Teaching is hard, and teacher self care is necessary. Underpaid and overworked – that’s how it is for most teachers, the work they do is amazing. In order to be the best they can be, teachers need to be taken care of. They need the tools to take care of themselves, and they need to be supported by a community around them. If you are a teacher, take these tips below and use them to stay healthy and happy in your teaching career.
Remember, taking care of yourself is not selfish; it enables you to be the best teacher you can be. Prioritizing self-care promotes longevity, passion, and fulfillment in your teaching career. Take a look at these categories to see how you can combat the stressors of working in education.
Keep a healthy work-life balance
The first thing you need to do is decide what a “healthy” balance looks like for you. Some people prefer to keep a strict divide between work and their personal lives. Others don’t mind having a bit of overlap. It’s up to you to decide what feels right at this time in your life.
Often, a work-life balance includes taking breaks and intentionally unplugging from work. Teachers usually need to work past their official hours to get everything done. That is why teacher self care is so important. Even with the extra work, you need to make time to unplug. Set aside an hour each day, just for you. You can take that time to sleep, work out, indulge in a hobby that you enjoy, etc. Whatever it is, make sure that it makes you feel good.
In addition, you can prioritize exercise for a better work-life balance. Exercise reduces anxiety, depression, and negative moods in general. Teaching is a stressful occupation, and exercise is one of the best ways to combat that stress.
While there is no perfect work-life balance, investing in relationships outside of the workplace can help a lot. It can be tough to make non-work friends, but having them provides an escape from the daily grind. As mentioned before, exercise is great for your mental health. Going to a gym or joining an exercise group is also a fantastic way to make new friends. There’s no shame in using the internet to find groups that you may be interested in joining, such as a book club or local sports team. There, you will find people who share your interests and are also likely looking for new friends.
Exercise regularly
Exercise is great for anyone with a stressful occupation like teaching. Working out even just a few minutes a day can make you feel happier and contributes to your long-term health.
Working out consistently results in the release of many types of “happy hormones” and chemicals in your body. Endorphins, dopamine, adrenaline, and endocannabinoids are all released at different stages of a workout. Each of these brain chemicals make you feel happier, more confident, less anxious, and can even reduce feelings of physical pain.
When you work out consistently, there are a ton of long-term benefits. Exercise is proven to improve your memory and reduces the risk of many common diseases, such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. Your balance and coordination are likely to be better if your work out consistently. Strength training exercises are also proven to improve your bone strength, protecting you from injury as you get older.
Although you might be tempted to rest after a long day on your feet, exercise can actually make you feel more energized. It’s counter-intuitive, but true. Regular exercise also makes it easier for you to fall asleep and get the rest you need every day.
Prioritize sleep
Sleep is crucial for teacher self care. Not only is it important for the maintenance of your mental performance at work, but the protection of your body as well. If teachers don’t get enough sleep, they’re more likely to be forgetful and unfocused at work. Not only are you impacted by your lack of rest, but your student are too. When you are exhausted, you’re also bound to be more irritable. Try to get 8 hours of sleep each day, and your friends and family will benefit as well.
When you’re surrounded by hundreds of students every day, it’s easy to get sick. Teachers often struggle with constant illness, especially during their first few years in the classroom. You’re even more likely to get sick when you don’t sleep enough. A lack of sleep means that your body’s immune system will not be able to protect you as well as it should. Studies show that people who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to get sick after coming into contact with a virus. That’s why you need to sleep more when you do fall ill – so you have enough energy that your immune system can fight off the virus.
Nurture your relationships outside of work
Relationships are essential to successful teacher self care. From friendships to romantic relationships, they all play a part in having a healthy and happy life. We all crave companionship, and it’s important to put effort into maintaining those relationships over time.
The people you spend the most time with shape who you become. They determine what you spend your time doing after work, what you talk about, and even your perspective on the world. Take a minute to think about who you spend the most time with. Do you like how they view the world and how they spend their time? Do you want to be more like them? It’s important to surround yourself with people that inspire and encourage you to become better and happier every day.
A great way to make new friends outside of work is to find a “Third Place”. This is the place that you will spend most of your time, aside from the top two – your workplace and your home. Personally, my third place is my climbing gym. Rock climbers like to hang out for hours at a time, and my gym has tons of areas where you can lounge around and chat. You can go work out and then spend time with your friends at the gym – or even make new friends! Another incredibly popular third place is a local coffeeshop. You can grab a snack and be there for hours. Some coffeeshops even have board games for this reason – to be the place where people want to spend their time and relax.
Practice mindfulness and relaxation techniques
As a teacher, it’s unlikely that everything will go to plan every day. You are constantly required to adjust and go with the flow. New requirements, a lack of supplies, changes to the lesson plan – all good reasons to be stressed out. There are techniques for relaxation and mindfulness that can really help your teacher self care. There are many popular breathing practice you can find online, like the 4-7-8 method or box breathing. Pick one and test it out when you feel the need to relax.
You can practice mindfulness anywhere, even during your teaching day. If you find a spare moment, use it to breathe. Take deep breaths and focus on the present moment. The 54321 grounding technique may be useful as a way to recenter. Find 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear around you, 2 things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. This is a great exercise for sorting through anxious thoughts and refocusing on whatever you’d like.
