There is an increase in the care for family members with dementia in the U.S., and it causes significant emotional and physical stress that gives rise to caregivers' risk of depression, anxiety, and death.
A new study by national Northwestern Medicine reported that a unique method of coping with that stress by teaching people to focus on positive emotions reduced their anxiety and depression after six weeks. The paper was published in Health Psychology. The study also resulted in better self-reported physical health and positive attitudes toward caregiving.
Judith Moskowitz, the lead author of the study and a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said that the caregivers who learned the skills had less depression, better self-reported physical health, more feelings of happiness and other positive emotions than the control group.
Moskowitz explained that nationally, there is a massive increase in informal caregivers. People are living longer with dementias like Alzheimer's disease, and their long-term care is falling to family members and friends. This intervention is one way that they can help reduce the stress and burden and enable them to provide better care.
Moskowitz and colleagues designed the intervention that included eight skills that evidence shows increase positive emotions. They include noticing and capitalizing on positive events, gratitude, mindfulness, positive reappraisal, personal strengths, attainable goals and acts of kindness.
It was not clear to Moskowitz how many caregivers would be able to complete the program because they are such a stressed, burdened group. But there was commitment and encouragement which speaks to how much they need programs like that.
The sessions went for six weeks where caregivers reviewed positive emotion skills and then had daily homework to practice the skills such as audio recordings. For instance, if the topic was acts of kindness, the caregivers' homework was to go out and practice an act of kindness.
Skills they taught the caregivers in the study include:
- Recognizing a positive event each day
- Taking delight in that positive event and logging it in a journal or telling someone about it
- Starting a daily gratitude journal
- Listing a personal strength each day and noting how they used this strength recently
- Setting an attainable goal each day and recording their progress
- Reporting relatively minor stress each say, then listing ways in which the event can be positively reappraised or reframed
- Considerate on small acts of kindness can have a significant impact on positive emotion and practicing a small act of kindness each day
Moskowitz will launch a new study that the National Institute of Aging funded where she will compare the facilitated version of the intervention to a self-guided online version of the intervention.
