5 Tips for Seniors on Coping with COVID-Related Isolation

COVID-19 has forced many people to self-isolate to avoid infection. Seniors in particular have been advised to stay home because of the dangers they face as a result of the virus. Unfortunately, research shows that all that time home alone can harm physical and mental health, increasing the risk of issues like insomnia and anxiety. As the Unified Caring Association explains, feelings of worry are normal in such difficult times.

It’s important to ward off mental and physical health issues that may arise from isolation. This guide provides actionable and affordable tips for seniors on feeling their best while sheltering in place.

5 tips for seniors coping with isolation

Create a Cozy Space at Home

If you’re going to be spending a lot of time in the house, you might as well be comfortable. Your house is your sanctuary. Insider has tips on creating a cozy space on a budget. Ideas include making a nook for reading or relaxation, embracing the power of aromatherapy with scented candles, and allowing more natural light in. The sun is a natural source of vitamin D, which also brings other benefits. As MSN reports, vitamin D can help boost your mood and combat depression.

Look for Senior-Friendly Workouts to Stay Physically Fit

The CDC recommends that older adults stay physically active to avoid health problems that come with age. There are many senior-friendly workouts you can do at home. Women’s Health has a list of tutorials you can follow for free via YouTube. If you want to get some workout gear to supplement your exercises, such as a yoga mat or exercise bands, you can order it easily online without leaving the home. To save money, the Unified Caring Association recommends looking for discounts online.

Embrace a Healthy Diet With Easy Home-Cooking Recipes

A healthy balanced diet helps older adults get the nutrients they need to maintain optimal physical and mental function. This becomes more challenging with age, as metabolism slows down and people experience decreased appetite. As a result, they have to get sufficient vitamins and minerals while consuming smaller portions. Healthy eating can also be a problem if you find cooking tiring. One solution is batch cooking. Prepare food that you can freeze and reheat. Delish has a list of more than 30 recipes that are ideal for batch cooking.

Use Technology to Maintain Social Connectivity Digitally

If you are able to see family or friends safely in person, make the most of your time together. If you can’t see your loved ones — for example, because they live far away — there are still ways you can connect. You can try eating a meal together via video chat, for example. Alternatively, watch a movie together using apps like Watch2gether and MyCircleTV. Too complicated for you? A simple video chat with your smartphone or tablet will do the trick, too. If you need to upgrade your technology, look online for deals on the latest gadgets.

Pick Up a New Hobby to Stay Busy and Mentally Fit

Technology can also help keep you occupied at home, helping you avoid boredom. Use your tech tools to pick up a new hobby. Develop Good Habits offers a list of options for seniors, like learning an instrument. This is the kind of thing you can do online, thanks to free YouTube tutorials. Plus, learning something new will keep you mentally sharp.

With these 5 tips for coping with COVID-related isolation, you can stay happy at home as you continue to self-isolate because of COVID-19. You will also feel better emotionally as a result.

By Karen Weeks, contributing author

We invite you to discover inspiring and effective ways to care for yourself and to serve others. Now more than ever, caring is what we all need most. Caring for our self. Caring for others around us. Life now demands caring, resilience and compassion like never before. So, become a Custodian of the Caring Movement and help create the world we need right now, the world we want for our future generations.

UCA resources available to help include the Turbulent Times Resources Center, radio show, publications and online store offering members huge discounts and always free shipping.

February 19, 2021

Schooling at Home; Practical Tips for Stressed out Families

We have officially begun the first week of homeschool for our kids as many of us are homebound and practicing health and safety routines for ourselves and our communities. We at Unified Caring Association (UCA) have been receiving questions about how to set up a routine for schooling at home. With some research we have come up with a few ideas that can help grow caring children and create a thriving educational environment at home.

