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.

Rest and Rejuvenation: How Play Can Help You Recharge

As we move through the holiday season, with many folks getting some much needed time off, it’s important to think about how we can use this time to get the most out of our break. How can rest and rejuvenation help? I’m so glad you asked.

I recently shared a post (by @RevDaniel) where he discussed some sage advice he received before taking a leave of absence: there is a difference between rest and rejuvenation. The analogy he used was the difference between unplugging and charging: unplugging simply means you’re not draining your battery; rejuvenation is something different. Both are important, but they are not the same.

Rest and rejuvenation are not the same

Rest is something we tend to be more familiar with: we know it involves slowing down and taking a pause or unplugging from some of the more strenuous, everyday demands we are faced with. Trisha Hersey of @thenapministry puts it this way: Rest is anything that slows you down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way. Maybe that means a nap, or a taking a walk in nature. Or it could mean spending time on the couch, listening to your favourite music, or turning off all your devices so that you aren’t on call or connected for a while.

So what is rejuvenation, and how is it different from rest?

Simply, the Oxford definition of rejuvenation is “the action or process of giving new energy or vigor to something”. One of the best ways to engage in rejuvenation is through play. We can think about play as something that is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun; something we do for the sake of enjoyment with no other goal. We often think that play is for kids, but it’s actually just as important for adults – play helps us to flourish. The act of engaging in play is what rejuvenates and helps to recharge our batteries, and get our joy and energy back. (There’s also a growing body of research for how and why play is a biological imperative for humans, associated with things from higher intelligence, to social skills development, to problem solving – check out Dr. Stuart Brown’s work on play for more information).

Ways to rejuvenate

So what might rejuvenation through play look like for you? Think about the things you get lost in doing – the activities you perhaps loved when you were younger and could spend time doing for hours. Think about the things that bring you joy, that you do for no other reason than that they are fun. It can be hard to think about doing things that aren’t “productive”, but this is exactly the type of activities our brains and bodies need to feel recharged again.

Play activities could look like:

·         Playing a sport

·         Playing an instrument – solo or with others

·         Having a games night with friends or family

·         Creating art of any kind: painting, crafting, knitting, collage

·         Anything that makes you belly laugh – going to a comedy or improv show, or watching your favourite funny movies or TV series

·         Cooking or baking

·         Getting outdoors in nature

·         Building something out of Lego

·         Swimming

The key to rejuvenation is finding ways to engage in play that is meaningful for you. Think about something that’s fun, that allows you to get into a flow state where you can lose track of time. Rest can help you to pause and catch your breath; play will get your batteries recharged again.

What kind of play activities will help you rejuvenate this season?

If this post resonates with you, but you need some support to figure out what rest, rejuvenation and play look like for you, connect with me! These are goals I can support you with. Click here to book a session or email me at laurel@yorkpsychology.org.

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

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.