our lives, but you can do things like putting your hand on your heart and feeling the warmth of your hand, and I'm touching my chest right now, and adopt some sort of soothing touch or deep trap, deep chest breathing. You might have to say to yourself, I need to be kinder to you, or I need to be kinder. It may require you to stand in the look in the mirror in the bathroom and give yourself a break, grant yourself permission, forgive yourself and really just do that. This practice can be used at any time, day or night, and will help you remember to evoke the three aspects of self-compassion when you need it most. And that is one of them is to be kind to yourself. Another way to practice self-compassion is to just explore it even more. It's kind of similar to the first one, but asking yourself, maybe in exploring it through writing. And I did this this morning. I wrote down mine this morning because I was beating myself up yesterday for feeling lazy and not feeling motivated. And I had to ask myself, which imperfections make you feel inadequate? Why did I feel inadequate? Why did I feel not good enough? Getting back to self-worth and try writing out the issue and why I felt that way and what was causing me it. And you even can go even further and write a letter to yourself from the perspective of that thought or that feeling. That might be a good way. And then feel the compassion as it soothes and comforts you because once you realize it, you will. I'm gonna slide my chair back and just share what I wrote to myself this morning. As I'm trying to get up on my chair life, it's hurtful here. I said in my journal here this morning, and I only did it for a short period of time. I said, yesterday I struggled with normalcy. I think it's winter and I feel blah. I sat with it and allowed it to be. I wish I had uh more motivation and drive to push, but I didn't yesterday. I know I'm successful and motivated. I know I can push, but yesterday wasn't it. I just sat with myself. And when you do that and you you just start writing that out, it made me feel so much better. Which leads me to the fourth one is have a journal. Have a journal where you can go ahead and share those hard days. You know, this one we're talking about self-compassion, where you can um really focus in on your emotions and thoughts. At some point during the evening is another great time when you have a few quiet moments. Review the day's events in your journal. Write down anything that you felt bad about, anything you felt judged about for yourself, or a difficult experience that caused you pain. Maybe you were angry at a waitress at lunch because she took forever to bring you the bill, or maybe you were you and you made a rude comment and stored off without leaving her a tip, and now you feel ashamed and embarrassed, or maybe it was driving in the car. For each event, used mindfulness, a sense of common humility and humanity and kindness to process the event because we're human, we're going to get to breaking points. And when so, when you think about mindfulness, you're being aware of your emotions, those painful emotions that drove up into you things that you are not normally doing, and now you're starting to judge yourself. Now you're starting to regret and feel bad about yourself. And when you go ahead and practice that, then you can go ahead and really start respecting it. And then when you start writing down um some kind and understanding words of comfort, let yourself know that you care about yourself. You're adopting a gentle, reassuring tone to yourself. It's okay that you messed up and you understand now why you messed up and became frustrating or you lost it or you shut down, whatever it would be. And then start practicing those components because once you become aware, once you start recognizing, once you start seeing it, you can start reducing those pieces that you're you're being so hard on yourself. You're, you're, you're being, you know, that you're you're not being self-compassionate. Another one, and I was, I, I struggled with this one at first because my girlfriend Julie talked about this a lot. And she talked about a supporting touch when there's a lot of research that says that touch activates your care system and that parasympathetic nervous system to help calm down and feel safe. And so it may feel awkward and embarrassing at first, but your body doesn't know that at all. It just responds to physical gestures of warmth and care. Have you ever maybe um a baby was crying? And when you hold the baby or you rock the baby, or you rub the baby's back, it feels that and it starts soothing that. Or you had somebody, maybe a maybe a friend that was starting to get irritated or angry, and you reached over and grabbed their hand and just started um um soothing your, you know, kind of squeezing their hand and rubbing their fingers. They may feel that as a response, and that kind of calms them down or gets them to think. Research indicates that physical touch releases the oxytocin, provides a sense of security, and soothes soothes, say that twice, distressing emotions and calms down our cardiovascular stress. So, how can we do that to ourselves? We talked about, I think, didn't we just talk about the hand on the heart? You put your hand on your heart, your right hand over your left side and rub your heart. And you