Brain Stress: Why is it Good?

To continue on the sports analogy, you become a better athlete when you practice and play. You’re body is “stressed” and that allows you to improve. However, if you over-exercise and over-stress your body, you can injure your body and then you become potentially a patient of a sports injury. With minor sports injury, one can stop playing the sport for a period of time until the body heals itself.

Now, a bit of stress for the brain is good – it stimulates us – learning is a type of stress – it challenges our brains. The more we learn and study and practice, the better our brains become. But if you try to do too much, you in effect cause an “injury” to your brain. BUT, unlike sports, you can’t stop using your brain until it heals.

As a caregiver, your brain receives stress and we can tolerate it up to a point. When there is too much stress, then we “injure our brain” and we become less useful. Thus, the caregiver, as a patient, is a patient that needs PREVENTITIVE care. Once we are overcome by stress, we cannot function at 100% and the two people suffer – the caregiver and the patient (because the caregiver can’t give the care to the patient).

Thus, the caregiver has to try to stay physically healthy and mentally healthy. It can be too easy to be caught up in the moment of a crisis and we go over the edge. Each of us has to learn how to keep ourselves healthy in a preventitive way.

For me, physically, I tried to keep myself in some kind of shape – I continued to play tennis; I tried to eat properly and I tried to get as much sleep as I could.

Pyschologically, sleep is also important; doing something that takes you away from being a caregiver is good for the brain. I tried to get to meet people for coffee or a drink just to get away and not be cooped up in the house.

Do things that allow you to get away for just a short break and clear your head.