13 Jul What Can Help Your Senior with Sleep?
Sleeping poorly can happen for so many different reasons and it impacts every area of your elderly family member’s life. Tweaking a few different areas of her life may help your senior to get better sleep.
Having Routines that Support Sleep
Routines that support both sleep and wakefulness give your elderly family member a chance to ease into and out of that sleep cycle in a way her body learns to count on. This means that your elderly family member ideally should be going to sleep around the same time and getting up around the same time, to start. She may not want to use an alarm, which makes perfect sense, but having a way to wind down for the day paves the way for sleep to naturally arrive.
Exercising Daily
Daily exercise is something that helps your elderly family member’s body to maintain muscles and to retain at least a little bit of flexibility. Talk to your senior’s doctor about exercise before she starts so that you’re aware of the limitations she needs to adhere to with any exercise she does. Her exercise routine can be as simple as stretching for a few minutes each day, if that’s what she’s able to do.
Eating Nutrient Dense Foods
There’s a saying that food is medicine and that’s true on so many levels. Your elderly family member needs as many nutrients as she can get and the best way to get them is through food. Unfortunately, she might not be excited much by eating foods that are “good” for her, especially if she’s relied on processed foods a lot. This might involve helping your senior to gradually swap out some of her favorite foods for similar options that include more nutrients.
Spending and Conserving Energy as Wisely as Possible
How your elderly family member uses the energy that she has makes more of a difference than either of you might realize. If your senior is spending a lot of energy to do all that she does in a day, she may be going to bed exhausted, but that doesn’t mean she’s sleeping well. Resting more during the day can be a key part of helping her to be just tired enough. Senior care providers can be the key to maintaining that balance. They can help her just enough to provide what she needs in terms of conserving energy.
Doing everything perfectly around sleep doesn’t mean all your senior’s issues with sleep will go away. She can still have trouble sleeping and it might be a good idea to talk to her doctor about those issues to rule out other causes.
If you or an aging loved-one is considering Senior Care in Fairwood, WA please contact the caring staff at Care To Stay Home – Spokane today at (509) 340-1359.