Taking Care of Your Physical Health as a Special Needs Parent
When I first landed in the “special needs parent” category 5 years ago, I had no clue just how long and hard the journey would be. We received the diagnosis of PANDAS in June of 2018 and really didn’t know if or when our daughter would recover.
I knew that taking care of my physical health was important, but trying to find the time to eat right, move my body and get good sleep felt impossible with the constant demands of therapy appointments and behavior management.
I did what I knew how to do- drink lots of water, eat organic foods and go to sleep early so my adrenals could have a chance to rest. But the reality was that the constant stress of those 5 years did a number on my gut-brain health, and once Alexis started to heal, my body fell apart.
This is not entirely uncommon for parents of special needs kids. It’s like the body starts to feel safe enough to relax after years and years of constant stress and when it does- it’s not pretty. I got a respiratory infection in November 2022 that severely weakened my immune system/ Not long after, I got a UTI that required a strong antibiotic, that further wiped out my immune system. My ferritin dropped, and that put so much physiologic stress on my adrenal glands that I started dumping cortisol like crazy.
I began having severe nausea, vomiting, I would wake up in the early morning shaking uncontrollably and had heart palpitations. It was an actual nightmare.
I knew that the years of “doing the best I could” were showing signs that it wasn’t enough, so I went to my doctor to get some help. We began addressing the nutrient deficiencies caused by the low iron, got to work balancing my cortisol levels, and did some in depth testing to see WHY my immune system decided to poop out on me.
It was a SLOW recovery- but it forced me to slow down and really look at some habits I had that were leading to chronic stress on my body and was preventing me from getting out of fight-or-flight.
I began blocking out my lunch our so I couldn’t take clients during that time. I began to focus on eating a full plate of nutrient dense foods and just focused on really enjoying my meals. Letting my body feel the weight of relaxation.
I began supporting my digestion with enzymes, targeted probiotics based off the advanced stool testing, and slowly but surely, I felt myself coming together again.
While it certainly wasn’t my fault that all the stress had caught up to me, It was a wake-up call that none of us are super-human.
And as special needs parents, we don’t need an intense work out regimen, or labor intensive meal plan. In fact- that’s likely to just add more stress to the picture.
What we need is simple, practical strategies to manage stress while taking care of our bodies. There were seasons where the ONLY thing I could focus on was going to bed at a decent time. That was my self care.
Other times, I could focus more on nutrition, or counseling to talk through the difficulties at home. I certainly couldn’t do it all (and likely you can’t either), but here are some ideas to get started making deposits in your physical bank account:
Go to sleep early- the more hours of sleep you get before midnight, the bigger impact on health you have. If you have a child who isn’t sleeping through the night, enlist your partner to trade off- no one parent should carry the weight of sleep deprivation.
Focus on adding just 1 nutrient dense food to your daily meals. This could be any vegetable, fermented foods like pickles or sauerkraut, canned green vegetables. Don’t be a perfectionist here- just add one thing.
Take a good probiotic. If there was ONE supplement I could encourage you to take, it’s something to support your gut health. This is a really good one that covers a lot of bases.
What’s one thing you can start with today to pour back into yourself?
Let me know in a comment below!
To your wellness,
Andrea Jones