Two Tips for Getting Set Up

One of the first challenges that can occur is the task of explaining to our kids about the coronavirus pandemic. This can be a bit difficult at times because there is some uncertainty about how long each school district is closing. It is important that we practice taking a deep breath to help us be center while calmly speaking with our kids. “The easiest rule of thumb is to try to be direct and honest and brief.” (Mathew Cruger)

The second tip is to set up new routines and goals. These routines do not have to be perfect off the bat. An example of a good place to start isa morning routine. In the morning, everyone wakes up at a reasonable hour, eats nutritious breakfast, brushes their hair and teeth, and gets dressed for the day. Another idea is to block out time for physical activity in the day, like a mock-recess. (Bonus points for joining in on the physical activity to help reduce your stress and boost your physical health!) If you need an example, check out fitness instructor Joe Wicks video series, P.E. with Joe. Each video is a daily 30-minute workout that kids can do at home.

Also, when setting up your new daily routine, it is important to set aside quality time with your family. This time requires you to put away other responsibilities in an effort to focus on playing with members of your family. A suggestion on LiveScience for “when you need to do another task, [is to] stay nearby and tell the child to play by themselves, but to let you know if they need help.” Sometimes we can have family bonding time through doing chores. Most of us have that moment of groaning when we think about dusting and mopping, but it can become a fun family activity. Try cranking up the tunes to boogie as you clean. Or have a relay race for who can fold the most laundry in 2 minutes!

Schedules are important to help kids understand what life will look like day-to-day, reducing stress and confusion. Additionally, a routine helps with student success for kids that still have school work to turn into their teachers remotely during the school closure.

Educational Materials For Homebound Kids

There are so many resources for keeping your kids’ education at its top game. Recently, many educational foundations and organizations have released tools and activities that are great for the brain while we are schooling our children at home. Some of these resources are available for free. K- 12 kids activities can be found on Kids Activities Blog where dozens of activities and educational materials.Other educational resources for schooling at home, such as audiobooks, e-books, videos, multimedia materials, are also available on the Open Culture website, like Google Learn at Home for example.

Scholastic Learn at Home has daily lessons in a variety of formats: videos, stories and prompts for drawing and writing activities. These are lessons that are great for grade levels pre-K to 6th grade and up.

“Khan Academy, a free online learning resource offering lessons, exercises and quizzes, has daily schedules for organizing at-home learning for students ages 4 to 18 years.” (LiveScience Kids Activities) On weekdays, this academy offers livestreams on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to help parents and educators best utilize the website’s tools and resources while schooling at home.

Speaking of Youtube, there is a channel called Crash Course that offers engaging educational videos on a wide range of subjects that are great for high school students.

PBS KIDS and PBS LearningMedia are showing their support as well by offering tools to help support learning at home. Some of these tools include educational videos and games from favorite series, as well as related skill-building offline activities that will help us grow caring children while running their education home.

Virtual Museums

We are completely into this next topic; virtual field trips! Recently penguins touring Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium took Twitter by storm! Now we can join in on the fun by taking a virtual tour of more than 2,500 museums around the world. These museums have made their collections accessible online through Google Arts and Culture. Additionally, we can get an outdoors feel by accessing virtual tours of national parks in the U.S.

If we are looking at specific museums, The American Museum of Natural History in New York City offers all ages online learning materials that are perfect for schooling at home. We took a look at their Ology science website, and it has games and activities in a range of science topics like archaeology, astronomy, and marine biology.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has a tour too! The Air and Space Anywhere webpage provides virtual tours of the museum, educational podcasts, games and activities that are all about aircraft and spacecraft. This is a great way to get some STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) lessons, activities and videos on topics, like flight and space.

Science!

Craving more science in your family’s life? (Bill Nye the Science Guy would be pleased as punch!) We found out that the California Science Center is livestreaming “Stuck at Home Science” Every weekday at 10 a.m. PDT. This is a new video series of science activities you can do at home.

Miami’s Frost Science Museum is helping out with remote science activities as well. Frost Science@Home helps curious and inquisitive minds plenty to do with fun science activities and DIY science experiments.

