When You’re Looking After Everyone Else: Who’s Looking After You?

There are women who can tell you when everyone else’s dentist appointment is, which prescription needs collecting, what time the school trip leaves, when their mother’s hospital appointment is and exactly what needs doing at work tomorrow morning.

Ask them when they last did something purely for themselves and the answer can be considerably harder to find.

For millions of women, caring is woven into everyday life. It might mean raising children, supporting ageing parents, caring for a partner or relative, managing a household or working professionally in health, social care or another caring role. Often, it is several of those things happening simultaneously.

Being somebody others can depend upon can be enormously rewarding. But constantly being the person who remembers, organises, notices, comforts and fixes things can also be exhausting.

And somewhere in the middle of taking care of everybody else, it can become remarkably easy to disappear from your own list.

Caring doesn’t finish when the working day does

For women working in health and social care, the crossover can be particularly striking.

A nurse might spend an entire shift caring for patients before going home to children who need her attention. A care worker may spend the day supporting other people’s parents before checking whether her own mother has taken her medication. A manager might spend hours dealing with the pressures facing her team before arriving home to another set of people needing decisions from her.

The individual circumstances differ, but the pattern will be familiar to many.

Professional caring requires patience, emotional regulation and responsibility. Family caring can require exactly the same things. When those worlds overlap, there may be very little time during the day when somebody is not responsible for another person’s needs.

Rest is not simply about sitting down. There is a difference between being physically off duty and feeling that nobody needs anything from you.

For some women, genuinely being off duty happens remarkably rarely.

The work nobody sees

Much has been written about the “mental load”, and with good reason.

Running a household involves considerably more than completing physical chores. Somebody has to notice that the milk is nearly finished, remember that the school form is due on Thursday, realise a birthday is approaching, arrange the childcare, book the appointment and know that a family member has been unusually quiet recently.

It is the work of anticipating what needs to happen before it becomes a problem.

This responsibility can be difficult to quantify because much of it takes place inside somebody’s head. A partner may happily cook dinner when asked, for example, while somebody else has still decided what the family is eating, checked which ingredients are available and remembered what needs buying.

The physical task has been shared. The responsibility for making sure the task happens has not necessarily been shared with it.

When that pattern repeats across dozens of small decisions every day, the cumulative effect can be significant.

The sandwich generation

Midlife can create a particularly intense period of caring responsibility.

Women in their forties and fifties may still have children living at home while simultaneously becoming increasingly involved in supporting ageing parents. This group is sometimes described as the “sandwich generation”, caught between caring responsibilities in two directions.

Those responsibilities can arrive at precisely the same time that careers are at their most demanding.

A senior role does not become less demanding because your father needs taking to a hospital appointment. Your teenager does not stop needing you because there is a major deadline at work. Your mother’s health does not conveniently deteriorate during annual leave.

And women navigating this stage of life may also be experiencing perimenopause or menopause themselves, potentially bringing changes to sleep, energy, mood and concentration into an already crowded picture.

There can be an extraordinary amount happening behind somebody who simply tells colleagues, “I’m fine.”

Why asking for help can feel so difficult

Women who spend years being dependable can become surprisingly uncomfortable when they are the ones who need support.

Part of that can be practical. If you are the person who knows how everything works, delegating can initially feel more complicated than simply doing it yourself.

But there can also be something deeper.

Being the capable one can become part of a person’s identity. Other people rely on you because you cope. You organise things. You keep going. Admitting that you are struggling can therefore feel as though you are somehow failing at the very thing everyone expects you to be good at.

There is also the familiar thought: Other people have it worse.

Perhaps they do. But exhaustion is not a competition.

You do not need to reach breaking point before being allowed to say that something is too much.

When self-care becomes another job

The modern wellness industry has plenty of suggestions for exhausted women.

Wake earlier. Meditate. Exercise. Meal prep. Journal. Practise gratitude. Take a bath. Drink more water. Complete a skincare routine. Get eight hours of sleep.

Individually, many of these things can be beneficial. Collectively, they can start to sound suspiciously like another list of things women are supposed to achieve.

