Dreading Work Tomorrow?  Practical Steps to Ease Your Anxiety and Avoid Burnout

Advice Given to Teachers at the Start of Term – Part 3

It’s September, and while students across the country are settling back into the rhythm of school, there’s another group of individuals feeling the weight and pressure of the new academic year: the teachers.

For many, this school year represents a fresh start; new schools, new roles, or simply another chance to make an impact.  But along with this sense of renewal comes a familiar pressure: the stress of looming challenges and the heavy weight of expectations.

Just a few weeks in, I’ve already heard from teachers who are overwhelmed, anxious, and wondering how they’re going to keep it all together.  In this third and final blog of my mini-series on the start of the academic year, I’m sharing advice I gave to one teacher who was on the verge of a panic attack, dreading the thought of going into work the next day, and feeling completely lost in the chaos of their role.

It was important to find practical steps to ease the burden, regain control, and restore a sense of calm in the storm.  Whether you’re feeling stressed or at your breaking point, this guidance might be what you need to get through tomorrow…and beyond.

I’m at breaking point, I can’t even face going in tomorrow…what do I do?

Context:

This teacher had experienced just over a week of the term, and to get to this point of dreading the next day, struggling with the pressure and the weight of panic they were feeling there must have been more to it.  The first week of term brings with it new challenges, new classes, a reset of expectations and the weight of last year’s results.  Equally, the new academic year also brings with it the hangovers of the last academic year; any problems which were put aside at the end of the last year come to the fore, and also any issues outside of school arise and emphasise with the prolonged summer.  The anticipation of this over the end of the summer can cause someone to get worked up and then the first few days of the new school year bring with them information overload and this itself can overwhelm someone even before the students come back.

The Advice:

My first priority was to notice that this teacher, at that moment of time was beyond panicking about work.  They were having physical signs of distress and was crying out for help.  My first priority was not to address the work issues or even to look to calm them, instead I needed to speak to, and reach the individual.

The first thing I needed to get them to do was to separate themselves from their anxiety.  I looked to create a few minutes for a simple grounding task.  I set them the task of taking a few minutes to breathe.  The weather was sunny, it was warm, and I felt that reconnecting with the world and getting away from the voice in their head was important.  To achieve this, I tasked them with going outside, bare foot onto the grass, to close their eyes and concentrate on taking slow, deep breathes and pausing after each inhale.

By focusing on the simple act of breathing slowly, and being in contact with the ground, you can start to quieten the mind and slow the racing of your heart which can happen when panic sets in.  It is a natural response to stress, to become single minded on the problem or trigger causing the stress, and in doing so you lose sight and focus of everything else.  So, a task which causes a focus on exiting your own head can be the first defence to this.

Only when this was achieved did I look to address the concerns surrounding tomorrow and the stresses behind the anxiety over this.

In order to address this, we explored the concept of ‘burnout’.  This is often associated with work, and ultimately it is.  However, this is not the only cause of burnout.  The reality is that burnout is more associated with a misalignment of where an individual is spending their energy, both inside and outside of work.  Too often people prioritise tasks which spend energy, over tasks which replenish energy.  And therefore, at some point in the day our energy stores reach empty, and we go in to ‘energy-debt’.

Imagine you have an energy account inside you.  Let’s say a good night’s sleep gives you have 100 chunks of energy.  You can spend them wherever you want, but they take a while to recoup.  If throughout the day you naturally generate another 10 chunks of energy, giving you a total of 110 to spend within the day.  When you do tasks which you don’t value personally, admin for example, they are spent rapidly which decreases your account.  Some tasks can come with its own initial energy boost; creative tasks for example might give you 20 chunks off the bat, this feels like motivation, but they take 50 to complete which eats into your internal energy store.  Lots of these tasks at work can massively depreciate the account and leave you on empty, or worse in ‘energy-debt’, which if consistently reached can cause what we refer to as “burnout”.

The Action:

Whilst this energy is easily spent, there are ways of spending some time each day which can recoup your energy reserves and help you to do the same amount at work (or less if you can refine your practice maybe) without feeling burnt-out.

However, in order to appreciate these, it is important to feel comfortable with giving time over to moving slower, and prioritising ourselves, in order to actually achieve more with the quality time that we then allocate to our work.

1. Eating healthily – this seems simple enough but eating less refined sugar and instead replacing these with more slow-release stores of energy.  Sugar spikes leads to sugar crashes.  We often turn to sugars to help us with our energy levels, but this actually slows our long-term energy release, leading to a subsequent crash.  Caffeine equally can be detrimental at the wrong times here too.

Our energy levels after consuming refined sugar can actually reach a level lower than before we ate it.  This therefore can lead to greater levels of tiredness, and if we repeatedly turn to refined sugar can actually compound the levels and reach lower and lower levels, requiring larger and larger amounts of sugar to have an impact.

2. Exercise – often people think that this would tire you out.  But a fit and healthy body is vital for a fit and healthy mind.  Exercise can also improve your mood and productivity, this is because the hormone response it causes.  Your levels of cortisol and adrenaline reduce through exercise, your dopamine, endorphins and serotonin levels also increase which are all part of the ‘feel-good’ hormone system.  Exercise equally encourages the replenishing of your energy stores, helping with focus and motivation.

3. Sleep – quality sleep is vital!   When you get good quality sleep it is a god send.  This isn’t necessarily 8 hours; you can have less sleep if the quality of the sleep is good.  Less screen time before going to sleep, and no snacks an hour before bed is said to help.  Dark and quiet rooms also help with this too.  Reading or journaling before bed is also a precursor for better sleep, it helps to quieten the mind as you have started to process the day, removing some of the concerns which you may not have rationalised yet and therefore the mind can settle quicker.

4. Be kinder on yourself with your inner talk – if you know you are doing your best, and giving your best, then reward yourself for showing up that way.  We are too easy to resort to negative self-talk and being hard on ourselves.  The rest of the world is hard enough on us as it is, let’s not be another punishment on ourselves and instead be our own cheerleader!

5. Mindfulness practices – reconnecting with the world around us by slowing down and noticing it.  Nature walks, getting out into the garden, practicing breathing exercises or looking to notice the world around us helps to remove ourselves from our mind and reconnect with our place in the world.  This can help to reframe our concerns and stresses and bring down our cortisol levels.

The Rationale:

Too often we can get caught in a negative spiral, where we convince ourselves that we need to do more, to achieve more and to be seen to be doing more.  We worry that if we get seen doing less, or focusing on ourselves we will be negatively judged and viewed as not pulling our weight, or worse, not caring enough.

By staying in this mindset, we drain our energy levels, we reach an energy debt on a regular basis, to the point where we cannot replenish our energy levels and we eat away at ourselves trying to maintain a lifestyle which was not healthy in the first place.

Rather than realising it is our approach to how we are working that is the problem, we instead externalise the problem and we blame the job or the workplace as this seems to be the common cause of our burnout.  We tell ourselves that the pressure we are feeling is caused by ‘others’, and by our workplace.  To some extent a part of the pressure is, however, we internalise this pressure and we compound it by putting pressure on ourselves to work to an unsustainable standard which we never once achieved successfully.

What we need to do is find a way to reframe this, recapture ourselves and learn how we can find an equilibrium between spending time recouping and rebuilding our energy levels, with time spent spending this.  We can achieve this by prioritising some of our time working on ourselves and investing in ourselves in a positive way.One thing we must keep in mind is that it is not selfish to focus on ourselves, to work on ourselves, and to bring our best selves to the table.  Afterall, ‘we cannot pour from an empty jug’.

Christopher Waters

Founder of LAMDA Solutions