Nova Labs at PBS has sciences for teens! These virtual science educational experiences come together through multimedia experiences that combine video, animation and games to delve into fascinating scientific topics. Teens learn about hot topics like polar ecosystems, solar storms and renewable energy to get your teens brains engaged and ready to help bring more caring into our communities.

NASA also has Teachable Moments for K-12th grade. This brings NASA to your home by connecting homes with resources for investigating the latest discoveries about our universe. To add to this, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is another source of free online content. When visiting the website, digital educators share live videos that pair with hands-on activities. These activities use materials that can be found at almost any home. Two examples of topics are living in space and on Mars, as well as basic rocketry.

For our kids that are ready for more and complex sciences, Physics Classroom is a great resource for beginning physics students. There are teacher toolkits for parents who are now learning how to be teachers. These toolkits supplement the site’s online lessons with videos, animations, simulations and exercises to give a full classroom experience.

Want to have a family Q&A with a scientist? Sign up at Skype a Scientist and get matched with an expert. This expert will live Skype chat with your family about real scientific research.

With all of the remote education and being homebound, we are craving some connection! stemCONNECT is a great answer that uses video conferencing to bring together students and experts in STEM industries. Also, the site has a free video library. This library contains Florida-based STEM experts to help with your child’s understanding of practical applications of a STEM career.

Creative & Fun

We have talked a lot about sciences and logical education resources. Now we get to flip to the other side of the brain. Ready to run some fun and creative activities at home? Creativity is a huge part of learning and having a fulfilling life adventure. Much like our Caring Coloring Contest, organizations are bringing to homes creative education as well!

Teaching the value of mindfulness to your kids can be a creative and interactive activity too! Monterey Bay Aquarium hosts “MeditOcean.” Help build your kids resiliency with a soothing guided meditation video featuring several aquarium jellyfish.

If your children need a more hands-on activity, they can hone their artistic side with artist and writer Mo Willems. Williams is hosting Lunch Doodles video sessions weekdays at 1 pm EDT. These sessions have an activity page reflecting the doodle session. If you happen to have a 3D printer, access to blueprints of digital 3D models from NASA. It can be fun and educational to print and construct miniature models of satellites, asteroids, spacecraft, and more!

Add a little ancient history and anthropology to the schooling at home curriculum with the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. Kids in 3rd-12th grade can learn to write their names in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs with a step-by-step guide. If they get really good they can write a whole story for you!

Is reading and storytime built into your kids’ education at home? There are variety of videos where celebrities and professionals in multiple industries read books aloud. It can be a thrill to watch and listen to Story Time from Space. Listen to stories sent to the International Space Station (ISS). These stories are read aloud by astronauts as they orbit far above Earth.

It is during this time that we come together with our families to help each other learn more. Setting up new goals and routines so that our children can do their schooling at home can be confusing. UCA is here to help and share caring resources. We are all being called to do extraordinary things for the collective caring of our families, communities and the world in response to the unique coronavirus pandemic. Whether home bound or providing critical services, everyone is stretched to adapt like never before. All of us are in this together. Now more than ever, caring is what we need most. Caring for our self. Caring for others around us. Life is going to require new routines, resilience and compassion. We invite you to join us in creating a caring movement to respond to local needs.

Want to read more about Unified Caring Association and UCA benefits? We have other blogs on caring topics like: ‘R’ is for Reforestation, Caring Communities to Help Stop Cyberbullying, and Is My Child Resilient? Or follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter to receive caring updates during the week!

March 26, 2020

Homebound Life Self-Care

We at Unified Caring Association (UCA) want to shed some light and positivity during this difficult time in the world right now. Sometimes it is referred to as “lockdown,” many of us are experiencing what it means to be homebound. We have been hearing many UCA members ask, “How can we turn this into an opportunity to see the good?” and “How can we practice self-care while being homebound?”

Self-care is crucial.

