Feeling Overwhelmed? How Teachers Can Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

Teaching is one of the most fulfilling careers, but let’s be real, it’s also incredibly demanding. If you’ve ever felt exhausted, overwhelmed, or just plain burnt out, you’re not alone. The good news? You don’t have to stay stuck in that cycle.

I’m so excited to welcome you to Season 4 of Unlock Your Teaching Potential! This podcast has always been about giving educators like you the tools to reclaim your energy, set boundaries, and show up as your best self. And this season, we’re diving even deeper into practical strategies that will help you thrive, not just survive.

In this episode, I’m sharing simple yet powerful self-regulation techniques to help you break free from stress and burnout. If you’ve been wondering how to start managing stress as a teacher, I’ll walk you through daily mindfulness exercises and my favorite box breathing technique to help you learn how to calm your nervous system, create a sense of safety, and take back your energy. Because the truth is, you can’t pour from an empty cup. Self-care for educators isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

I’ll walk you through practical teacher stress management strategies that will help you feel lighter, more in control, and ready to step into your full potential both in and out of the classroom.

Take a deep breath, you’ve got this! 

Hit play now and let’s start building a calmer, more balanced teaching life together.

Stay empowered,
Jen

Empowered Educator Card Deck

empowerededucator.com/thrive

https://empowerededucator.com/meditations

Let’s keep the conversation going! Find me at:

empowerededucator.com/resources

Instagram: @jenrafferty_

Facebook: Empowered Educator Faculty Room

Transcript

Are you feeling exhausted by the constant demands of teaching? Do you find yourself wondering if there's a way to balance both your career and your well being without burning out? Welcome, to Unlock Your Teaching Potential, your permission slip to hit the brakes, recharge, and reignite your joy for teaching and living. I'm Dr. Jen Rafferty, former music teacher, author, TEDx speaker, and founder of Empowered Educator. And I've been where you are. Exhausted, overwhelmed and just trying to get through the day, making it all work. So each week, I'll bring you short, powerful episodes with actionable tools to help you reclaim your energy, set boundaries and step into your full potential, both in and out of your role as an educator. So take a breath and let's dive in. It's time to unlock your teaching potential, because the world needs you at your best. 

Hello and welcome to episode one of season four of this podcast. I'm so glad you're here, I'm so glad to be here. It's March, a time of new beginnings. Spring is so close, it's just around the corner. Although, as I'm recording this, my yard is covered in snow and it's freezing outside, but the hope of spring is so close, I can taste it. And as a former music teacher, I need to share this too. Every spring, I always think of the song New Day by The King Singers. And if you haven't heard it, do yourself a favor and listen to it, it brings me to tears every single time it's so beautiful. So despite all of the snow, there is hope for this new day and beautiful new potential of the things to come. And with this, of course, it's season four of this podcast, which used to be called Take Notes, but now we've decided to call it Unlock Your Teaching Potential, because, truthfully, that's what we do here at Empowered Educator. We give educators a flashlight, pretty much as they create a new map to reach their own potential, and in doing so, you end up paving the way for your students. And because I am such a neuroscience nerd, everything we do is based in brain science, because it's super easy to say all of the affirmations and continually talk about good vibes. But truly, at the end of the day, you change yourself by changing your brain. And because of neuroplasticity, that's completely possible, which is the coolest thing to me. 

So yes, there's so much that is broken about education, but what's true is that organizations don't change until people change. And the only person that you have any agency in changing is yourself, that's it. So each week I'm going to drop some delicious nuggets for you which are inspired by your questions, for those people who have gone through the work of Empowered Educator, all of the classes that we have taken, or perhaps I've given a keynote at your school, or maybe you're listening and you have a question and you're able to send it our way, we're going to be answering those as well. 

