Stress is natural and will always be apart of our daily life. But being able to manage stress well will give teachers the spirit they need to happily stay in the classroom.

A little over two years ago, I was dealing with teacher burnout. I was tired, extremely overwhelmed, and felt like I needed an extended break. I didn’t know at the time that the stress I was dealing with was brewing for quite some time.

After fighting teacher burnout, I had always thought I was great at managing stress. But often, I would try to find ways to deal with it (shopping, planned ignoring of my to-do list) but that too become a point of stress. I often made stressful situations worse because I was dealing with a top layer then focusing on the healing.

After much research, I found that often, stress starts out in our minds before it starts to show some signs on our bodies. Keep in mind that both are linked and one will show some effects of the other. A stress-free mind is often linked to an active and healthy body, but a mind riddled with problems will surely result to a deteriorating health.

This is why I was so tired. I always had a never-ending tiredness and felt like I could stay in bed all day. I got to a point where I was depressed and was so stressed out that I didn’t feel like doing my normal every day activities.

Why is Stress Management important for teachers

It is very important for a person to watch out for danger signs you’re body is nearing the limits of its tolerance to stress. We might feel some minor aches and pains in various parts of our body when our mind is getting burdened with all the stress and problems it is subjected to. If left unchecked, it might result to sleeping and behavioral problems, lack of breath, or even a potential heart attack when it is already above the danger level.

In my case, my had terrible back pain where I could barely walk. This all came on for no apparent reason. I also was out of breath from teaching class and this surprised me the most. I’m a petite woman, with an average weight to my height. Overall, I was active with an athletic build, so I always just chopped my breathing to my asthma.

The mind shows the first signs of stress and will later reveal itself to your emotional and physical state when left unchecked. It is essential that we learn how to calm our minds when under the throes of stress and learn to focus our thoughts in order to push the problems out and learn to relax when you need to.

This might take some effort if it’s your first time to undertake stress management. But there are some techniques you can use to simplify the process and helps you learn it bit by bit.

What causes the most stress for teachers

There is such a strong mental and emotional burden that is often attributed to the demands of teachers that can affect our productivity and efficiency to be effective in the classroom. We have to wear so many professional (counselor, behavior specialist, etc.) and even personal hats (mom, dad, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, grandma or grandpa) as a teacher that it is hard to walk away and leave work at work.

How Much Stress do Teachers Have

The best way to figure out how much stress teachers really have is to find the source. Knowing the source of your stress gives you plenty of options to counter it. If your stress stems from overwork for example:

• bulking most of grading and lesson planning at home in the evenings
• not being planned or prepared enough
• classroom organization problems
• teaching online
• having to learn a new learning platform
• not feeling effective
• worrying about students

Then take some time off and reflect. I call these “wellness days.” I use to take one day (a Friday or Monday) off a month to relax and rejuvenate for my 3-day weekend.

If you are doing virtual teaching and learning, it’s important to understand the home can also become a stressful environment, especially when it’s disorganized. Then you are leading out of one stressful environment to another. If that is the case, make your house home by making some simple changes:

• rearrange the furniture
• add some home decor to make it comfortable to look at
• make a small space just for you (in the bedroom, spare room, etc.)

Once you are able to determine the problem then you can take the necessary steps to correct it. Since you will never be able to get rid of stress if you don’t know what’s causing it.

If it’s your first time to try out stress management then it would be safe to say that you wouldn’t know where to begin. You can read a lot of materials on it but it will still take some time for you to master the basics. If you are in need of immediate stress relief, then here are some ideas that will surely help you out in your time of need.

Stress Management Tips

1. Learn To Relax Your Mind

Everyone would agree that work, or the demands of work, is mostly the cause of stress, and this is no different from teachers and teaching. We make at least 1500 decisions during our school day and we just need time to relax our mind, body, and spirit. Relaxation is a very useful stress management technique. Having a clear and focused mind can help in dealing with stress before it gets out of control.