Self-care requires us to be self-aware, which means being aware of what is going on within inside of ourselves. (A.K.A. checking in with yourself to see how you are doing.) When we feel like we are going a million miles a minute, it is important to take a moment to pause and reevaluate. Write things down in a journal. Some suggestions on the things to write are: what have you have accomplished and wish to accomplish, and set new goals for yourself. Overall, be proud of yourself. Also, according to article on Taking Good Care of Your Yourself, be kind to yourself.

Meditation is a great tool for self-care. It improves our wellbeing and health. Also, meditation or mindfulness activities helps us get in a calm relaxing psychological state too. We have many mindfulness activities on our website. Here is an example of a guided breath mediation with soft spa music to listen to — Guided breath Meditation-Spa-Music. If you are craving more, we also have many more videos on our YouTube channel!

If you’re ready to start a new exercise routine or a better eating regimen, why not start now?

Yoga is great for the brain, heart and bones. It can also boost your immunity, reduce chronic inflammation, gain more self-control and self-confidence. An additional bonus is it can also help manage stress. All it takes is 10 to 15 minutes a day. We found a great article on Practicing self- care with Yoga that is a quick and interesting read!

One more self-care suggestion…

Salt Baths are very beneficial for self-care. Salt detox baths are usually made of Epsom salt, which allows for minerals to “draw out” toxins from the body. Supporters often claim that soaking in an Epsom salt bath can remove harmful toxins and balance the body. Some claim it can help with weight management as well. The suggestion is to soak in an Epson salt bath for 12-20 minutes per day, 1-2 times per week, for the best results. We love adding essential oils, like lavender, along with Epson salt to baths for an extra boost of relaxation.

Remember all of those little projects that you set aside?

While enjoying the homebound life, we can tackle small projects around the house. For example, that “spring cleaning” of the closets, cabinets, refrigerator, garage (or as some of us call it the storage unit), etc. How does cleaning and organizing provide self-care? The act of cleaning itself has a positive phycological impact. Cleaning gives us a sense of control and accomplishment, which helps us better manage the ups and downs of life with a sense of resilience and self-confidence. Additionally, the simple activity and repetitive motions of washing dishes, mopping floors, or wiping down surfaces makes it easier for the mind to enter a focused and meditative state, temporarily relieving anxieties. In an October 2018 article published by VICE, Darby Saxbe, assistant professor of psychology at USC, said “[Cleaning] gives people a sense of mastery and control over their environment. Life is full of uncertainty and many situations are out of our hands, but at least we can assert our will on our living space, especially while being homebound.” If cleaning can lead to feeling in control of our personal destiny. Cleaning is Self-Care has an additional article for more information about how cleaning and doing projects around the house is beneficial.

We are all being called to do extraordinary things for the collective caring of our families, communities and the world in response to the unique coronavirus pandemic. Whether home bound or providing critical services, everyone is stretched to adapt like never before. All of us are in this together. Now more than ever, caring is what we need most. Caring for our self. Caring for others around us. Life is going to require new routines, resilience and compassion. We invite you to join us in creating a caring movement to respond to local needs.

Would you like to read more about UCA caring resources? We have other blogs on Unified Caring Association, caring in our communities, and caring the UCA way! If you would like caring messages throughout the week, follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter!

March 23, 2020

Proactive Mental Health

Each day can bring about new challenges. The trick is to maintain a healthy and active mind to that you are able to be more resilient through stressful moments. We at Unified Caring Association (UCA) strive to provide our members caring tools and resources for mental well-being. These resources can help us all be proactive with our mental health. To start, let’s look at why having a strong mind is important.

Emotions

Strengthening the mind is connected with improving our emotional intelligence. According to an article in the “Journal of Abnormal Psychology,” the successful route to take is to incorporate a “positive activity.” A positive activity is often an activity that a person enjoys doing, such as meditation or writing letters of gratitude. In this research article the authors, K. Layous, J. Chancellor, and S. Lyubomirsky, study the effects of positive activities on mental well-being. They state that “…promoting Well-Being can reduce negative emotions, negative thoughts, and negative behaviors.” Overall, maintaining happiness and a positive mental outlook leads to better physical health.

