Advice on Self-Care Ideas for Teachers #2
If you are a school teacher then “overwhelmed” is the word that best describes your life. A new study (April 2020) conducted by Yale showed school teachers are anxious, OVERWHELMED, and stressed. Overwhelmed by life and feeling overwhelmed at work. All the added stressors of teaching online are bringing on teacher burnout. That’s why it’s so important to share some advice about self-care that can help destress you teaching professionals.
Today, I am excited to be sharing some advice on self-care for teachers. I myself am not a school teacher, I am a mental health provider, who is married to a school teacher. My wife teaches teachers to teach, at the largest University in Utah. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Education Department, and she also has a second job creating science curriculum for school teachers on TPT (if you’re a teacher you know what TPT is).
Watching her work all summer to get her teaching material converted into a distance learning format has been an inspiration. But it also has been stressful seeing how overwhelmed she has been with all the new stressors with COVID. The advice I will be sharing comes a lot from her as I have watched her practice good self-care. And she has also been teaching these self-care ideas to her overwhelmed student teachers.
Hi, I am Brett R. Williams, psychotherapist and Chief Executive Director (CEO) of the Gathering. The Gathering of Good People is a nonprofit that is dedicated to helping you with personal growth and emotional healing. In addition to sharing mental health advice and free content we also provide support to anyone and everyone who needs help, through our self-care groups.
We are using this series of posts and podcasts to announce the start of a new teacher self-care group. Go to the gathering and register.
I would also love to hear in your comments what’s the most overwhelming part of your teaching world. And share your needs in terms of self-care for teachers.
I want to start my advice with a little self-understanding. Before writing this post I looked online to see what other people were writing about self-care ideas, and particularly about self-care for school teachers. A lot of it was lists of ideas about how to destress, but they were mainly things you know you should do but don’t.
“Read a good book, take a hot bath, and do a yoga class.” Were some self-care ideas I read. These are all good things, but if you aren’t doing them now, I am not sure how me telling you to “stop and smell the flowers”, is really going to make you stop.
My advice, focuses on helping you create a greater understanding of yourself and then providing tools to help with your feelings of being overwhelmed. To destress is to remove or mitigate the effects of stress in your life. And you need to understand stress and understand yourself in order to do that. A to-do-list of “self-care ideas” is not going to promote understanding.
Also know this is not going to be one single post, but a series of self-care blogs, and podcasts. As I was looking at self-care ideas I could see that this is far too large an idea to cover in one single superficial post.
In fact, this is the second one in the series. The opening post and podcast was called, Self-Care for Teachers. The first episode touched on the idea that self-care is self-love. And as I shared from my book, You Can Be Right Or You Can Be Married, love is defined as attention. Therefore, self-love and self-care happen when you give yourself some attention throughout the day. Please check that blog out as well.
In today’s self-care post for school teachers, I want to start with the ideas of HOW. How do you show self-love or self-care with your attention? Specifically, you are going to learn how to self-care by changing your thinking.
There are three essentials that make up the quality of your life. By understanding the three essentials of your life, you will understand what you need to change in order to deal with your overwhelmed feelings and destress from your day.
The three essentials that make up the quality of your life are:
- Thinking– What you think about your life is more important than what happens in your life.
- Habits– What you do each day sets habits, which forms your daily experiences, and forms the quality of your life.
- Community– Who you spend time with influences who you are. And when you isolate that affects the quality of your life as well.
You are what you think about each day, what you do each day, and the company you keep or don’t keep, during the day. By understanding these, you’ll understand the advice, and self-care ideas I will be sharing to help you destress.
From these three essentials, I will be sharing in all my self-care ideas. The first will focus on changing your thinking, because “you are what you meditate upon”.
The first of our self-care ideas will be to adjust or recalibrate your Think-a-rater. I have a YouTube video that may better explain this process, but here’s a short version. Everything you think about, you give it a level of importance. This is how you decide what thoughts to focus on and which ones to let go of.
I use a 0 to 10 scale. Zero means a thought or a stressor is small and insignificant. You notice your shoe is untied during the day. You don’t think twice about your shoe, you tie it and then move on. And a 10 would be something that’s of huge importance, such as the death of a friend or family member. If you have lost someone you live in your life, you know you don’t just stop thinking about them. That person is on your mind all the time. Such a loss is hugely significant.
The problem with a miscalibrated think-a-rater is that it rates everything as a ten. Every thought and situation is seen as a kind of life or death event. This kind of thinking puts your stress levels off the chart. Every thought becomes overwhelming because everything in your life is given huge importance.
Living with Lynda, my wife/the school teacher, I can see the importance she puts on everything she does. She brings excellence to every task. She always brings her best to all she does.
This can be a wonderful trait until such high importance begins to stress you out, your own thinking becomes a huge stressor. When you can do your best, and you have the time and energy to do all your tasks with excellence, then do it.
But what happens when you don’t have enough time, energy, or emotional bandwidth to do your very best at everything? This is when your thinking needs to be adjusted or you will become overwhelmed.
If you want to live within your budget, you would have to balance what you want with what you can afford. My mom always had champagne tastes but she lived on a beer budget. She loved having the best, but she didn’t have a lot of money. When she spent more than she could afford it created a stressor in her life in the form of not enough money for the other things she needed in life, like paying rent, food, and other essentials.
My mom’s thinking often got confused between “what she wanted and what she needed.” And if she could adjust her desires from “needs” to” just wants” she would overspend. This would be an example of calibrating her think-a-rater.
When she saw a nice pair of shoes and thought of them as a 10, an essential, she had to buy them. However, if she could adjust her thinking and see the shoes as a 2 (not a 10), then she could better see the shoes as a want.
The same adjustments need to be made to your thinking around school and teaching. It would be nice to treat every project as essential and to bring your best to every aspect of your job. However, that has to be balanced with how much time and energy you have. You have to love yourself and consider you as a limited and precious commodity.
Your needs must be considered as you evaluate the demands of the job. When the two are in balance, you are in a good place. When you are not valued, you are a one on your think-a-rater, and the demands of the job are a ten, then you will become stressed, distressed, and overwhelmed because your resources (you) are not in balance with the demands of your job.
Self-care for school teachers can start with you valuing yourself. You are a resource that needs to be protected and conserved because you have value. Self-care in your thinking means you are bringing attention (which is love) to your own needs, and balancing that with the needs and demands of others.
Self-care for teachers can be doing things for yourself, like reading a book or taking a bubble bath. It is good to feed your needs. However, self-care can also come in the form of thinking about your resources and not prioritizing others over yourself. Perhaps you can choose not to take one more professional development course or leave that bulletin board or Google Classroom banner up for one more week.
To learn more, please come to the gathering of good people. And I want you to consider joining a teacher’s self-care group. By making time to come and gather and grow you are feeding yourself what you need, and making yourself a priority. Destress your distress by connecting to other school teachers.