Self-care should not become another performance standard.

A woman who is already overwhelmed does not necessarily need to squeeze an elaborate wellness routine into the only 30 minutes she has to herself. Sometimes caring for yourself is far less photogenic.

• It can mean cancelling something.
• It can mean buying the easy dinner.
• It can mean leaving the washing until tomorrow.
• It can mean telling your family that somebody else needs to sort something out.
• It can mean going to bed.

Most importantly, it can mean recognising that protecting your own capacity is not an optional extra to be considered once everybody else’s needs have been met.

You are allowed to need things too

One of the easiest traps when caring for others is gradually treating your own needs as negotiable.

Everyone else’s appointments remain in the diary while yours gets postponed. Their prescriptions are collected while you ignore the health concern you have been meaning to discuss. Their sleep is protected while yours is repeatedly interrupted. Their feelings are considered while you decide yours can wait.

For a while, that can work.

Human beings are capable of functioning under extraordinary pressure when necessary. The problem is when an emergency way of living quietly becomes normal life.

Over time, prolonged stress and inadequate rest can affect both physical and mental wellbeing. Irritability, difficulty concentrating, poor sleep, emotional exhaustion and feeling detached from things you normally enjoy can all be signs that something needs attention.

Sometimes the person who needs looking after is you.

Sharing tasks is not always the same as sharing responsibility

If caring responsibilities are becoming overwhelming, one useful question is not simply, “Who helps me?” but “Who else takes responsibility?”

There is a meaningful difference.

Helping suggests that one person remains the manager while somebody else completes tasks they have been allocated. Shared responsibility means another person notices, plans and follows through without needing to be supervised.

In a household, that might mean somebody taking complete responsibility for school activities rather than waiting to be told which forms need signing. It could mean another family member arranging an elderly parent’s appointments rather than simply providing a lift after somebody else has organised everything.

The goal is not mathematical equality in every household. Families have different circumstances, working patterns and abilities.

But if one person’s brain has effectively become the control centre for everybody else’s life, it is reasonable to question whether that arrangement is sustainable.

Workplaces have a role too

Employers also need to understand that caring responsibilities do not exist neatly outside working hours.

People may be supporting children, disabled relatives, partners experiencing illness or ageing parents while continuing to perform demanding jobs. For some, those responsibilities are temporary. For others, they may continue for years.

A supportive workplace does not require managers to solve employees’ personal lives. But flexibility, sensible workloads and a culture in which people can discuss caring responsibilities without fearing that they will be viewed as less committed can make an enormous difference.

This matters particularly in health and social care, where organisations rely heavily on a workforce that may already spend much of its professional life caring for others.

We cannot continually ask people to provide compassionate care while creating working environments that leave no room for compassion towards the people providing it.

Check on the strong one

There is another side to this conversation.

Most of us know somebody who always seems to manage.

She remembers birthdays. She checks everyone got home safely. She organises Christmas. She asks how your appointment went. She appears when somebody is ill and somehow finds the right thing to say when somebody is struggling.

Because she is capable, people assume she is okay.

Sometimes she absolutely is.

But sometimes the people who are best at looking after everyone else are also the easiest people to forget to check on.

So ask her how she is and wait for the real answer.

Offer something specific rather than saying, “Let me know if you need anything.” Take something off her plate without requiring her to project-manage the help.

And if you recognise yourself in that description, perhaps extend the same consideration to yourself.

You matter outside what you do for other people

Caring is an extraordinary part of being human. Loving people inevitably means that sometimes their needs come before ours.

The difficulty comes when sometimes quietly turns into always.

You are more than the person who keeps everything running. Your health matters even when nobody is depending on you being healthy. Your rest matters even when there are things still left on the list. Your time matters even when somebody else would happily fill it.

And you do not have to earn the right to be cared for by reaching complete exhaustion first.

So perhaps the question is worth asking occasionally.

When you’re looking after everyone else, who’s looking after you?

And if the answer is nobody, maybe that’s something that deserves to change.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.

Or, if you’re ready to get back to what’s happening across the sector, catch up with today’s Daily News for the latest health and social care stories.