For example, when I was teaching in my classroom, I would always want my morning to myself, it would leave me clear mind to be ready to start the day. Now, as I teach from home, I make sure to spend my planning time away from the computer. Just getting rid of that screen time puts my day in perspective.

2. Meditation & Breathing Exercises-

Another method is to focus on your breathing. You can start some exercises which involves breathing in and out in specific intervals. This might take some getting used to on your first try but you will be able to focus on your breathing immediately after some practice.

Also, this exercise will ensure that your body, as well as your mind will get enough oxygen for it to function properly. We usually hyperventilate or suffer short breathing when stressed so it’s best to practice some breathing exercise to help you cope with it.

3. Exercising

Exercise kind of goes without saying but two things I did really helped in helping to relax when the pressure of stress became too much to handle:

• Yoga
• Walking

Both yoga and walking were stress relievers that help me with incorporating other items on this list. Especially listening to music and maintain my breathing exercises. It also helped me jump-start just eating better because I became more aware of foods that put me in a slump. What you find within this list, is that everything works together and thus helping you managing stress a lot better.

4. Listen to Music

A common adage says that music can soothe the savage beast and stress is definitely a wild beast inside you waiting for the right moment to pounce. You can try to listen to your favorite music to help you relax and get back your lost rhythm. This is practically the most common method for coping with stress and it will surely work for you if you give it a try.

5. Aromatherapy

There are certain scents from plant extracts that can greatly affect our mood. Have your stomach ever grumbled when you smell something delectable? This is the same thing with aromatherapy and stress. You can enjoy an aromatherapy session along with your massage or you can buy some incense or oils from the nearby health shops and use them on your home or while in the office. Also, the smell will also have some effect on those around you for a calmer atmosphere.

6. Manage Stress with the Right Food

We need to take care of what we eat if you plan to fight stress head-on. It is essential that our body gets enough nutrients for it to function properly and avoid a breakdown when our mind is getting bombarded with problems. Avoid eating foods that are high in cholesterol and try to focus more on integrating a healthy lifestyle of fruits and vegetables. You might not know it, but healthy foods can also help you in dealing with stress. After all, if you’re not burdened with body pains then you can focus more in helping your mind cope with it.

If you want to know what I eat for lunch in a traditional school day check this weight loss post.

7. Make Stress Management a Daily Habit

Integrate your stress management techniques with your overall daily lifestyle if you want to be good at it for your self-improvement project. Doing it just because you got stressed with your classroom environment is not a good way to practice stress management. You need to keep practicing your chosen method or technique until you can do it instantaneously.

The Best Way Control Your Stress

The best way to control stress is to have a calm and focused mind. You don’t need special skills or superhuman abilities to cope with stress — you only need your mind for that. A great way to achieve this is to know the cause of your stress and list them down so that you can tackle it one-by-one. It is not advisable to look at all your problems in one sitting since that will only lead to confusion, and eventually, more stress for you.

You don’t have to be in a special place to apply stress management. In fact, you can do it anytime and anywhere if you feel like it. You can do it while at your work desk, in the comfort room, or even out in the lobby. The idea here is to control your mind to relax so that you can continue fresh with your task — emotionally, physically, and mentally. Here are some tips that will surely help you out.

Final Thoughts

Keep in mind that the gist of stress management is not the methods you take for getting stress out of your system. The idea here is to learn how to divert your mind from the problems that causes stress to give yourself time to relax and face the problem with a clear mind.

Stress can greatly affect our body’s normal function; especially if we don’t pay attention to the warning signs. Even if we deny the sensations we are feeling on our bodies, we can surely feel that our physical and mental state is breaking down. It is very important for an individual to learn to watch out for the warning signs that stress is already taking control of your system and you need to learn the ways to take care of your body to avoid a total breakdown.

Have you been a teacher that needed a stress reduction? Please let me know in the comments below.