(Caregiving) Lessons from the Ski Slopes, Part 2

My favorite hobby is downhill skiing, and I just enjoyed a great ski season with a few trips in Japan, starting in late January, and ending on March. 10. I’ve been at it for 20 years now, and although I’m not a power skier, the act of trying to ski always gives me good analogies for living!

Inspired by my first ski trip last year, I wrote about the top ten ways that caregiving is like downhill skiing; there are plenty of similarities, believe it or not! If you missed this piece last year, check it out:

https://www.thecaregivingjourney.com/top-ten-ways-that-caregiving-is-like-downhill-skiing/

This year, I was inspired to drill down on one of the top 10 ways that caregiving is like downhill skiing:

Self-care and setting boundaries are critical

Even if you don’t ski, I promise you’ll be able to relate and find something of value for your own self-care and caregiving situation!

Self-care and setting boundaries were both heavy on my mind as I left for my first ski trip of 2019. First of all, I was worried about my strength and ability, since I had been really sick over the holidays, and I hadn’t been able to do any pre-conditioning to get ready.

I was also concerned about staying on my routine of self-care, since my ski club is notorious for eating and drinking with near-abandon.

One other concern was whether or not I could fit into my ski pants. On the first day of ski season last year, I had a rude awakening when I pulled my ski pants up and thought for sure I wouldn’t be able to zip them up. Somehow I managed to suck my gut in and get them on by not tucking my knit top inside … but it was super uncomfortable and I could hardly breathe, let alone move. At one point on the way home that first afternoon, I lost my balance and fell into a deep (yet thankfully soft) bank of snow, and struggled for quite some time, like a turtle on its back, to pull myself out up and out. I literally had to unbutton and unzip my pants so my body could bend enough to pick myself up!

It dawned on me that just as self-care and setting boundaries are foundational building blocks for downhill skiing, they are also critical for any caregiving situation.

You want and need to be in good shape for caregiving, whether your stage in the process is before, during and after. After all, if you don’t have YOUR oxygen mask on, how can you help your care receiver? Even if your caregiving is done, you need to be in good shape to approach the rest of YOUR life.

Establishing strong self-care habits BEFORE you find yourself in a caregiving situation is clearly the best strategy, even though it’s not always possible. If you find yourself in a situation like I did, where you are NOT in the best shape, then self-care becomes even more crucial.

If you know you’re going into a challenging situation such as caregiving (or in this case, a weekend trip that threatened to take me off my routine), it’s a good idea to make some agreements with yourself from the beginning. In my case, I vowed to continue with my routine of having hot lemon water in the morning, as well as to take a few naps along the way so as to avoid burning myself out. Before I left, I decided to pace myself, take it as easy as possible, and not to overdo it.

In the throes of caregiving, it can be tricky to know just how stressed out you are, since it’s easy to lose your objectivity when you’re under such great pressure. However, by thinking about it ahead of time and enhancing your self-awareness, you can at least attempt to take proactive steps to prevent burning yourself out.

It’s also good to have reliable benchmarks when caregiving so you can objectively evaluate how the situation may be affecting your health and emotional well-being. After my experience with the tight ski pants at the beginning of last year, for example, I had worked hard to lose a few pounds. I felt I’d lost a little weight, but the ski pants don’t lie. Fortunately, my efforts were rewarded when they zipped right up like a charm.

In the caregiving situation, you can monitor your health statistics (such as basic health screening measurements like weight, body mass index, blood pressure and urine investigations… and onward to tests for blood count, sugar levels, cholesterol levels, kidney and liver function). You can ask your doctor for depression screening if you’ve been feeling down for more than two weeks (a high percentage of caregivers suffer from depression).

Like my ski pants, you might also look for your own anecdotal signs of progress and measurement that work for YOU in telling you how things are going, or when you need to make a change.

Maybe it’s that you lost your temper with your care receiver (which might tell you that tell you that you are coming close to the edge and need to re-focus on getting some time for yourself). Or you realize your own life is starting to fall apart when you forget something really important … like another family member’s birthday. Or perhaps your care receiver has a third “fender bender” that tells you, in no uncertain terms, that it isn’t safe for them to drive any longer.

Whether you are skiing or caregiving, self-care and setting boundaries are fluid and ever changing. Every ski season offers a clean slate, a new beginning, and a chance to try again, yet with the benefit of all you have learned thus far. Similarly, every day of caregiving offers you a new chance to decide what and how YOU want your next steps to be.