So we're going to kick it off with our first question from Sue in Philadelphia, and Sue says, “In this climate, I want to know more about how to be more positive and optimistic and less of a warrior. There always seems to be so much to worry about, and I don't want to feel paralyzed by it, but I don't know how to navigate through it, especially when I'm at school. How can I feel more positive when I'm so anxious about the future?” This is such a great question and such an important question. The paralysis and overwhelm that you feel is a biological response to your stress. So I want to just normalize this for you and really level the playing field that the things that we are feeling from the stressors on the outside that create the stress on the inside is your biology working and doing its job. Your brain's sole function means that lots of functions, but the main thing that it's doing is keeping you alive, and the little part that's in your brain that's called the Amygdala, that is responsible for your stress response has not evolved much since the days that we were hunting and gathering and being chased by bears. So even if it's something as simple as receiving a text message you didn't want to see or an email from an angry parent, or, oh, the email for at the beginning of the day from your principal being like, “hey, come see me by the end of the day in my office”, and you're you're worried about it all day, your brain thinks that you're going to die. It seems ridiculous, but that's actually what's going on biologically. It is a natural response to something that is unfamiliar. Now, in our current situation and what's going on with the world, especially, there is so much uncertainty, there is so much change, there is so much verbal vomit being thrown at each other, there's so much hate that we see everywhere and in social media that we can’t seem to escape from, and it infiltrates into our cultures at school, our kids are watching this too. It's hard to know how to navigate, especially when you have a curriculum that you need to teach, and yet there are all of these distractions, and everyone's feeling so paralyzed by what's going on. Here's some good news. You are not your stress. You are also not your brain. You are a person who has a brain that is experiencing symptoms of stress, and because of your objectivity to it, you have the opportunity to navigate through it differently if you choose. And like I said, these responses are biological, so making a different choice isn't always going to be easy, but it is possible. 

So one of the first really tangible things that you can do is in a quiet moment, because we can't do this when we're in the middle of all of the things that we have to do. You know, we're making dinner, or we're picking up the kids, we're having our faculty meetings, we're managing behaviors in our classroom. This, what I'm talking about right now, because we can get to some of those strategies in another time. I know that there are questions about that that we'll get to in later episodes. But for right now in this exercise, find yourself a quiet moment, or you go to bed or after dinner. You know when kids are watching TV and notice what is happening with your body. Where is the stress manifesting in your body? Are your shoulders wanting to become your earrings? Is your stomach tight? Do you have a headache? Are you sweating? Is your heart beating really fast? These are all messages that your body is sending you that, hey, listen, we're stressed, we're not okay, we think we're going to die. And having that awareness first is key, that unlocks everything else. Because without that awareness, we bypass our relationship to our body, we bypass any sort of connection or communication that we might have with our body, which is what's giving us the information. We've become detached from our bodies for all sorts of reasons, and we stopped listening to it at some point. We grow up learning that our minds are the thing that needs to be paid most attention to, but your mind is where the stress is, your mind is where the intrusive thoughts are, your mind is what's going to consistently keep you in anxiety and worry and stress and overwhelm, it is your body that is giving you the messages. And when we connect more to our body, well, now we have some place to work with. Your body is always going to be where that truth is. 

And so what I'm going to encourage you, Sue, and anyone who's resonating with us to start to do is in that moment of recognizing a physical symptom of stress, you are going to do one of the many exercises that we have here in Empowered Educator. I'm going to share this particular one with you right now because it is my favorite and my go-to and one that I use all the time. Simply put your hand to your heart. And if you can, not while you're driving. But if you can, close your eyes, don't close your eyes when you're driving. And I want you to do three rounds of a box breath. This is inhale for a count of four, pause for a count of four, exhale for a count of four and pause for a count of four. And when you do that three times, I want you to notice what your body feels like afterwards, because what we're doing is we're moving our body from a state of stress and protection to a state of safety. And we need to be in that safety state in order to do our work, in order to be creative, in order to show up as our best selves, in order to get home and not snap at our partner and yell at our kids because we've had such a stressful day. It's actively moving from that state of stress and overwhelm into a state of safety for your nervous system, that is step one. And while we cannot go from feeling that safety state all the way into being positive and more optimistic about things. We can't get to that place of feeling more positive and optimistic until we start with the building blocks of connection to body and self regulation. Regulating your nervous system to a state of safety. And when you're in that state of safety, it might feel very uncomfortable. We live in a world where we don't know what it feels like to have sustainable moments of safety. Everywhere we look, there are reminders of the stressors. You don't have to look very far at all for your nervous system to get activated again. So in those moments, you are going to remind your nervous system of what it feels like to feel safe, and the more often you do it, I do this four times a day, some people do it more, don't do it any less than four times a day. I recommend in your car, in the parking lot before you get out to go to work in the morning, sometime during lunch, and if you don't take lunch, well, then we're gonna have another conversation, but in the bathroom, and if you don't take a bathroom break, then we need to have another conversation. We can talk about that in another podcast episode, please go to the bathroom. Do a breathing break there, do a breathing break in the parking lot again before you leave work, and then one other time before bed, sometime between dinner and bedtime, and what you're going to start to realize is that your body is going to become familiar with that state of safety. And in order to get to a place of feeling positive and optimistic, we need to feel safe first. Because being in your home, being at work, being in your car, being in your bed, these are places where you don't need to feel as if you are being chased by a bear. You get to create your own sense of safety without waiting for external circumstances to do so. And here's what's really important about this and I can't stress this enough. We cannot create from a state of heightened stress. We can't think clearly from a state of heightened stress, the part of your brain that's responsible for higher order thinking, for executive functioning, for prioritizing, for organizing that part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, is not available when you are in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. And to show up as our best selves, to advocate for what we want, to be an activist in any sort of way, to have a conversation with confidence and clarity, you need that part of your brain. And so in order to get there, you get to create this sense of safety for yourself. And you can do this like I said, as many times as you need to. And the positive and optimistic? Well, that comes later. And so while that was your question, what really needs to be answered is what I just said. 

