Self-Care That Doesn’t Have to be Scheduled: An Essential Skill for Caregivers

Written by Danielle C. Brosseau, PhD, Registered Psychologist

Many of the people that find their way to my therapy room have a general sense of the importance of caring for themselves – perhaps not surprisingly given that they did just sign up for therapy! Despite this knowledge, almost everyone expresses some level of discouragement with how challenging it can be to find time for self-care. This challenge is even more difficult for people who provide informal caregiving for a family member or friend. Self-care in this context calls for an approach that doesn’t have to be scheduled!

More than 8 million Canadians provide unpaid care for adults with a disability or health condition (Statistics Canada, 2022). What’s more, many middle-aged folks are providing care for their young children and for aging parents, a phenomenon referred to as sandwich caregiving (Wray, 2024). Any of you who currently find yourself in the middle of that kind of sandwich know that things can get really messy when feeling the pressure from both sides! Although informal caregiving is provided by people of all genders, women provide the majority of unpaid caregiving labour in our country (Statistics Canada, 2022).

What difficulties do caregivers report experiencing?

It is challenging to summarize the difficult aspects of caregiving across such a diverse group because the caregiving experience is influenced by many factors including the relationship between the caregiver and the care recipient, the type of caregiving required, and the reason the care needs exist. However, as a group, a vast majority of caregivers report feeling overwhelmed and approximately half report caregiver burden (Soh et al., 2025). Caregiver burden is a caregiver’s experience of multifaceted strain when caring for a loved one over an extended period of time (Liu et al., 2020). Among carers of cancer patients, this experience of burden was associated with feelings of guilt, lower quality of life, and less psychological resilience (Shi & Liu, 2026; Xu et al., 2026). Caregivers are also at greater risk of experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety than the general population (Soh et al., 2025; Statistics Canada, 2024). If you find your own experience represented in some of these numbers, it may be especially useful to consider how you are caring for yourself.

What does self-care look like for caregivers?

When I initiate this conversation with caregivers, many people describe efforts to carve out time in their busy schedules to exercise, socialize, or participate in a favourite hobby. Others focus on rare moments of relaxation or indulgence – think bubble baths and fancy coffee! These activities and moments of relaxation can be an important part of how someone cares for themselves (no judgement from me if these are your go-to strategies – I too enjoy a perfectly prepared Canadiano and a good pedicure!), but there are ways that we can engage in self-care that doesn’t have to be scheduled and doesn’t come with a hefty spa bill! Have I caught your attention? Excellent! One way to approach self-care is to consider how we talk to ourselves when we are struggling. Responding to yourself with compassion when you feel guilty, are forced to make impossible decisions about your time, or feel that you are failing is an effective way to approach self-care.

What is self-compassion?

Much of our current knowledge about self-compassion can be attributed to the work of Kristin Neff. Neff has researched and written extensively on self-compassion and defined it as, “compassion for the experience of suffering turned inward” (Neff, 2023, p. 194). She goes on to explain that self-compassion involves three components: mindful awareness of our personal suffering, kindness towards ourselves when suffering, and an understanding of suffering as a shared human experience (Neff, 2016; 2023).

I invite you to consider this concept of self-compassion for yourself. Take a moment and recall the last time you made a mistake, felt like you were failing, or just didn’t measure up. What was the narrative in your own mind in response to that experience? What emotions did you experience? How did you treat yourself when noticing you were having a hard time? Now imagine for a moment that a friend of yours made that same kind of mistake and disclosed it to you. What would you say to your friend? What do you feel in response to your friend’s disclosure? If you are anything like me, my students, and many of my clients (read, if you are human!), those two responses are dramatically different! It can be quite eye-opening to begin observing this difference and equally painful to recognize how poorly we treat ourselves at times.

What are the potential benefits of self-compassion?

