Social isolation is one of the big issues that can lead to caregiver stress. If you’re not allowing yourself to have normal social interactions, you’re stagnating and it takes away from what you can give your loved one emotionally. Here are some ways that you could be making the situation worse without realizing it.

You Back Out of Appointments with Friends

Maybe you do make arrangements with your friends and other family members to do something, but that event never materializes. Often that happens because you plan ahead, and then something happens that makes you cancel. This might be an actual emergency with your loved one or you could just be too tired to do anything once the actual appointment rolls around, so you back out. Doing this to yourself keeps you in that isolation loop and eventually friends and family members will stop making arrangements with you.

You Avoid People Who Aren’t Connected to Your Loved One

Some family caregivers think that they should be on duty all day, every day, which can lead to making the decision that they can’t do things with people unless they’re involved in caring for their elderly loved one. This is a backwards theory because in reality, caregivers need to experience a wider range of people and activities in order to be more well-rounded.

You Keep Yourself Too Tightly Scheduled

You have a lot to do as a caregiver, that’s just a fact. The problem comes in when you schedule every single hour of every day down to the bare wire. You have to include down time and social time into your schedule if you want to keep yourself healthy and be a strong caregiver for your loved one. Take an objective look at your schedule and find out what you can outsource to other people, including elderly care providers and other family members. Delegation can be your friend.

You’re Unorganized

Sometimes you might not even know what your appointments are, where you should be going, or why it’s important. Being a full-time family caregiver can be really overwhelming and if you aren’t organized, then it’s impossible to say yes to social situations because you just don’t know when you can do what. Take the time to get all of your ducks in a row.

You Don’t Let Others Help with Your Loved One

Your elderly loved one needs to be around other people just as much as you do, so when you limit her interactions to her doctors and you, you’re doing both of you a disservice. This can also be a result of being afraid that you’re not doing enough for your loved one. Usually that is incorrect, and it’s easily rectified by making sure that you have respite care services and home care providers helping out. If other family members want to help, let them.

Isolating yourself is not good for your emotional health, so take a good long look at how you might be sabotaging yourself so you can work around those obstacles.