Why Summer is the Best Time for Teachers to Go to Therapy

Summer is finally here (at least it is where I am in Alberta, Canada). I remember how chaotic June felt as a teacher - somehow it was always busier than any other month of the school year. Time seemed to slow down rather than speed up the closer we got to the end. I always kept a countdown of how many days it was until July 1st. If I could make it to the finish line, then I knew I would finally be able to catch my breath, take a real break, and enjoy time spent away from working.

Summer is obviously a great time to rest, recharge, and get back to feeling like yourself (at least for a few weeks before you have to start thinking about starting to plan and prepare for the fall). For teachers, summer can also be the perfect time to start working with a therapist or to increase the frequency of your sessions. This might seem counterintuitive. Work is often the largest stressor on a teacher’s plate, so why would they need therapy when the work aspect is on pause? However, as someone who has experienced that stress as a teacher and now supports educators to manage stress, I believe summer is the perfect time for teachers to dive into therapy. Here are a few reasons why:

You can address the stress from the year that you’re carrying in your body. There is a difference between stress and stressors (I have a whole blog post about it - read more here). Stress is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter a real or perceived threat (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2019). Stressors are what activates the stress responses, and they can be sensory, external, and internal causes. Work is an example of an external stressor. Just because the stressor itself has ended does not mean that you have dealt with the stress itself. If you’re like most teachers I know, you’ve been working in conditions that cause chronic stress. You may be feeling these effects in your body – they often show up as symptoms that impact your appetite or eating, sleep, energy levels, and emotions. Working with a therapist can help you to understand more about the effects of chronic stress on your body. Learning how to deal with your school year stress in the summer can help you create a plan for managing it better when you return to work in the fall.

You need support to process a challenging year. When we are living through chaotic or stressful situations, we don’t often have the luxury to pause in the moment and deal with what’s happening. It is after we have survived the crisis that we have the emotional space or energy to circle back to address the challenges we have experienced. A therapist can help you making meaning of and process the challenges of your year, to bring closure to them. I offer workshops and groups about processing and bringing closure to the year for this exact reason. Having a safe space to acknowledge and validate the things about your school year that were difficult can be an important part of the healing process. A therapist can help you with this important work.

You have better emotional availability to explore your needs. Teachers often tell me that summer is when they feel most like themselves. Without the stressors of work on their plates, educators finally have time to connect with others, themselves, and nature; to travel; or to get to those hobbies and activities they haven’t had time to do during the school year. All of these things contribute to a state of wellness. Wellness is “the freedom to move fluidly through the cycles of being human. Wellness is thus not a state of being; it is a state of action” (Nagoski & Nagoski, 2019). Being in a state of wellness and feeling good can be an important starting point for therapy, or addressing things you don’t have the capacity to touch when you’re surviving the chaos of a stressful year. For example, I use EMDR which is a form of non-talk trauma therapy. This work can be intense and often heightens clients’ emotional sensitivity for a few days after processing. Teacher clients may not have the luxury of time to do this type of work throughout the year. Summer is a great time to do some intensive work without the challenges of having to tend to students’ needs at the same time so that you can prioritize your own emotional and mental health needs.

You have the time to build new habits that you can carry into the fall. Without the busyness and stress of teaching on your plate, you are in a great position to make changes or build habits that will increase your overall wellness. It can be helpful to use your summer downtime to identify what your needs or what helps increase your wellness when you aren’t chronically busy or stressed. Maybe you notice that weekly coffee dates with your friend, regularly playing a loved sport, or taking time to engage in your favourite hobby make you feel like your best self. Play, exercise, creativity, and social connection are all things that humans need regularly to feel rested and rejuvenated. Identifying these activities in the summer when you have more time for them can give you information about what is important to continue doing in the fall. A therapist can help you to prioritize those non-negotiables to that they’re built into your life and schedule when the busyness starts up again in the fall.

Adding therapy to your summer self-care list can be an important way to not only get back to feeling like yourself, but to set yourself up for a successful return to work. Do any of these points resonate with you? I’d love to support you! I’m accepting new Alberta clients for in-person and virtual sessions. Book a free consult to learn more, or book an individual counselling session here: https://york-psychology.janeapp.com/#staff_member/1

What Is Anxiety and How Can I Handle It? New Perspectives

Let's talk about anxiety! One of the therapeutic lenses that I practice from is Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). This model has a great tool called the Change Triangle that comes from AEDP therapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel's work - the information in this post is a small snapshot of this concept. You can find her work here - highly recommend giving it a read.

Let’s talk about emotions

In a nutshell, humans have 7 core emotions: joy, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, excitement, and sexual excitement. They are typically experienced as physical sensations in the body. Core emotions are adaptive and provide us with the information we need to know about our environment so that we can survive but also thrive. Thriving is when we are wholehearted and connected to ourselves - which occurs when we are able to feel our emotions and use the information they give us for our betterment.

 What is anxiety?

Sometimes, we are unable to fully experience our core emotions, and that's where anxiety comes in. Often times, it shows up to protect us from being overwhelmed by strong emotions. This can be adaptive, like when you are at work and cannot afford to ride the wave of anger or sadness in the moment. The problem comes if we never dip below the anxiety to engage with those core emotions and let them run their course. We can get stuck in feeling anxious, which comes with all kinds of symptoms that can be both physically and emotionally distressing.

 How to manage your anxiety

What can be helpful is learning to notice anxiety as a cue that there are core emotions underneath that are asking for attention. In my experience, it's often fear, anger, and sadness.

When you notice you're feeling anxious:

• Pause and take a moment to breathe

• Notice the sensations that come up in your body, which are clues to which core emotions you might be feeling

• Listen to what the emotion is telling you without judging it - feelings are just information

• Think about how best to proceed

Taking time to pause, notice, listen, and think can create the space to connect with yourself and let your emotions give you the information you need to shake off the anxiety.

Not sure how to do that, or how to stay with strong emotions and process them? I love to do this work with clients, and I'd love to support you, too. Connect with me here to book a session.

How to Manage Daily Stress and Feel Better

What do emotions have to do with it?

We can’t talk about burnout without talking about emotions (see my previous post on Burnout 101). Emotions are important - they’re the instant and automatic reactions we have to stimuli around us. They provide us with information about what’s happening in our environment. We all know the responses we feel in our bodies that let us know we are experiencing emotional responses - anger, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, or excitement. These emotions also produce felt-reactions in our bodies - that’s how we know what we’re feeling. Fun fact: those reactions typically only last 90 second or less. If left to their own devices, emotional responses and their corresponding physical reactions, will run their course on their own. Your attention will shift, the physical responses die out, and you’ll return to baseline. We often use phrases in the therapy world, like, You’ve got to feel it to heal it. This is true. Letting emotions run their course is important to ensure that they don’t get stuck in your nervous system. Otherwise, they can show up as physical symptoms or even secondary emotions like anxiety, guilt, or shame.

The feeling your feelings step is often where problems happen - you often don’t have time, safety, or privilege to let a full emotional response happen in real time. Working in a helping profession often means you’ve been trained to “be a professional first” (I hate this phase). You’re not allowed to bring your emotions to work (anything other than happy, anyway). You can’t break a sweat during hard conversations or crisis responses, you have to put on a stoic face. That’s fine - but it means that sometime afterward, you need to make time to revisit that stressor and emotional response to let it move through your nervous system. E

Ways to Manage Stress and Emotions

Feel it to heal it is one of the ways that you can care for your nervous system and beat the odds of developing burnout. Make time to check in with yourself daily, especially when you have experienced big stressors. Notice how your body feels, or what emotions come up. Take time to notice them without judgment.

Complete your stress cycle. Taking time to address your nervous system helps you move from fight/flight/freeze and back to baseline. This helps burn off the stress hormones your body has been kicking out to get you through the big stressors in your day. Here are some ways you can complete your stress cycle:

• physical activity - do something that gets your heart rate up (20-60 minutes is optimal, but do what is reasonable for you)

• breathing exercises - focus on short breaths in and long breaths out through your mouth. A good technique is 4-7-8: inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7, exhale for 8

• positive social interaction - connect with your people who love and support you

• physical affection - hug your partner, your kids, or pet an animal. This gets oxytocin (the love hormone) flowing so that you feel connected to your love ones

• laughter or a big cry - get those emotions out. Watch your favourite shows or read something that makes you laugh or cry

• creative expression - art, photography, music, dance - all of these can help you move through your emotions

• muscle tension/relaxation exercises - tense your muscles and hold for 10 seconds, moving from head to toe. Repeat as needed. This can be a great exercise to try if you are too tired to exercise.

• play - engage in a hobby or activity that you enjoy and can lose yourself in, something you do just for fun.

If this resonates with you, and you find yourself saying, “YES! This is exactly what I’m going through! What do I do about it?” then please reach out. I’d love to connect with you and support you to learn more about your nervous system and how you can take care of it. Click here to book a session or email me at laurel@yorkpsychology.org.

*Information in this post is largely drawn from Burnout: the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily & Amelia Nagoski, which you can find here: https://www.emilynagoski.com/home

Burnout 101: The Science Behind Chronic Stress

What is Burnout?

Burnout is a topic that I’m passionate about, because it’s one of the most pervasive problems I see helping professionals wrestle with. Most people have a general sense of what it is or what it feels like. In this post (and the ones following), I’m going to explain a little bit of the science behind burnout: what it is and why it happens. The more you know about your nervous system and how to regulate it, the better chance you have of taking care of it and combatting burnout in your own life.

A little history: burnout as a concept was coined by psychologists in the 1970’s, specifically by Herbert Freudenberger. He defined it as a technical term that has 3 parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a decreased sense of accomplishment. To break it down further: emotional exhaustion is the fatigue you experience from caring too much, for too long. Depersonalization is the depletion of feelings like empathy, caring, and compassion (the term compassion fatigue applies here). A decreased sense of accomplishment leaves you with an unconquerable feeling of futility, like nothing you do matters or is making any difference. Here are some some clues that you might be experiencing burnout:

• you’re emotionally exhausted - you’re sleeping at night, but don’t wake up rested and you still feel emotionally stressed in the morning

• you feel like you’re losing empathy for others

• you don’t have the emotional energy to put into people or things that you love

If you’re like any of the helping professionals I know, you’ve experienced one or more of these aspects that contribute to burnout - maybe even all three. Dr. Emily W. King describes it as “the feeling of the consequences in your body when you’re holding on to stress.” This comes from being stuck in a low level, persistent stress cycle that just doesn’t turn off. You can feel the stress in your body and you just can’t seem to shake it.

The Purpose of Stress

Stress is a normal part of the human experience. From an evolutionary perspective, stress is good and serves the function of keeping us alive. Responses like fight, flight, fawn, and freeze? These are all important actions your body uses, by design, to keep you safe under circumstances of threat. For example, this is super useful when you see a bear and you need to decide quickly if running away, fighting back, or playing dead gives you the greatest odds of making it out of the encounter alive. The amygdala, a structure in your brain, is like a threat detector. It goes off to alert the rest of your brain and body that something is happening that needs a response. This cues the rest of your nervous system to take action. Your sympathetic nervous system shifts into gear - your heart rate and blood sugar levels increase, immune system kicks in, and you’re ready to spring into action. When the stressor is dealt with, your parasympathetic takes over and you recover from the stressful incident. Digestion resumes, healing can happen, and you get back to a resting state because your body knows it is safe again.

When Stress Becomes a Problem

It becomes a problem, however, when normal, non-life threatening (e.g. not a deadly bear) stressors keep you stuck in a state of arousal or alarm - your sympathetic nervous system keeps responding to the stressors you’re experiencing. Things like email alerts, looming paperwork deadlines, a dreaded meeting with your boss or tough clients, or the energy it takes to emotionally regulate the people in your care - they all add up. Instead of processing the stress chemicals that help you survive the metaphorical bear, they stay in your body. If you were fighting or running from a real bear, you would physically use up the stress chemicals to help you survive. Instead, your nervous system becomes overtaxed because your stress responses are constantly in an “on” position. Your brain can’t tell the difference between real threats or imagined ones, so it starts to treat all stressors the same way - as big problems that need a big response. (I could get more into the brain/body science, but I won’t here. An excellent, reader-friendly resource is “Burnout: the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle” by Emily & Amelia Nagoski. Check it out here - https://www.emilynagoski.com/home )

So, now you know a little more about the neuroscience behind stress and burnout. What can you do about it? Stay tuned - l’ll address this in my next post on how to complete the stress cycle.

If any of this resonates with you, and you find yourself saying, “YES! This is exactly what I’m going through! What do I do about it?” then please reach out. I’d love to connect with you and support you to learn more about your nervous system and how you can take care of it. Click here to book a session or email me at laurel@yorkpsychology.org.

*Information in this post is largely drawn from Burnout: the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily & Amelia Nagoski.

Is it December yet?

A good friend of mine - a high school teacher - posted that as his status on Facebook the other day. Many of my friends and family members are teachers, and I’ve seen them sharing similar sentiments across social media since… the first week of September this year. It seems that no matter where you are, what grade level you’re teaching or what school, city, or town - exhaustion has set in.

The burnout is real.

When I was counselling teachers during my internship last year, I heard the same thing, starting in middle of September. “I love my job! But I am having a harder and harder time getting out of bed in the morning.” “Sometimes I sit in my car in the parking lot and try not to have an anxiety attack before going inside.” “All I do is come home, flop on the couch, and watch Netflix until I crawl into bed. I don’t have energy for anything these days. I just survive until bedtime and then do it all over again.” And then they would ask, “What’s wrong with me?”

And time and time again, I would tell them, nothing is wrong with you. You’re not broken. The systems you work and live in are, though.

It’s the fourth school year impacted by COVID-19 and not only are health challenges still a concern, so are all the cracks that were there before COVID-19, but have somehow been magnified by the pandemic: A horrifying scarcity of resources. Increased classroom complexity, including student behavioural and mental health needs that could really be categorized as a pandemic of their own. “Learning loss”. Increased paperwork and administrative duties. Curriculum changes that are developmentally way off the mark for what students know, can do, or should be asked to do. Things were hard before COVID hit, but the past few years have seen the wheels falling off the bus. There’s never enough time to get everything done, but there are always new things added to your plate.

One of my clients described it as, “I’m carrying around a backpack of rocks up a huge hill. And no one is taking anything out - they just keep adding more rocks. And there are kids climbing on me, and I can’t do anything but keep moving. There’s no way to stop.”

Does that sound familiar?

My work centers around supporting teachers to take off that backpack - to sit and rest for a while while they get their bearings, and learn what is within their scope to change so that everyday is not the same old grind. Things are hard, but they don’t have to be this hard. There are ways to make it better.

I realize that there are many things that aren’t in your control - you can’t choose your students, your admins, or your working conditions. You don’t have much autonomy over your workload these days. You’re just trying to survive the avalanche of tasks thrown at you, on top of actually teaching and regulating kids and having relationships with the students in your classes who have widely different needs.

However! You are a human person with a nervous system and a brain and a body that deserves self-compassion and care. I firmly believe that one of the education system’s biggest flaws is that we have forgotten this - we have forgotten the humanity of the people in our buildings, students and staff alike. Without a clear understanding of things like interpersonal neurobiology (how our brains and bodies interact with others’), including the stress cycle, attachment needs, and what is developmentally appropriate for all folks involved (e.g. getting adequate amounts of rest and play instead of chasing the never-ending grind of work work work), we are stuck and will stay stuck in an endless cycle of burnout.

My work as a therapist is to teach you about all of these things - about how your nervous system works, how you can regulate it, how you can hack the stress cycle to get back to a calmer baseline - so that you can feel human again. You’re more than just your work. I’ll try to share useful tidbits about these things here on the blog with the hope that something will land and you can start to feel a little better.

If you are ready for more - if the burnout is impacting your life, wellness, and mental health, then please reach out and connect with me. I’d love to support you. Email me at laurel@yorkpsychology.org or book a free consult today.