Help Your Parent Reduce His Or Her Anxiety Through These Methods

Posted on: 27 April 2017

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If you have an elderly parent who lives alone and suffers from a high degree of anxiety, you may feel lost about how to help. One way to effectively deal with this issue is to hire a home health aide through a place like ActiveCare Home Care. The daily presence of this caregiver can go a long way toward helping your parent's anxiety levels. While the mere presence of the caregiver can be helpful, you may wish to speak to him or her about using additional methods to further reduce your parent's anxiety. Here are some suggestions for you and the home health aide to discuss.

Daily Exercise

Daily exercise is a valuable tool to use in the fight again anxiety. In addition to releasing pleasure hormones known as endorphins, exercise also helps to distract from whatever anxiety is occupying the mind. There are a number of ways that the home health aide can help your parent get exercise. For example, the caregiver could accompany your parent on a walk through a local park or, during inclement weather, visit a local mall that encourages walkers before the individual stores open. Similarly, the caregiver could also do some yoga or basic stretching with your parent in the comfort of his or her home.

Improved Diet

A poor diet that is heavy in sugar and fat may increase your parent's anxiety level. Ask the home health aide to monitor your parent after each meal and note is his or her anxiety level is higher after eating poorly. If this is the case, the solution is to ask the home health aide to prepare healthier food for your parent. The aide may also need to go through the house and remove any unhealthy foods that may be too enticing. This list could include cookies, potato chips, and soda.

Encourage Social Interaction

Some people who suffer from anxiety feel better upon interacting with others. While the daily visit of the home health aide will help in this regard, he or she may wish to encourage your parent to enjoy more social activities. To this end, the aide could prepare food for your parent to host friends and neighbors for tea, visit local establishments that have seniors programming, and simply strive to get out of the house once a day to do something that involves being around other people.

By using the above three methods, your parent's caregiver can play a positive role in reducing your parent's anxiety.