Caregiving and Sleep - There's Hope!

So your elderly, demented parent, losing their ability to care for themselves, has moved in with you. You try to keep up with your normal activities, the things you do for and with other family members, but you get stretched thin, and start going to bed later. Your stress load increases and you have more on your mind, making it harder to fall asleep once you’re in bed. Having to respond to your parent’s distress in the middle of the night makes it even worse.

You find at some point that you are losing patience with everyone, particularly your parent. Life becomes a series of increasingly frustrating events, and it becomes harder and harder to hang on to joy. There are many factors causing this decline, but there is one central one: loss of sleep.

The mental effects of inadequate sleep are evil and insidious, in the sense that people gradually lose their cognitive edge, their emotional resilience, and their mental clarity, but they do not realize they are affected. What’s worse than having a poorly performing brain? Having a poorly performing brain and still thinking that you’re fine. Every aspect of your life is affected: relationships, work, play, even self-image. Even the quality of care that you provide for your parent suffers as a result.

Not to mention that inadequate sleep puts one at risk for damage to every system in the body. Sleep is a time when the body heals and regenerates itself; not getting enough increases the risk for everything from obesity to heart disease to diabetes.

Fortunately, these changes are reversible. This study from Baylor University found that caregivers’ loss of sleep is very real and potentially damaging, but that basic behavioral changes helped turn the problem around.

Based on the systematic review and meta-analysis of 35 studies (3268 caregivers), caregivers lost 2.42 to 3.50 hours of sleep each week due to difficulty falling asleep and maintaining sleep, a significant difference relative to age-matched noncaregiver controls. However, significantly better sleep quality was observed in caregivers after behavioral interventions.

These behavioral interventions included:

• Sleep hygiene education (creating a more conducive sleep environment)

• Stimulus control

• Light chronotherapy

Note that no drugs are used in any of these interventions. The study acknowledges that researching the effectiveness of drugs on caregivers’ sleep may reduce their ability to respond to the late-night needs of the dementia patient.

Circle of Care recommends that anyone whose mental and emotional resources are strained to the limit try to bring in help. But it’s good to know that something as basic as behavioral sleep intervention can help you get that emotional resilience and mental clarity back, which will improve not just your quality of life, but that of your parent and everyone around you.