can hear my you hear me rubbing my heart maybe over the microphone a little bit. And I'm rubbing my heart, and that soothes me down. It slows me down. It makes me feel like I'm noticing my body. You might even um you'll notice some people when they're nervous, they're clamming their hands together. In a way, they're trying to soothe their nerves. My dad used to go ahead and I don't, I can't really do it on he I describe it here. He would put his fingers together, his thumb and his four fingers, and rub them back and forth. He would do that. Have you ever seen somebody curling their hair? Maybe with their one finger, whatever it would be, you have to find what works for you. Maybe it's one hand on your cheek, maybe it's cradling your face in your hands. If you can do that at a quiet moment, maybe it's stroking your arm or crossing your arms and giving your own self a hug. Uh, moms do the hand over the abdomen and rub the abdomen. Maybe it's cupping one hand in the other in your lap and you're rubbing your hands together. Whatever it would be, find ways to soothe yourself. What can you do? Because there's that gentle touch that can help you, because again, that sympathetic nervous system can impact your overall health. And so you're trying to go ahead and saying, It's okay, Kathy. Yeah, you feel guilty and you feel shame, you know. You're frustrated, you know, it's time for me now to go ahead and give myself some self-compassion. Now, there's a lot of meditation and yoga that you can do to associate that as well. So that might help. Another way is changing your critical self-talk. And really, you know, the the it's some people find it useful to work on their inner critic by journaling. Some people like to go ahead and talk out loud to themselves or talk inside of themselves. If you are someone like me who never manages, you know, to uh find things to journal about, but maybe I don't have my journal during this situation. Like we're in the car and we're we're checking mom in and we were late because we had that. I need to think in silence with myself and tell myself, it wasn't my fault. It'll be okay. I'm not the first person that had a traffic jam and were late for a doctor's appointment. You can say those out loud or you can say those to yourself. The first steps towards changing the way to treat yourself is to notice your critical, you're being that you're being critical to yourself. And your self-critical voice is common for that. Even notice it when it is in the present. When you're feeling bad about something, what is your voice trying to tell you? What are your thoughts trying to tell you? Are they being harsh? Are they being angry? Like I said, maybe you ate that half a box of Oreos and now you feel like crap. And you and you might say to yourself, You're so disgusting. You make me sick, or something like that. Oh my gosh. Really try to get a clear sense of how you should talk to yourself. You know, have to understand why I ate those cookies. What can I do better the next time? It's okay. It's not the end of the world. And make an effort to soften your critical voice because you might hear in your head that you're yelling at yourself or even swearing at yourself. And it's unnecessary pain that you're causing yourself. Could you let your inner compassion self just say a few, just to say a few words like, yeah, I screwed up, but you know what? I need to learn from this, and I'm gonna figure this out. Thinking positive and doing that is is so important. Another one is identifying what you really want. Think about the ways that you use self-criticism as a motivator. Is there any personal trait that criticizes yourself for being too overweight or too lazy or too impulsive? Because you think being hard on yourself will help you change. If so, try to get in touch with that emotional pain and that self-criticism by giving yourself compassion. And then think of a kinder, more caring way to motivate yourself to make a change if you need to make a change. That's so important. Every time you catch yourself being judgmental or unwanted trade in the future, first notice it. I think you know what comes to my mind right away is I don't know because there used to be in November, I don't know if there still is National No Smoking Day. And there used to be rubber bands that my mom would wear around her wrist. And if she thought about smoking, it was it's it was so bad. She would snap her wrist, and that would tell her, stop it. Instead, you know, there had to be a better way, you know, to go ahead and and do something. And when she thought about it, could she have journaled? Could she have gone for a walk? Could she have called a friend, whatever? And so, and really not being hard on yourself, but finding a way that's going to encourage you and support you. But you know what? I can give my mom credit because she tried to quit smoking at least a dozen times. I know it. But when she turned, I think in her 60s, she quit completely and she didn't need any other pieces. She finally found it in her mind and her motivation to do it. Okay, now the last one that I know is probably the best one from a self-compassion perspective is literally taking care of yourself. You need to recharge your battery so you have enough energy to give it to others. When you are not, um, when you are too tired, when you