Let’s Talk About Teacher Burnout

Education as a profession is basically the only social service that doesn’t require credentialing some way to process stress and trauma. Educators are expected to go for as long as 30 years with absolutely nothing to help them process stress and trauma; and they hold a lot of vicarious trauma for the students and families they serve. 

It’s highly likely that you felt more stressed than usual during these uncertain times and also felt that there was very little you could do about it. Taking control of your own well-being is vital for teachers, and in these extraordinary times it’s even more important than ever.

What Is Teacher Burnout?

Psychology Today describes burnout as “a state of chronic stress that leads to physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, detachment, and feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.” Teacher burnout can affect any teacher, regardless of how experienced or passionate they are about their jobs. Burnout is one of the most common reasons that teachers are leaving their profession, and it contributes to the increased teacher turnover rate in the past few years. K–12 in particular is known for high teacher burnout rates, and finding ways to prevent or combat burnout is a key current issue in early education.

First of all, one must recognize what it feels like to be in a state of burnout. So, if you’re not really sure of what that’s like, often it just ranges from a huge feeling of overwhelm and guilt from not being able to do everything you need to do or meet deadlines, to feeling exhausted and tired and lethargic, to procrastinating and being unmotivated, or to being completely negative and complaining all the time.

One of the key signs that you start to notice when you are reaching that point of burnout is that all of your routines and your habits have gone out the window: you’re not sleeping well, you’re not eating properly, you’re not seeing your friends or family, and you’re not looking after yourself. Sometimes, when you don’t have a good mattress, a good night’s sleep can be elusive. Your whole night’s sleep can be partially determined by your bed, so it is important to find the best mattresses in Australia, (or amending this search to your local area) to let your body fully rest and relax at night.

Reaching burnout is a long process and there are definitely signs along the way. So, just sit down and have a little bit of a reflection moment. Think about what your tendencies are, do you tend to complain, what is it that you struggle with, do you forget to eat or can you not fall asleep?

Once you start to recognize what it’s like for you personally to start to feel that you are tired and that you’re starting to approach that stage, it’s the most important to recognize it because then you’re able to do something about it.

What Are The Signs and Symptoms Of Teacher Burnout?

Let’s look at some signs of burnout. Ask yourself:

– have you become cynical or critical at work?

– do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started?

– have you become irritable or impatient with colleagues, students and parents?

– do you lack the energy to be consistently productive?

– do you find it hard to concentrate?

– do you take satisfaction from your achievements?

– do you feel disillusioned about your work?

– are you using food, drugs or alcohol to feel better or to simply not feel?

– have your sleep habits changed?

– are you troubled by unexplained headaches, stomach or bowel problems or other physical complaints?

If the symptoms above sound too familiar, you are likely experiencing burnout. You might also be likely to experience job burnout if you identify so strongly with work that you lack balance between your work life and your personal life. If you have a high workload, which all teachers do at the moment, that you try to be everything to everyone, if you feel you have little or no control over your work, and if you feel like your job is monotonous, ignored or unaddressed, job burnout can have significant consequences: excessive stress, fatigue, insomnia, sadness, anger and irritability, alcohol or substance misuse, as well as a range of other physical illnesses.

What Really Causes Teacher Burnout?

Here are some of the causes of teacher burnout:

1. A perceived lack of control. This is an inability to influence decisions that affect your job, such as your schedule, your assignments or workload, and these can lead to burnout. So can the lack of resources you need to do your work. Teachers feeling a lack of control tend to not see a clear connection between effort and payoff in teaching. They do not feel influential in their educational environment and believe that luck and not personal effort plays a large role in the fate of their profession. They are also more likely to experience anxiety and feelings of low degree of influence on policies and issues that affect them in their day-to-day routine.
2. Unclear job expectations. If you’re unclear about the degree of authority you have or what your principal or others expect from you, you’re not likely to feel comfortable at work.
3. Dysfunctional workplace dynamics. Perhaps you work with an office bully or you feel undermined by colleagues or your boss micromanages your work.  This can severely contribute to job stress. Many laws exist to protect the rights of employees and safeguard them against this kind of behavior. Click here to find how to seek legal advice.
4. Extreme activity. When a job is monotonous, not like teaching is but chaotic, which it is at the moment, you need constant energy to remain focused. That can lead to fatigue and job burnout.
5. Work-life imbalance. If your work takes up so much of your time and effort, that you don’t have any energy to spend time with your family and friends, the likelihood of you burning out quickly is much higher.

How To Avoid Teacher Burnout

Here are some tips on how to stay in control of your life and work, and not let stress and burnout get the better of you:

• Stay healthy. The first step to avoiding teacher burnout is to stay healthy first and foremost. Regular exercise helps your mind deal with anxiety, depression, and even advanced illnesses like Parkinson’s disease. Obviously, it also helps your body stay in shape. The more you exercise, the more you’ll also get better sleep when you go to bed every night. That means you get to wake up and go into the classroom rejuvenated and ready to go every single morning. When you combine these two things with eating healthy plenty of leafy greens, complex carbohydrates and other nutritional foods, you have a winning combination to stay healthy, even when you’re facing your most stressful times of the school year.