To answer this question, I will invite you to nerd-out 🤓 with me for a moment while I summarize some of the research-based information we have about the benefits of self-compassion. Psychological interventions designed to improve caregivers’ self-compassion have demonstrated promising benefits. Researchers compared the impacts of a mindful self-compassion intervention with usual care for family caregivers of people living with a psychiatric illness (Lök & Bademli, 2024). In this study, caregivers who participated in the self-compassion intervention experienced less caregiver burden, criticism, hostility, and emotional over-involvement and also reported improved mental well-being. Similarly, a mindful self-compassion intervention delivered using art-based therapy led to reductions in stress, caregiver burden, and depressive symptoms for caregivers of people living with dementia (Tan-Ho et al., 2026). Among family caregivers of adults with cancer, caregiver burden was lower among caregivers with higher mindful acknowledgment of their suffering, a key component of self-compassion (Kalav et al., 2026). Research results like these are still relatively new and we should be rightly cautious about over-interpreting them. However, these results are compelling, and they align with clinical experiences I have observed in the people I support. These results suggest that self-compassion can be improved (at least when participating in a professionally assisted intervention) and when we turn compassion inward, we can experience a cascade of mental health benefits.

What does it all mean?

As described by Neff (2023), self-compassion “is a powerful way to alleviate suffering that is accessible to anyone at any moment” (p. 211). As I often say to my clients, even when they are skeptical, are you willing to try it out? Try experimenting with a more compassionate response to yourself and observe the impact. In what ways does it feel different from your typical response? What impact does that difference have on how you feel? It may be beneficial to find a psychologist who incorporates a focus on self-compassion if you find it difficult to experiment with this new approach to self-care on your own. For those of you who want to explore more or are curious but unconvinced, I recommend Kristin Neff’s (2015) book titled, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, where she directly addresses many barriers to self-compassion that show up for people.

Self-compassion is a muscle that is often underworked. Many of us can quickly and meaningfully respond to others’ struggles with heaps of compassion, but find that gentler, kinder content notably absent from how we respond to ourselves. However, when we find ways to meet our mistakes with compassion, there is more space for acceptance of ourselves in all of our beautifully imperfect humanness and, as the research suggests, a beneficial payout in terms of our mental well-being!

References

Liu, Z., Heffernan, C., & Tan, J. (2020). Caregiver burden: A concept analysis. International Journal of Nursing Sciences, 7(4), 438–445.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnss.2020.07.012

Lök, N., & Bademli, K. (2024). The effect of a mindful self-compassion intervention on burden, expressed emotion and mental well-being in family caregivers of patients with schizophrenia: A randomized controlled trial. Community Mental Health Journal, 60, 997–1005.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-024-01253-y

Neff, K. D. (2015). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.

Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-Compassion: Theory, method, research and intervention. AnnualReview of Psychology, 74, 193–218.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047

Shi, W., & Liu, X. (2026). A study on the correlation between caregiver burden, psychological resilience, and quality of life in patients with advanced cancer receiving inpatient palliative care. Journal of Palliative Care, 41(2), 231–243.https://doi.org/10.1177/08258597261427542

Soh, X. C., Hartanto, A., Ling, N., Reyes, M., Sim, L., & Majeed, N. M. (2025). Prevalence of depression, anxiety, burden, burnout, and stress in informal caregivers: An umbrella review of meta-analyses. Archives of Gerontology & Geriatrics Plus, 2(3), 1–23.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aggp.2025.100197

Statistics Canada (2022). More than half of women provide care to children and care-dependent adults in Canada (catalogue number dq221108b). The Daily.https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/daily-quotidien/221108/dq221108b-eng.pdf?st=jee_r6jX

Tan-Ho, G., Choo, P. Y., Ma, S. H. X. Y., Hum, A. Y. M., Yap, P. L. K., Bte Ali, N., Tan, M. K. B., & Ho, A. H. Y. (2026). Mindful-compassion art-based therapy for dementia care (MCAT-DC): A multicomponent approach to enhancing resilience in dementia family caregivers. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research,Practice, and Policy. Advance online publication.https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/tra0002172

Wray, D. (2024). “Sandwiched” between unpaid care for children and care-dependent adults: A gender-based study. Statistics Canada.https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/89-652-x/89-652-x2024002-eng.pdf?st=ATv6bHc2

Xu, H., Han, X., Fan, W., Sun, Y., Gao, K., Liu, X., Liu, X., Li, Y., Zhang, Y., Du, W., Li, W., Zhou, Z., & Shang, L. (2026). Caregiver guilt as an underrecognised burden in family cancer caregiving: a scoping review and implications for palliative care support. BMC palliative care. Advance online publication.https://doi.org/10.1186/s12904-026-02203-z