Lately I have seen and heard a lot of people talking about self-care. Burnout is real and rampant, and many people are looking for a way to combat that. According to most of the people writing and talking about self-care, we all just need to take more hot baths, read more books, and take time to exercise and go for walks. Carve out 15 minutes or an hour a day to do something for ourselves. When you’re really feeling down, take a mental health day and skip work. Take the day to do anything else besides work. The promise is that you will feel so much more energized when you return.
As a teacher facing some severe burnout, I tried those things. I started reading more. I gave myself permission to take long, hot baths. I went for long walks with my dog and started meditating. What I discovered is that those things made me feel better sometimes, usually while I was doing them, but afterwards I went back to feeling just as burned out as ever. That brand of self-care wasn’t working for me. Don’t get me wrong; I still do all of those things and I enjoy them thoroughly. I think it’s great to incorporate those types of things into your life somehow. They just didn’t make a huge difference for me as far as getting over my burnout. They were a Bandaid when I needed surgery. That was when I ran across this quote.
“True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake. It is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.”
Brianna Wiest
Here was a definition of self-care that I could get behind. This rang true to me. Taking a long walk every day was nice, but if I dreaded everything else in my day, nothing was going to change. I needed to build a life that I didn’t need to escape from.
Building the Life I Wanted
Work
Work is a huge part of my day, and that’s where I needed to make the most changes. Luckily for me, I already enjoyed a lot of things about my job. I taught great kids. I had amazing coworkers. I just needed to identify the spots where things weren’t working out for me and try to do something about them.
I was working too much. On a normal school day, I was the first teacher at the school because I taught an early morning orchestra class and I often was one of the last teachers to leave, due to after-school rehearsals and performances. During those long winter months, I often didn’t even see the sun at all during the day. I desperately needed to cut back on something. Part of the solution for me was to change jobs. My schedule at my school now is a little less demanding. I no longer have that early-morning orchestra, and I’ve rearranged things to minimize the extra time I have to spend at school. I still have long days on occasion, but those are the exception, not the norm.
Too many things were causing me anxiety. I dreaded checking my email because I might get another angry email. I would overthink my conversations with a student or coworker and regret something I had said. I would wake up in a cold sweat realizing that I didn’t have lesson plans for any of my classes that day. I was anxious so much that if I ever wasn’t anxious, I would get anxious because there probably was something to be anxious about that I hadn’t thought of yet. It was bad. Now I’ve removed as many of those triggers as I can. I only check email once a day when I’m the most prepared to handle whatever I find in my inbox. I try to build positive relationships with my students and coworkers and focus more on them rather than myself. I give myself ample time to plan lessons so that I can walk into my classroom knowing everything is prepared. I still get anxious on occasion, but not nearly as often.
Creating an environment where I felt comfortable really helped, too. Clutter triggers my anxiety. Having a clean room and office where everything has a place and looks nice helps me enjoy my work so much more. I tell my students that my classroom is an extension of my home and they are guests there. They need to keep it clean, just like they would if they were visiting a friend’s house. Even just clearing off my stand and podium after each class makes work a lot more enjoyable.
Leisure
When I did have free time, I often found myself just watching TV or scrolling through social media. I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Ironic, since as a child I could always find something to do, whether it was reading or sewing or drawing or whittling or any one of the many hobbies I went through. As an adult, however, with so much more available to me, I couldn’t find anything to do.
Finding a hobby had a major impact on how happy I was with my life. I joined a quilt block club and started sewing again. I remembered how much I enjoyed writing and started this blog. I started reading again, after years of not reading hardly anything ever. I love learning, so I took some online classes. Filling my free time with those kinds of productive activities made my life exciting again. I had thought I was too tired to do more, but in reality I was tired because I didn’t have anything to do.
Relationships
I often felt lonely and socially inept. I’m a huge introvert and I’ve never been good at reaching out to others, but I desperately needed that social interaction in my life. My students are great, but I need friends. What I’ve found recently is that I have so many more friends than I thought. This is something that I’m still working on, but recently I’ve realized that I am so very blessed with the great people that surround me. I have great coworkers, if I take the time to talk to them. I have several good, close friends, if I don’t push them away. I have an amazing family that lives close and is always willing to have me over. It’s on me to take advantage of what I already have.
Self-Care Can Just Be Caring
Imagine for a minute that you’re caught in a rainstorm. You get an umbrella and shield yourself the best you can. If you’ve ever been caught in a bad rainstorm, you probably know how nice it is to have a large, sturdy umbrella that can hold up to the wind and keep you mostly dry. Now imagine that you are walking with a friend or a couple of kids in that same storm, but you only have the one umbrella. That big, sturdy umbrella can do a lot to protect them as well.
Once we create a life that is calmer, happier, and more purposeful, we can better care for the people around us. My students will be happier when they have a clean, comfortable, peaceful environment to learn in. I’ll be able to help them better if I’m calm and less stressed and anxious. By being involved in hobbies and reaching out to others, I’m not only making my life better, I’m improving theirs. Self-care and caring for others can be viewed as two separate things, but for me they are intrinsically linked, especially as a teacher. Caring for myself or my students is very much one and the same. It’s just caring.
Today’s Challenge
What do you need to change to create a life you don’t need to regularly escape from? This week find one thing that is keeping you from that life and make a plan to change it.