Did you know that more than five million people in the Netherlands provide informal care, more than 800,000 of them long-term? That's an awful lot of people who care for others, but what if you are among the group of people who care too much for others? Who lose sight of themselves and have no time for themselves to recharge?
Caring too much for others is something many people also suffer from. Why is this and what can you do to care less for others and more for yourself?
People working in healthcare
People who work in healthcare often do so out of a need to care for other people. It's not about the money, it's about contributing to making the lives of others better.
Only for care workers in particular, therefore, is the risk often relatively high that they care too much for others and too little for themselves. Precisely because they are so valuable, it is important that, whether privately or at work, they take good care of themselves. After all, you can't take care of people if you work yourself sick.
For example, people working in palliative care or working with people with cancer may also experience grief and stress from their clients' suffering[1].
To ensure that compassion does not overwhelm you, it is important to be self-aware and to take good care of yourself. For example, compassion in healthcare workers can cause burnout, fatigue and compassion fatigue.
Compassion fatigue basically means that you can no longer/will no longer empathize with the other person and no longer want to feel compassion. As a result, you can suddenly become very impersonal and harsh as a caregiver.
With burnout, you lose the idealism you started out with in your career, you may suffer from cynicism and start working less efficiently. This can eventually cause stress because you then find that you no longer have good morals.
Even if you don't work in caregiving, but you do care for other people a lot, such as as as a caregiver or because you are the person who does most of the work for the children at home, you may also suffer from these kinds of problems.
Family caregivers can feel overwhelmed, fatigued and isolated. In addition, they often experience a lack of support and training in how to care for their family members. They also lack someone with whom they can discuss their problems or with whom they can just talk everything out.
It can also affect your work if you become a caregiver, such as by taking more time off or working fewer hours.
For the caregiver, this is not easy either which often results in the caregiver's physical health deteriorating as well, family relationships and other social ties can become less good, and in addition, caregivers often experience more stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms[2].
Taking good care of yourself to take care of others
So what does it take to take good care of yourself when you take care of others? In that case, then, it is important to be able to reflect on yourself and thereby gain a form of self-awareness.
For example, reflection can help you monitor whether you are forgetting, exhausting yourself or emotionally unwilling to give more for the people you care for. You can do a lot with mindfulness meditation and by keeping reflective journals to improve your self-awareness.
After all, that's when you can take a moment to set your boundaries and give proper attention to yourself, until you find that you can get back to it or just find a better balance.
Ways to take good care of yourself include:
- Maintain good relationships with friends/family (source 2).
- Pay attention to your physical health, with adequate sleep, healthy diet and adequate exercise.
- Going on vacation.
- Have hobbies and have time to pursue them.
- Apply mindfulness and meditation.
- Developing you spiritually (source 1).
Working on taking good care of yourself is also good for creating self-compassion (being kind to yourself), improving your well-being and reducing burnout symptoms[3].
Family caregivers also do well to educate themselves as much as possible about the problem of the person they care for. This makes for better well-being because you will have more feelings of control (source 2).
Hypnosis when you care too much for others
Hypnosis and self-hypnosis can also help you if you care too much for others. For example, you can relax with self-hypnosis. Similar to a guided meditation, you can use self-hypnosis to take a break from everyday reality and recharge in a place in your mind where you feel completely calm and safe.
This is often another exercise performed during hypnotherapy to achieve a deep state of hypnosis.
Researchers also indicate that teaching self-hypnosis to people who are caregivers, for example, can be an important step in making caregiving less burdensome[4].
Beliefs can sometimes hinder you from taking good care of yourself. For example, you have certain opinions about what is morally right and how much you should care for your family. Sometimes it can be difficult to choose for yourself when you really need to.
For example, some people only choose to take care of themselves when their body tells them to, such as when they still get a sniffling cold or suddenly go through their back.
It is more convenient if you choose for yourself before you have this kind of setback.
So how does hypnosis help with this? If you find that you care too much for others, a hypnotherapist can already help you with conversational hypnosis. In this conversation, you can find out why you are doing what you are doing now. Then, with clever suggestions, using opposites and imagery, the hypnotherapist can often already change your mind.
At the March 2023 seminar, we got a great example of this during a demonstration of hypnotherapy. I started a conversation with someone and at a certain point he didn't really know what the problem was anymore. At that point you could say that there was a completely different way of looking at problems, which made it super simple to take time for yourself when necessary.
However, very often more than just a hypnotic call is needed.
For example, sometimes it's helpful to know where certain beliefs come from. For example, you may get a kind of gut feeling at the moment when you really should choose for yourself, but you still choose your caring job.
You've usually had this feeling then many times in your life at other times when you chose not for yourself, but for the other person.
With regression, a hypnotherapist then helps you go back to the first moment when you had that feeling. Then you will "fix" this moment in your mind, so that you can choose for yourself. The hypnotherapist helps you take the actions to repair it. Sometimes simply empathizing with other people who were also there at that moment is enough.
Usually these are moments from your childhood, because that was when you determined how the world works and how you are supposed to function in it. But these unconscious beliefs often don't get an intermediate evaluation, and with regression you do just that and update the belief to how you understand the world now as an adult.
This can often do an awful lot to remove limiting beliefs as well.
In addition, by repeating suggestions, you can install new beliefs in yourself. These can be beliefs such as:
"I need to take care of myself first, before I take care of another."
"Doing something for someone is better than doing nothing and better than doing too much."
"I may ask for help."
These are just examples, depending on your beliefs and problems with caring too much for others you may get other suggestions from the hypnotherapist.
In addition, hypnotherapists often give post-hypnotic suggestions. These are then often about what your life is like after hypnotherapy and how everything will get better by itself. How over time you notice that you are more comfortable in your own skin and that you are taking good care of your surroundings, while also taking good care of yourself.
That's incredibly helpful!
Would you also like to learn how hypnosis works and how to use it to take care of yourself and others? Then come to the free online master class for an introduction to hypnosis,
Want to get started immediately on helping others feel better about themselves? Then enroll in one of our training courses.
Training courses are available online or in a classroom setting. Choose a training format that suits you.
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