• Find time for yourself. As a teacher, your personal time is limited; this goes double if you’re a parent or a head of household in your personal life. It’s so important for you to find time for yourself, and you can do that by developing or rediscovering the hobbies that you used to have before work got so hectic and almost took over your life. When you discover what hobbies help you relax, you’re able to come home from a crazy thing in the classroom and unwind for a little bit of time to make sure that you can handle whatever is on the horizon.

• Share the load. It’s essential that you find time to talk to your colleagues. No one understands your challenges or frustrations more than other teachers. Plus, workplace friendships have a laundry list of benefits including long-term career satisfaction. Also, relationships are two-way streets; so, when you have a workplace relationship, it’s a great way to help your other colleagues keep the passion alive and prevent burning out themselves.

• Prepare ahead of time. Prepare all of your lessons, activities, and curriculum way ahead of time. When you work ahead of the curve, you free up a lot of your time to help students. Attend to your personal life and avoid the dreaded Sunday blues that are affecting so many teachers today. If you have all of your things ready to go ahead of time, you can enter Monday ready to go, prepared to execute, and don’t have to worry about getting anything done last-minute.

• Give some credit to yourself. You’ve chosen to pursue a career that’s predicated on helping others. As a result, it’s hard to find time to recognize what you do well yourself. This is important, because it can help keep the passion alive for teaching that you’ve had for your entire career. A lot of teachers do this by keeping a daily journal about how classes go every single day. Then they can look back on that journal and see what they did well and what they need to improve upon for the coming year.

• Leave school at school. It may be tempting to take school work home with you, but when you draw a line in the sand, you respect your boundaries and you respect your own time. So, this way you can attend to your family, friends, hobbies, and more. Take some time for yourself, you’ve earned it.

Developing Healthy Habits

Looking after your well-being is a long-term goal. It is essential to develop some healthy habits that will keep you strong and focused, and will let you perform at your best.

1. Better time management. Often, we only really plan the big tasks that we need to do on a daily basis, for example, the lessons you need to teach, and any preparation and marking you need to do. However, being a teacher, there are hundreds of little things that we have to do on a weekly basis, and carving out time to do those things can often be missed. So, if you’re not fully aware of what those things are or how long those things take you to do, start to take note of everything that you’ve been doing throughout the day, and also start to time yourself how long it takes you to do certain tasks. That way you can start to make really informed decisions of planning in your diary for specific chunks of time that you need to allocate to each task. In addition, leave about an hour worth of time each day, where you can do anything that was unplanned, because as teachers were always dealing with unforeseen situations.
2. Leave work on time. Have at least one day in the work week where you leave work on time. It certainly is so difficult as a teacher, but it’s also a little bit of a pause moment, that helps you just check in with yourself and distract yourself with anything you’d like to do. So, whatever it is that you want to do or when it is that you want to do, just make sure that you have an evening a week where you’re not really doing work, and you have a little bit of time for yourself.
3. Plan in a rest day. Have at least one day in the whole week where it’s a no-work, complete rest day. This is so important to make sure that you do every week, so that you are able to restore your energy and get ready for the week ahead of you. How you choose to spend that day is completely up to you, but make sure that you get outside, spend some quality time with friends and family, and also spend some time with yourself doing a hobby that you really enjoy doing.
4. Schedule some fun. Get some fun stuff scheduled into your personal diary. This can be anything, from theater tickets, cinema tickets, plays, musicals, concerts, whatever it is that you like to do. Or it can be things that don’t really cost money, it can be scheduling some well-deserved time with yourself or time going to a gym or doing some exercise classes or time with your friends or any other hobby that you like to do. So, just look at your calendar and just carve out pockets of time throughout the next weeks or months even. Sometimes you know a year ahead of a holiday that you’re looking forward to or specific evening out that you’ve scheduled to spend time with yourself or with friends and family.
5. Exercise. Make sure that you move and that you get some fresh air. It’s so important to exercise, whether that means going to an exercise class or a gym or just getting outside. What matters is that you are moving your body and that you’re looking after your body. As teachers, we often forget what it’s like to be outside, we forget to go for a walk or get a bit of fresh air. It’s so important to do that; you feel much more accomplished, oxygen is flowing throughout your body, and endorphins are being released. So, definitely prioritize exercising, as it’s going to make you feel so much better.
6. Establish a home routine. It’s so important to make sure that you’ve got a morning routine and an evening routine down, waking up at similar times, going to bed, making sure that you eat properly.  Also make sure that you’ve got some really nice cozy spots where you get to snuggle with a book or spend time with your kids or partner. Make sure you’ve got personal routines down, because when times get tough, it’s those routines that are going to help you feel that you’ve got a space where you can feel safe and relaxed. So, make sure that you prioritize eating and sleeping, and then add anything else to the mix that’s going to make you happy and relaxed, so that you are able to do the best work you can do.
7. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Make sure that you don’t make a big deal out of everything. There will definitely be pressure points throughout the academic year, where you’re going to have lots of deadlines and a huge workload. At that point, make sure that you think about when those things are, and also spend a little bit more time getting ready for those things. During those stressful periods, it’s always common to exchange some comments with colleagues and perhaps complain. It is absolutely fine and normal to feel that way and to want to empathize with other people, but instead of using that as an opportunity to be more negative, be more positive and encouraging. So, lift yourself up and lift your colleagues around you up as well, and encourage each other.

If you have that mindset and that attitude, then those things that are overwhelming will feel like a breeze and you will be able to overcome any obstacles that come your way.