Surviving Teacher Burnout: How to Regain Balance and Purpose
Does this sound familiar?
It’s the end of October, I’m six months out of teacher’s college, and my watch reads 7:00 p.m. as I finally leave work for the evening. It’s dark outside, just like it was when I got to school at 7:00 a.m. My stomach growls, reminding me I shouldn’t have skipped lunch. Again. What did I eat today—a black coffee, a yogurt cup, and a ziplock full of Chicago mix popcorn? No wonder I’ve been losing weight since the first bell in September. I’ve been running around non-stop to get my lesson plans done—including accommodations (i.e. different lesson plans) for two gifted kids and three modified students—not to forget marking, cafeteria duty, and, oh right, teaching itself! My commute is 45 minutes each way, the only regular exercise I get is the walk to the photocopier, and the only semblance of a social life I have is sending memes in the group chat. But hey, at least I only cry every other day…
Fast forward ten years, and it’s all better—right? I play positive affirmations and drink my smoothie on the commute to work, carrying my lunch bag that does not include a single kernel of Chicago mix. I still fast-walk through the halls, and often forget my deep-breathing techniques, but I only cry once a month now. On weekends, I find myself wincing when I drive by a school, haunted by my never-ending to-do list. Even when June 30th arrives, the concern for my students’ well-being lingers deep into the summer. I’ve spent a decade of my life dedicated to student learning and education, and am super proud of the support I’ve given my students and the relationships I’ve built. But I’m mid-career and wake up with a sense of dread wondering how I am going to make it through the day, let alone the next 20 years. Hopelessness floods me. The burnout is real.
What is Burnout?
There are many signs and symptoms of burnout. From a psychological perspective, burnout is a phenomenon experienced by professionals in helping roles. It is different from exhaustion or fatigue in that it takes into account both external “environmental” stress factors from the workplace and internal “personal” factors associated with one’s job. External factors might include the ever-increasing to-do list of marking, parent communication, lesson planning, club supervision, yard supervision, coaching, professional development, staff meetings, and classroom management. Internal factors are personal, and can change from person to person, but typically concentrate on one’s job satisfaction, feeling of support, motivation, hopefulness, and fulfillment.
It’s not just teachers who experience burnout. In her 2001 paper, researcher and professor Dr. Evangelina Demerouti of Eindhoven University of Technology, found that anyone can experience burnout, but employees in positions which require high levels of emotional regulation, person-centred care, empathy, and engagement are especially vulnerable. These invisible skills, while not typically celebrated, take up a considerable amount of energy. When demands are high these resources can be drained—leading to burnout.
Key Emotional Challenges of Teaching
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is the ability to be in touch with and control your emotional state. It is a capacity you might not recognize you are exercising daily. Everyday, you show up and do your best despite how you are feeling inside, which requires a significant amount of energy spent being emotionally regulated. This looks like maintaining your own calm when facing disruptions.
- Not snapping back when you get attitude from an eighth grader about playing on their Chromebook;
- Helping a student calm down while they’re having a tantrum;
- Taking a minute to breathe and center yourself before calling a parent; and many, many more.
You may recognize these examples as “staying professional” in work lingo, but in psychology we refer to it as “emotionally regulated.”
Empathy
Empathy is your ability to put yourself in someone’s shoes and feel what they are feeling. As a teacher, it’s your capacity to understand that not every child is coming to school with their basic needs met and holding that heartbreak, while also maintaining your professional boundaries. This is no easy task and is often carried home at the end of the day.
Engagement
As a teacher, you now have to compete with TikTok, roblox, and the Google dinosaur jumping game (if you know, you know; and if you don’t—hope your students never find out). You’re at the front of the class, every day, trying to teach y=mx+b by performing the mathematics equivalent of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, while competing for your students’ attention with an online game about chopping fruit in half. Engagement is your ability to not only capture, but hold on to your students’ attention so you can convert the acronym BEDMAS into actual problem solving skills they will use in the future.
Symptoms & Risks
If you’re experiencing chronic work stress that has not been adequately managed, you might be experiencing low mood, anxiety, hopelessness, or memory and attention difficulties which are compounding an already stressful job. Boredom, fatigue, irritability, frustration responses, and negativity might also be present in your day to day.
While the psychological toll of burnout can be scary, the physical symptoms may also be impacting you.
These include:
- More frequent headaches or fatigue;
- Sleep difficulties or insomnia;
- Catching colds more often.
In extreme cases, studies suggest that burnout can increase the risk of developing anxiety, depression, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease.
What Causes Burnout?
Maslach describes three main factors that contribute to burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, cynicism, and personal fulfillment. High levels of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and cynicism, combined with low levels of fulfillment, are a recipe for burnout. Let’s take a look at how these factors might be showing up in your work.
Emotional Exhaustion
Emotional exhaustion can feel like your cup is empty and you just don’t have any more to give. Because helping professions, like teachers and nurses, are constantly exposed to emotionally taxing work (e.g. navigating conflicts, bullying, tantrums, neglect, and more), this puts them at a heightened risk for emotional exhaustion.
If you’re experiencing burnout or emotional exhaustion you might be going home at the end of the day feeling like a shell of a human, and can’t engage with your family or friends like you used to. In their 2018 paper, researchers Gabrielle Simionato and psychologist Dr. Susan Simpson found that emotional exhaustion can be tied to low work performance. In the face of ever-increasing job demands, low performance can compound the issue leading to higher degrees of burnout.
