Hi @daughterfuturemd Your post is a good one and you make some solid suggestions! However, I feel the need to add my perspective gained from my years as a spousal primary caregiver and realize I may sound a bit blunt. If so I apologize in advance.

I believe there are no rules in caregiving beyond medical directives/orders. Every patient, every disease's path, and every caregiver is unique. When someone places 'rules' out there for caregivers to follow, and a caregiver cannot meet those rules, they feel they are not being a 'good' caregiver. That leads to increased feelings of guilt, anxiety, and incompetence. These feelings are already rampant in a caregiver's life so I truly believe they do not need any 'rules' to add to their burdens. Modifiers like 'might help', 'could be tried', 'maybe', 'perhaps', 'works for some people', 'I suggest', etc. can mitigate future feelings of failure by not adhering to, or meeting, some 'rule'. Eight hours of sleep? A nice idea, but for the last four months of my wife's life she required mediations every two hours around the clock in home hospice. Any sleep was a luxury and 8 hours an impossibility. Another for instance for me was for a long time I felt terrible anxiety over the fact I wasn't going through the 'steps of grief' properly, until I realized there are no rules to grief, even though so many folks demanded that there were!

Personally, I've also never met a caregiver who didn't want to take care of themselves. When you are in the pressure cooker that is a caregiver's life, one's own needs quickly come second -- or ninth. By necessity the needs of the patient are paramount and often there is no relief person, no time off, no money, no ability to do anything other than to attend to the needs of your patient. Plus caregivers cannot simply turn off their concern for their patient and her/his needs. And after the direct care duties are the bills, dishes, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, meal prep, and more. From my perspective telling a caregiver to 'self-care' is akin to yelling at a drowning person to 'swim'! Nice idea, might make the one who yelled it feel like they intervened, but didn't they think they'd swim if they could?

Strength, courage, and peace to all caregivers!