There’s a particular kind of dread that comes with an unexpected call from a parent’s phone number. Your stomach drops before you even answer. Is this the call? Most of the time it isn’t — it’s a question about a prescription, or a complaint about a neighbor’s dog. But your body doesn’t know that until you pick up.
If you’re caring for an aging parent and also living with anxiety, you’re managing two jobs that pull in opposite directions. One asks you to stay calm, organized, and steady for someone who’s relying on you. The other is your own nervous system, which may have strong opinions about staying calm that it refuses to share with you in advance.
The role reversal nobody prepares you for
Somewhere along the way, you became the one who remembers the medication schedule, calls the doctor’s office, and makes the decisions your parent used to make for you. This shift can happen gradually or all at once, and either way it tends to stir up feelings that are hard to name — grief, resentment, tenderness, and fear, often in the same hour.
For someone with anxiety, this kind of ambiguous, ongoing responsibility is especially hard to sit with. Anxiety tends to want clear answers and defined endings. Caregiving rarely offers either. There’s no finish line to work toward, just a long stretch of uncertainty punctuated by appointments, test results, and small changes that might mean something or might mean nothing.
Waiting is its own kind of work
A lot of the anxiety in caregiving doesn’t happen during the crisis — it happens in the waiting beforehand. Waiting for the specialist to call back. Waiting to see if the new medication helps. Waiting through a hospital stay to find out what happens next. These stretches can be harder on the body than the actual bad news, because the mind keeps rehearsing every possible version of it. If this sounds familiar, the waiting period before test results often works the same way, whether the results belong to you or to someone you love.
It can help to notice when you’ve slipped into rehearsing worst-case scenarios on a loop, and to gently redirect your attention to something concrete in front of you — a task, a conversation, the actual present moment, which is usually calmer than the one your mind is imagining.
Guilt shows up uninvited
Anxiety and guilt often travel together in caregiving. You worry you’re not doing enough, visiting enough, calling enough. You also worry about the moments you feel impatient or exhausted, as if having limits makes you a worse son or daughter. Neither of these worries is evidence of anything except that you’re a person with a finite amount of energy trying to do something genuinely difficult.
It’s worth separating the guilt your mind generates from any actual gap in care. Most of the time, the gap exists only in the anxious story you’re telling yourself about what a “good” adult child would do, a story that rarely matches what’s realistic or even kind to expect of yourself.
The body keeps score too
Caregiving stress doesn’t only live in your thoughts. It shows up as tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, trouble sleeping, or a stomach that’s been unsettled for weeks without a clear cause. These are worth paying attention to rather than writing off as just part of the deal. Physical symptoms of anxiety often get mistaken for something else entirely when they show up during a stretch of caregiving.
You’re not the only one in this
If you have siblings or other family involved, caregiving can surface old patterns — who’s seen as responsible, who gets to opt out, who feels unseen for the work they’re doing. These dynamics are rarely just about logistics. A conversation with a family therapist can sometimes untangle what’s really going on underneath the arguments about who drove Mom to her appointment last week, and family therapy can be useful even when the anxious person isn’t the one in the caregiving role.
It also helps to say plainly, to a sibling or a friend, that you’re carrying more than you can hold alone. Anxiety has a way of convincing people that asking for help is itself a burden on others. Most of the time, the people around you would rather know than watch you quietly struggle.
Small permissions
You’re allowed to let the phone go to voicemail sometimes. You’re allowed to feel relief when a visit ends. You’re allowed to care deeply about your parent’s wellbeing and still need your own evenings back. None of that makes you less devoted — it makes you a person doing a hard, unglamorous job with a nervous system that’s working overtime, and giving yourself a little room doesn’t take anything away from the care you’re providing.