The other piece of this is something that is really important to me, and something I keep on my desk all of the time. And it's this simple statement, “I refuse to become distracted from my important work.” And you know, it makes me teary eyed, even just saying that out loud, I refuse to become distracted from my important work, because the distractions are everywhere, and I can't do what I want to do in this world, being distracted. Now, this doesn't mean that I put my head in the sand and I ignore what's going on, but I am really aware of how my body is feeling. And when my body starts to give me signals of, “Hey, Jen, we're not okay. We feel like we're in threat. It feels like we're going to die. It feels like we're being chased by a bear.” I get to redirect myself. I get to create safety for myself using an exercise like I just shared and plenty others that you can find at the resources page, at Empowered Educator, or plenty of others. And I refocus. I refocus on how I want to show up and who I want to be, in this moment, because I have one life here. This is so temporary. This life is so temporary, and I refuse to abdicate my power to all of the things that are out of my control. 

So with that being said, practice those breathing exercises, practice those breaks in between the day and you know, as I said earlier, is breathing going to change all of the brokenness that's in education? No, but we need to be able to think clearly enough to make those changes. If organizations don't change until people change, this is how we start. This is how we leverage the neuroplasticity of our brain to make sustainable change. So thank you, Sue, so much for your question. And if you're listening and you have a question, send it to hello@empowerededucator.com with a subject line “Podcast”, and you might get your question answered right here on the show too. And at the end of each episode this season, I will pull a card from the Empowered Educator card deck, which was actually inspired by teachers we were working with who asked us, “Hey, we really want something that we could keep on our desk that's tangible as reminders of some of the things that you've said in our classes and in our coursework.” So we gave the people what they want, and we have this gorgeous card deck that is so nice to have and so easy to refer to throughout your day. So I'm going to pick a card from this deck, and this one says, oh, oh, my goodness, “Every day is an opportunity to begin again.” How perfect for this new season, episode one of season four every day is an opportunity to begin again. And we don't have to wait until New Years, we don't have to wait until a new school year, we don't have to wait until Monday, you can start now. You don't have to wait. You can start now. You know, so often we hear stories of some sort of crisis or catastrophe, or, to be honest, I've lost track of the number of educators who have told me that they or someone they know, a teacher they know, have had a cardiac event, and it's, you know, shifted the bedrock of their life. Of course, it has, but you don't have to wait for some life changing events to make changes for yourself. Every day is an opportunity to begin again. What a beautiful card and so fitting for this episode. And if you want your own empowered educator card deck, you can head over to empowerededucator.com/resources, and all of these links will be in the show notes too. That's a great space for you to go to find more cool stuff, breathing exercises, meditations, more episodes of this podcast, some of my favorite books, and all of these other great things. And one last thing, we are always looking for teachers who aren't feeling great and who haven't felt connected to their work in a long time and really want to start living their lives with a healthier work-life balance. Our next self paced class Thrive starts on April 1st, and it is exactly the place for you to find the answers that you're looking for. Join the thousands of educators who have already taken this life changing course. They've avoided burnout, they've reduced the stress in their life, and they've really rediscovered their passion for teaching, because I want you to want more for yourself, and counting down the days until Friday, the weeks until summer vacation and the years until retirement. Thrive is the reset button that will change everything. Doors are now open for registration at empowerededucator.com/thrive. Thank you so much for the work that you do in this world. You have the most important job in the world.

Remember, the most generous thing that you can do for your students is take care of yourself. So if you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe so you never miss a moment of inspiration. And if you're loving the show, I'd love for you to leave a review. This helps more educators like you find the space to unlock their teaching potential, too. Until next time, please remember that you are a gift to this world, so act accordingly. See you soon.