Memory

Our memories help shape us, our identities and our relationships. It goes without saying that our memories are very important to us all. There are tools to help strengthen our memory, such as UCA’s caring apps for memory fitness. Some of these apps are games that help build and strengthen our ability to recall information. Other apps can be puzzles to help with exercising the brain’s ability to problem solve. Other ideas that work well for us include learning a new language or musical instrument, as well as volunteering and socializing through acts of kindness. In conjunction with healthy nutrition and lifestyle, the mind is just like a muscle, it needs exercise in order to grow stronger and stay in shape.

When to seek help for memory loss…

“If you’re worried about memory loss — especially if memory loss affects your ability to complete your usual daily activities or if you notice your memory getting worse — talk to your doctor. He or she will likely do a physical exam, as well as check your memory and problem-solving skills. Sometimes other tests are needed as well. Treatment will depend on what’s contributing to your memory loss.” (Mayo Clinic)

Tips

There are many ways we can be proactive with our mental health. Being active in your community, sharing caring with others and yourself are some examples of working on your mental well-being. And as mentioned above, learning a language like Spanish or Japanese will streacha nd build your brain to be more resilient. Below are nine that we have come up with that can help strengthen our minds in different ways. Check them out to see how we all can build our mental health to be the best it can be!

Love our blogs and want to read more? Unified Caring Association has other caring blogs such as Advanced Directives of Peace of Mind, and Caring Challenge x 365 Days that inspire us all! We also share caring and inspirational posts daily on social media (Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter). Follow us to get a little extra caring in your day!

January 20, 2020

Lifetime Membership

Unified Caring Association (UCA) has been sharing caring news and resources with our members since 1987. We love supporting and sponsoring caring projects that reflect values that C.A.R.E. (Children, Animals, Reforestation, and Elderly). As we grow, we add more to our products and services, like our health and fitness tools, Caring Community online store, community resources, and scholarships! We are always listening to what our members are looking for most to select our next caring addition. This time, the addition is all about flexibility in membership options. We are proud to present the newest membership option: UCA’s Lifetime Membership.

Ask, Listen, and Receive

UCA’s new Lifetime Membership option is a response to our members’ changing needs through their adult life. When many members needed to reduce their benefit selection, we began asking if each member would prefer to remain a part of the membership community at a base level of benefits. The overwhelming answer was “YES!” So, we have introduced the new Lifetime Membership option to provide the flexibility to meet life’s needs and be as active as desired without worrying about monthly charges.

A great way to see if being a part of this quietly building caring community of over 150,000 people is with the basic $15 month-to-month membership. Members sign in to their secure area of UnifiedCaring.org to access a wide array of benefits. These benefits include: self-care, care for family and pets, community connections, savings on a vast array of online purchases, sponsorship of caring impactful projects, positive and inspiring news, and access to a whole bunch more benefits that keeps growing with members’ needs.

With society’s need to grow caring children, take care of our communities, and equally importantly to take of ourselves over a lifetime, the new Lifetime Membership option of a one-time $99.95 forever purchase. This lifetime membership keeps our members connected to the mission and benefits so needed today and tomorrow.

Our membership is diverse across the U.S. There is one thing common to the vast majority of those wanting to join and stay a part of the association. Our members want to find ways to live a healthier life and have an impact as a community to put caring into action. If they can do both plus receive assistance in reducing expenses or getting access to products and services with big savings, then “all the better value.”

Stop by UnifiedCaring.org and check out our membership benefits summaries. We hope to see you join our community soon.

We love sharing UCA caring news and resources, research, and caring acts in our community through our website and blogs. Or would like to receive more Unified Caring Association caring notes throughout the week? Follow us on: Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter! We are looking forward to sharing more with you, our caring community!

November 6, 2019 0

Tag: fitness

Lifetime Membership

Ask, Listen, and Receive

Stop by UnifiedCaring.org and check out our membership benefits summaries. We hope to see you join our community soon.

How to reach us: