For Teachers: Having a Year Plan for Personal Wellness is as Important as Your Teaching Year Plan

Hey Alberta teachers - happy August 1st! We're at the halfway point of summer, which means it's (probably) only a few more weeks until you're getting things ready for September (hopefully you aren’t back at it already!). Before you get to year planning and into the details of setting up your classroom, I want to challenge you to consider this: make yourself a personal wellness plan for the year before you start to plan for curriculum.

What is a wellness year plan? Great question! It's something that can help you to stay on top of managing stress so that you can respond proactively to challenges and ward off burnout. Having a detailed plan of ways to take care of yourself during stress (both daily and over time) is just as important as having a well-crafted year plan. You’re probably a meticulous, detailed planner when it comes to the ins-and-outs of teaching kids. It’s important to direct that same level of care and attention to knowing what will support YOU before you head back into the new school year.

What might a wellness plan look like? First, identify the activities or things you've been doing this summer that make you feel rested, rejuvenated, and more connected to yourself. If you need ideas, the best evidence-backed strategies for completing your stress cycle are:
🌻exercise (especially cardio)
🌻sleep
🌻positive social connection
🌻physical affection
🌻crying
🌻belly laughter
🌻creative expression.

Note which things you have been doing this summer that make you feel good. These are same things you're going to want to build into your daily weekly schedule - I like to call these my “non-negotiables”. These are the things you’re going to return to again and again when you notice that you’re feeling the stress (both in your mind and your body) and you need proactive ways to manage it. Get really granular - take time making a big list or menu of things that you know you love to do that are guaranteed to make you feel better/regulated/connected. Maybe it’s an exercise class or walking your dog. Maybe it’s coffee with your friends. Maybe it’s watching a movie with your kids, painting, playing an instrument, or going for a hike. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it works for you. Write these things down and post them somewhere that you’ll see them regularly to remind you to engage in them as often as possible. Stress relief is not a luxury - it has to be part of your daily plan. You have to take care of yourself first, and you need to do it well if you want to have enough energy and resources to support the other people in your life, including your students.

Next, map out known time/energy consuming dates that you know are coming. September is an exhausting month (so are December and June). Report cards, IPPs, parent meetings, extra curriculars - these are all things that will tax your nervous system. Identifying the known dates or time periods can help you to plan for extra care around those times. Maybe that means meal planning in advance, delegating household tasks to family members or even scheduling more sleep and rest when you know you'll be in survival mode. Being aware of what's coming and planning with your nervous system in mind can help you maintain the energy you need to get through those seasons - and avoid burnout.

Finally, share your plan with someone else - a partner, colleague, or friend. Getting support from others to help us maintain our work-life balance and prioritize our human needs (not just productivity goals) is an important way to stay connected to ourselves.

Need help making a wellness plan, or need to learn more about stress, burnout, and how to take care of it? Book a session with me. This is my favourite work to do, and I’d love to support you! 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.

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.