Depersonalization
Psychology describes depersonalization as the feeling of being detached from oneself. At work, a lack of resources—like funding, support, time, and energy—can prevent you from finding a sense of fulfillment, like you’re always falling short and unable to reach your goals. It might feel like you are watching yourself go through the motions, but don’t feel like you’re really there. It can also look like having a hard time accessing your emotions; feeling like a robot, zombie, or sleep-walker (or any combination of the three), who is doing your job on the outside, but not making space to feel happy, sad, tired, or joyful inside. Feeling nothing may appear more efficient to get your work done, and is often an unconscious way to conserve your energy. However, this too has its drawbacks: like losing your sense of joy and passion in life and relationships—some of the important things that make you, you.
Cynicism
At the same time, you may find yourself becoming increasingly more cynical: like you have lost all hope and adopted a “What’s the point?” mentality. That hopelessness and attitude can feel awful, intolerable, and shameful. To cope, you might try a variety of things like shopping, wine, bingeing reruns, or just cocooning in bed with a Costco-sized bag of Chicago mix. And while all of these are neither inherently good nor bad; deep down it doesn’t fix your relationship with your job. Even your summer off doesn’t quite act as the balm it once did.
Protective Factors
“But Nicole, my job is so fulfilling—sometimes. Can’t that be enough?” I would like to tell you yes, but you need more than that to get you through.
Personal Fulfillment
In the psychological model of burnout —“The Conservation of Resources Model” (2017)—Dr. Holmgreen and her research team explain why the little joyful moments (or “glimmers”) that teachers experience at work are wonderful—but do not fix the overall problem of burnout.
Let’s use a cup with water metaphor to explain this idea. First, envision your energy, fulfillment, motivation, etc.—your “resources”—as the water that fills the cup. Next, imagine your job is the cup. Finally, think of the demands of your job as a pin that pricks holes in your cup. A few holes will slowly let the water leak out, but you might have enough instances of fulfillment which act as a tap to steadily refill the cup, hardly noticing the losses. However, as more and more demands build, your cup gets filled with more holes, and as resources diminish, the tap that refills your cup slows to a trickle. In some cases it may even feel like there is so little support for your role that the tap slows to an occasional drip.
Holmgreen suggests that all humans are motivated to acquire and protect resources that are of value to them. They also explain that losing resources has a significantly greater negative impact than gaining a resource. Think of your cup, full of holes, and hardly a dribble coming from the tap. Your natural human response when resources are threatened is to attempt to limit depletion and maximize gain, which explains why you might have less empathy, patience, and energy despite everything you do to counter this phenomenon. You might take more days off, do less at school, or let things slide in an attempt to keep your cup full. But at the end of the day, you’ll still find yourself asking: “Is this sustainable?”
What Can I Do About Burnout?
1. Assess Your Burnout
To start, consider your cup. What does it look like? How many holes do you see? If your answer is anything like, “a lot,” then the Maslach Burnout Inventory or the Burnout Assessment Tool can be used by a clinician to assess or validate the level of burnout you might be experiencing.
2. Identify Your Resources
It is important to identify what your resources are. These are the things that matter to you, that make you feel like yourself, that keep you motivated, and fill your cup. It may be challenging to do this; but a therapist can help you discover some resources that might not have made themselves apparent to you right away.
3. Build Self-Compassion and Set Boundaries
Working to build your capacity to practice self-compassion, setting healthy boundaries around resources, and practicing mindfulness can mitigate certain factors associated with burnout. While many job demands are outside of your immediate control, you can reinforce your cup to withstand the damage done from excessive drain of resources. Research shows that self-compassion plays a significant role in reducing the effects of emotional exhaustion. This can look like talking to yourself in the way you would talk to a dear friend experiencing burnout; validating and making space for hard feelings without judgement.
4. Acceptance and Seeking Professional Help
Recognizing and accepting your experience as true, valid, and part of the common human experience can help alleviate the shame and guilt you may be feeling towards yourself. Self-compassion, mindfulness, and talk therapy are all powerful tools to help you reduce the impact of your emotional exhaustion and prevent or deal with burnout. Experiential therapy can teach you to safely access and manage the emotions you may have been numbing or avoiding and allow you to live more fully outside of work.
Therapeutic tools like defusion of automatic thoughts can help reduce the impact of negative emotions associated with cynical thoughts about work. An example of this includes catching and rephrasing thoughts from: “This is pointless” (which is an emotionally sticky thought that floods you with despair and hopelessness) to “I’m having the thought that this is pointless” (which is observing, neutral, and allows the thought to pass with minimal energy on your part).
Conclusion: You’re Not Alone
Burnout can feel like a black hole, sucking the joy and energy from your life; the further in you fall the harder it can seem to get back to yourself. But you don’t have to go it alone. At Transforming Emotions we can help you to build an awareness of your thoughts and learn to de-fuse from them. We can build your capacity to treat yourself with more tenderness and compassion, and turn inward to identify your needs to combat these feelings of stuckness, hopelessness, and dread.
If you’re struggling with burnout—as a teacher or any other profession—and curious about how we can help, please reach out to set up a free consultation call.
