Yowei Shaw

He's feeling frustrated, sad.

This turns out to be the way a lot of dementia caregivers feel.

Way higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress than the rest of us.

And because we're talking about nearly 12 million Americans who, like Brian, are providing unpaid care to a loved one in this way, that's a huge steaming pile of shitty feelings.

Shitty feelings that are affecting everyone involved.

Researchers have found that these stressed-out caregivers tend to skip doctor's appointments, not take breaks, not exercise, not see friends.

But here's the thing.

The more caregivers neglect their own well-being and the more they become distressed, the worse the people they're caring for tend to do.

They're more likely to have worse symptoms of dementia, more likely to end up in the hospital, even more likely to be abused.

It's this terrible irony.

The more a caregiver gives up of their life to care for the person they love, the more the care they're giving can suffer.

So what to do with all these shitty feelings?

And how can Brian stop taking out his frustration on his mother-in-law?

Claudia says typically we feel a bad feeling and we want to get rid of it.

Maybe go to yoga, start boxing.

The point is to purge the bad feeling so you can be a better caregiver who doesn't snap at your confused mother-in-law.

But Claudia says that's just temporary because you can't really get rid of a feeling if you don't change the situation.

And if you bat away the feeling without trying to understand it, like, no, no, no, no, no.

Those are your clues.

Claudia wants caregivers to sit with and feel all the feelings, even the bad ones.