If you find it difficult to guide yourself through relaxation practices, you can always go to a yoga class, get a massage, or find a video online. Everyone needs help to combat anxiety, and everyone can find the way that works best for them. It might take a bit of experimentation, but then you’ll have all the tools in your belt when you need them.
Set boundaries
At the beginning of your teaching career, you’ll quickly realize the important of setting boundaries. Both inside and outside of the classroom, boundaries will make things much simpler and easier overall. Boundaries will help you maintain a healthy work-home balance, and they will help your students to feel comfortable in your classroom.
It can be incredibly easy to let your job bleed into your personal life. From after-school parent phone calls to late-night grading deadlines, it can get exhausting to have to keep fighting for your own time. Setting boundaries can make this a great deal easier. First, message the parents and let them know of your on-call hours. It’s best to do this at the beginning of the school year, but never too late to adjust. This way, you can make sure the parents feel heard and know when they will hear back from you, but you also get designated time without being disturbed. Next, set a time when you will stop working every day – no matter what. There is always more to do at school, and the deadlines will never stop coming. You need to set boundaries, and that is a healthy and rational thing to do.
When setting rules and routines in the classroom, make them non-negotiable. The sooner your students understand what’s expected of them, the more smoothly things will go. Of course, it’s understandable if you need to tweak a few expectations as you see them take action in real life, but ideally nothing huge will change throughout the school year. Stick to your own rules with no exceptions, and your students will find it easier to interact with the environment you have created.
Seek support at work
There’s nothing more useful to a teacher than supportive coworkers and administrative staff. Having communicative and empathetic relationships with your colleagues can reduce your stress and make things easier at work for you in general.
Don’t be afraid of asking questions at work. If you’re not understanding something or in need of assistance, asking is the only way to get help. Your administrators would be wise to prioritize their teachers. Teacher are the backbone of every successful school. That’s why teacher self care is so crucial. By asking for help, you are demonstrating how your admin can best take care of you throughout the school year. Each teacher has their own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s the administrative staff’s job to support you each according to your own needs.
In order to manage your classroom and teach effectively, you need to be taking care of yourself first. It can be difficult to set boundaries between work and your personal life, especially in education. You will often be asked to come in on the weekends or stay late after school, with the ever-present phrase “do it for the kids” lingering in the air. It’s important to remind yourself that you cannot effectively help your students if you don’t help yourself first.
Yes, you can stay late or go in on the weekends if you feel strongly enough about the cause. However, if you take a mind-body check and discover that you really need that time to recover and be ready to teach the next day, take that time for yourself. It is not selfish – it’s actually the opposite. Without this time to recover, your students will have an exhausted and overworked teacher the next morning.
Use self-reflection to track your progress
Self-reflection can be a great way to make sure your self care strategies are actually working. By looking back and evaluating the effect of your efforts, you can see what works in relieving stress in your life and what does not. It is difficult to find a work-life balance that works. This is especially true because there is no solution that works for everyone. Just because your coworker finds balance by going to the gym every day after work doesn’t mean you have to do the same. Experiment, reflect, and reset to cultivate your ideal teacher self care routine.
Let’s say that every day you get into the classroom at 7:00 in the morning. You have been feeling tired and broken down, even at the beginning of your day, and you want that to change. Maybe you set some boundaries with work in order to get enough rest each day. That would be the self care strategy that you’re trying out. After a week or so, you need to reflect. Have your feelings each morning changed? Do you feel better or worse since you made the change? Do you want to do any further tweaking to your routine, or do you want to focus on creating a habit? All of these questions will help you with self-reflection as a way to track your progress.
Take breaks and go on vacation
When it comes to teacher self care on break, there are two ways to go about it. You can work on your routine to incorporate regular breaks into your schedule, or you can focus on planning a longer vacation. Both are useful for resting and recharging after a long stint of hard work.
To plan small breaks throughout your day, make sure they will actually leave you feeling better than before you took the break. Many people choose to use their lunch break to scroll through social media or respond to emails. However, staring at a screen during your break is likely to leave you feeling more tired and stressed out rather than rested and ready to work. Try to pick a more positive activity instead. You can do something creative, get moving, nourish your body, or socialize to feel more productive and motivated when you’re finished.
One major benefit of teaching is that you typically will have more time off than someone working in a corporate job. Working in the United States, you may get Thanksgiving Break, Christmas, Spring Break, and Summer all to rest and recuperate until classes resume. This is fantastic, but you need to make sure not to let prep work get in the way of your break time. It can be easy to feel pressured to catch up on grading papers or preparing lesson plans, but breaks are crucial to make sure that you don’t experience burnout.
Practice self-compassion
Above all of these teacher self care strategies, self-compassion has served me the most. This means talking to yourself in a kind way, and acknowledging how hard you work as a teacher. You truly deserve to feel rested and to have fun outside of work. Teaching is a hard job, and you show up. That’s one of the biggest wins you can have as a teacher – just keep showing up for your students. Be the best version of yourself possible in the classroom, which means taking care of yourself before anyone else. You cannot take care of dozens of students when you’re not taken care of yourself.
When you feel overwhelmed by stressors in your life, take a self-compassion break. Acknowledge what is causing you stress, and then remind yourself that it is natural to be stressed. Anxiety is deeply human, and problems are a part of life. It’s okay to feel this way, and you are not alone. Lastly, speak to yourself as you would a friend. Pick a comforting and encouraging phrase that would help you move past the anxious feelings and into a more positive mindset for the rest of your day.
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