Part 1 of 3: How Rituals Can Save Your Sanity and Make You a Better Caregiver

We talked briefly in the MOVE Method post about how a morning rituals can help you boost your emotions and give yourself a positive start to the day. That resonated with quite a few readers – due in no small part to the pandemic, I’m sure. We’ve all started our days for the last 15 months or so being dragged down mental health’s sliding scale.

In this series of three blog posts, How Rituals Can Save Your Sanity and Make You a Better Caregiver, I want to delve into rituals a bit further. As the title suggests, rituals help anchor you, help you keep your sanity, and help you become a better caregiver.

And rituals aren’t just for morning routines. I and my coaching clients have found evening rituals to be extremely helpful as well. Coupled with morning rituals, evening rituals are like bookends to the day that help us take a few moments to get centred once again.

But first,...

Caregiver compassion fatigue is the flip side of another well-known occurrence: the Mother Teresa Effect. Recognized in the 1980s, the Mother Teresa Effect breaks down to this. When you do good for people around you – even people you don’t know – you feel better. Not only that, you actually, physically are better too. At least one study showed that people who went out of their way to help others boosted their immunity to colds and other infections. 

But even Mother Teresa knew that caring for others could go too far. She understood about compassion fatigue long before the term existed. (Coincidentally, compassion fatigue was also first defined in the 1980s.) Mother Teresa mandated that her nuns take a year off every four or five years in order to essentially heal themselves.

And it makes sense. How often do you say that you wish you could take some of their pain and suffering away and put it on yourself?

Here’s the thing though: in many ways, we actually...