Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains how caregivers burn out from prolonged nervous system dysregulation and offers a first step: write down the thoughts that trigger your stress so you can address them. She covers how your environment and your thinking patterns both matter.
Foreign. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on caregiver burnout prevention, the cognitive and environmental aspects. And you may be asking yourself, doc Snipes, why are we doing both of those? Well, because I have that mnemonic piece physical, interpersonal, emotional, cognitive, and environmental. And I didn't want to leave off environmental because there are some things that are important. So I wanted to make sure we address all aspects of how caregiving can cause stress and burnout and the effects of that, and ways to intervene. Today, we will identify cognitive and environmental signs of burnout, explore issues in those areas leading to burnout, and identify strategies to maintain cognitive and environmental health. Just a brief overview. If you're talking with caregivers of loved ones, you may be working with somebody who's taking care of their mom or a new parent or a teacher or whatever. We want to recognize that not everybody knows all of our lingo. And at its most basic level, cognitions is just a fancy word for thoughts that are triggered based on our feelings, and those feelings are triggered based on stimuli from the environment. Things we see, hear, smell, think, whatever. Just like feelings aren't facts, thoughts may not be factually accurate in the current context. We can perceive things, we all perceive things through a lens that is shaded by our prior learning. And it doesn't mean we're wrong, but it means we are going to interpret things differently than pretty much everybody else in the world. And. And that's true for everybody. So we don't want to assume in the moment that what is going on in this context at this time is necessarily threatening, is necessarily a problem. We want to check our thoughts to make sure that we are thinking accurately in the moment. And people's environment represents their ability to maintain stable housing, to keep a roof over our head, and to feel safe and not overwhelmed in that environment. And for caregivers, it also means knowing that your loved one, whoever you're caring for, if it's not a loved one, your patient, your student, whatever is safe, that's part of that environmental safety. If you know that you can take a break for 30 minutes or an hour or go home for the day and it's going to be okay, then it's easier to let your hair down, it's easier to relax than if you're worried that, oh, okay, Johnny was in class today and I'm worried about him because I don't know that he is safe in his home. It doesn't rise to the level of an abuse report or something, but I am worried about Johnny. So that's harder. When those environmental stressors are weighing on you. Burnout represents exhaustion and a sense of being overwhelmed due to prolonged states of fight or flight. Prolonged stress, we get burned out. And that is a lay term, if you will, for what happens when our nervous system is dysregulated, when our nervous system changes in, in response to chronic and ongoing stress. So briefly, what do you, as a caregiver. All of us are caregivers, I would guess. And, and whether it's your pets, your kids, your clients, whomever, your parents, what do you as a caregiver think about regularly that triggers your stress response? You're just bebopping along and all of a sudden this thought pops into your head, what is it? And I encourage people to write those things down so they can address those thoughts. Yeah, we don't want to belabor them, we don't want to nurture them and keep these ruminations going. But if there are certain things that pop into our head, then that might be our brain saying, have you remembered?