are at your wit's end and the emotions are bubbling up and the fatigue is bubbling up and your energy is lost, that's when you're gonna be hardest on yourself. You're gonna be hardest on every single thing. And so you have to create that base first of taking care of yourself. So, you know, you want to go ahead and find things that are going to go ahead and improve the quality, enhance the quality of your life as a caregiver. And so you want to think about your physical activities. Is it yoga? Is it meditation? Is it going for a walk? Is it hanging out with a friend? Oh my gosh, getting a massage. Maybe those are things that you could do. You also want to think about what am I doing emotionally for myself? You know, what am I doing? Am I journaling? Am I going ahead and listening to music? Am I trying to meditate more? Am I going ahead and finding a hobby that's going to kind of take me away? You know, am I uh fueling my body right? And so all of those things are important. And like I said, every single one of us is different. I laugh because my husband and I are so different. We'll go for a walk and he listens to music that's just blasting, and I can hear it beyond his earbuds. And the guy can't hear very well. So that he has those and he loves loud music. Versus when I go for a walk, I like soothing, enjoyable music that's just gonna go ahead and let me enjoy the nature, but also I love a good podcast when I walk too, so that I have something to kind of keep my mind occupied, or no, nothing at all. And so we're different. And then when he's painting, um, he was painting this weekend, he was listening to crime podcasts versus when I work, I couldn't do that. But you know, I we're all different, we're all different in different ways. Also, you want to use time to go ahead and incorporate some of those self-compassion breaks or soothing touch or um deep breaths that you could take to go ahead and release some of that um stress and anxiety away from that sympathetic nervous system. So, to kind of conclude here once, some people come by self-compassion naturally. And I am so envious of you, those positive thinkers, those people that are focusing on self-compassion naturally. If you have that skill set or that value or that trait, embrace it, embrace it and continue to share it with others. But not everybody does, and we all have it maybe at different points of our lives, but in caregiving, most of us don't have that because we're under so much pressure and stress. Luckily, though, it is a learnable skill and it's something that we can do. I always think about caregiving now that I'm going into my sixth year of caregiving, and I think that caregiving is a huge self-growth opportunity or it evolves your whole inner self-growth. Um, you can't take a course on this and how much you grow internally as a caregiver if you're open to it. So, caregiving stress and burnout is going to be prevalent, or it's going to happen to most of us as caregivers. And self-compassion is proven to buffer against burnout. And think of burnout as a place that you don't want to go. You're in this trail and you're enjoying this beautiful trail. But if you cross over to the other side of this trail, it is rocky, uh, it is scary, wild, that kind of thing. And you don't want to be in that burnout side. You want to be on that that good side. And so you want to keep filling your mind, body, and soul with all the tools that you can give. And some self-compassion is one of those. So I want to end this episode with one quote again that another quote from Chris Germer or Christopher Germer. At the beginning, I talked about it, uh, one of his quotes. This is another one. A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life. I truly believe that. If you go ahead and take a moment and allow self-compassion in, it can change the mood for your day. And once you continue to practice it, it can make this whole caregiving life a little bit better. So I hope you enjoyed it. We talked about self-worth in the last episode. We self-talked about self-compassion in this one. Next week, we're going to talk about self-love. And then the following week, we're going to talk about values and we're going to wrap them all up together because it truly is all about that. And just like I said at the very beginning, this is why I'm doing it. Is I got to get to my notes here. Self-care is personal. It's your thoughts and your feelings, which are self-worth. It's your self-compassion, which is being kind to yourself. Next week, we're going to talk about its growth and takes action, which is your self-love, and then its beliefs and purpose of who you are, which are your values. And so once you understand these four components of self-care, you will be able to see your path and most importantly, keep that burnout from getting into who you are and making this journey a little bit better. Will you have a good rest of the week? And hey, let me know about your self-compassion. Let me know what you're discovering. Drop me a DM or find me on Instagram and DM, or if you're on my mailing list, even tell me what your self-compassion journey has been like. How are you doing? It's okay to to recognize that you need a lot of work, but what are you doing? One step at a time, you're gonna go ahead and get this down. We'll talk to you soon. Love you. Bye now.