I see it all the time at my practice. A daughter comes in with a back injury. She's been lifting her father in and out of bed for six months. She thought she was doing fine. Then one day her back gave out, and now she can't care for him at all.

Most caregivers don't realise how much they're putting on their body until something goes wrong. The reaching, the bending, the half-lifting at awkward angles, it adds up. Your body keeps quiet until it doesn't.

Three things I tell every caregiver who comes through my clinic:

First, when you lift someone, use your legs, not your back. Bend your knees, keep your back straight. It feels slower at first. Do it anyway. The injury you don't get this year is the year of caregiving you don't lose next year.

Second, pay attention to early signs. Persistent back pain. Numbness. A sharp twinge that comes and goes. These aren't normal parts of caregiving. They're your body telling you something needs to change.

Third, your wellbeing is not optional. I know how that sounds when you're already running on fumes. But the math is simple: if you go down, who looks after them?

Looking after yourself isn't selfish. It's how you keep showing up.

I used to think caregiving was about pushing through. I was caring for my father, holding a job, trying to be a husband. I treated tiredness like a weakness. If I just kept going, I told myself, I'd get through it.

I was wrong.

What I didn't see is that sleeping four hours a night for months on end doesn't make you stronger. It makes you brittle. I'd snap at my dad. I'd forget appointments. I'd lose hours staring at my phone because my brain was too tired to do anything else.

The turning point was when I realised caregiving is a marathon, not a sprint. You can run flat-out for a week. You can't run flat-out for two years.

Here's what I do differently now:

I sleep when I can. Even if it's twenty minutes on the sofa after lunch.

I let myself say "I need help" out loud. To my siblings. To my friends. To anyone who'll listen.

I stopped treating my own needs like an inconvenience. Hunger is information. Tiredness is information. So is sadness. I pay attention to it now.

If you're caring for someone, really caring for them, day after day, you have to care for yourself too. Not because it's nice. Because if you don't, you can't keep going.

My father's heart stopped for twelve minutes.

I was at work when the call came. By the time I got to the hospital, the doctors had got him back, but everything was different. He couldn't speak. He couldn't eat on his own. He needed round-the-clock care.

I'm a financial planner. I spend my days helping people prepare for the unexpected. But when it happened to me, I realised something most of us never want to face: I hadn't planned for this. Not really.

I had insurance. I had savings. What I didn't have were the conversations.

I didn't know what my father wanted if he couldn't speak for himself. I didn't know how he felt about long-term care, or about being kept alive by machines, or about who should make decisions for him. We'd never talked about any of it.

In the months that followed, my family had to figure all of that out under the worst possible circumstances. Every decision felt heavy because we were guessing.

Here's what I now tell every family I work with:

Have the hard conversations early. Not because you expect the worst. Because if it happens, you don't want to be making guesses in the hospital corridor.

Make sure there's enough insurance to cover months of unexpected care, not just hospital bills.

Build a small emergency fund that's separate from your main savings. So if something happens tomorrow, you're not paying for it from your retirement.

And talk to your siblings now. About who'll do what. About who can take time off. About what each of you can give. So you're not figuring it out in a crisis.

Financial planning isn't really about money. It's about giving your family a clearer path through the worst moments, so the love you have for each other doesn't have to compete with logistics.