Caregiver Tip #8- Blow Bubbles
That’s right! For Caregiver Tip #8 I suggest you blow bubbles and let that inner child in you come out to play.
What I Learned From My Granddaughter
On a recent trip to visit my granddaughter I rediscovered the joy of doing the simple things. We spent hours playing in the sandbox, swinging on the swingset and blowing bubbles.
While I can’t always ditch work and go play in the sandbox I can keep a bottle of bubbles on my desk. When you blow bubbles your breath naturally slows down. It’s impossible to get a really good bubble with short, fast breathing. As your breathing begins to slow down a series of chemical reactions also begin to take place.
This is what Dr. Herbert Benson, a Harvard Physician, calls The Relaxation Response. Most of us are familiar with the stress response. In response to real or perceived danger our body prepares to either fight the danger or flee from it.
When our body elicits the stress response the following changes occur:
- heart rate increases
- breathing rate increases
- muscle tension increases
- blood pressure increases
In addition to this your adrenal glands begin to pump hormones, which cause
- digestion decreases
- reproduction decreases
- responses of your immune and inflammatory systems decrease
The same mechanism that turned on the stress response can turn it off!
As soon as you decide that a situation is no longer threatening, your brain stops sending panic messages to your nervous system. Three minutes after you cease to send out the danger signals all of the systems in your body return to normal functioning. Herbert Benson, a leading researcher on stress referred to this natural restorative process as “The Relaxation Response”
The trouble is most of us never turn on the relaxation response. We jump from one stressor to the next and are in a constant and chronic state of stress. Becoming aware of your breath and learning to slow down your rate of breathing while also taking deeper abdominal breaths will move your body into The Relaxation Response. The goal is to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which causes humans to relax.
Author- Kathryn Watson
Like many today Kathryn Watson was thrust into the world of Elder care with little knowledge or understanding of the industry. The challenges she overcame led her write Help! My Parents Are Aging and Help! I Can’t Do This Alone and to create a web directory for Houston families. Find Houston Senior Care offers both resources and information to help you navigate the elder care world.