Teacher burnout, stress, anxiety are common problems in education, as UNICEF (2023) asserts. This article invites us to reflect about wellbeing decisions and how to integrate good practices to help educators keep a healthy work-life balance, with an emphasis on remote work scenarios. Robert Chadfield is the British Council Argentina Director, he is an experienced teacher manager with a special interest in wellbeing practices. We talked to him about his personal experience in connection with these subjects and preventive measures we can all take.
Robert explained he has a personal interest in mental health, he has studied mindfulness and meditation. He travelled to India and spent time there living with Tibetan monks in an exchange. His interest is fueled by the fact that he has suffered burnout himself due to work pressure, accompanied by insomnia, depression, anxiety. Robert is not alone on this. Many workers around the world experience some of these symptoms and there are added risks in remote work scenarios, as the World Health Organisation has warned.
During the pandemic, remote work became more common, which brought along a number of associated risks such as an added danger of isolation and loneliness. This is related to the fact remote work implies being all day at home by yourself. Even if you have a conversation online, it is not the same as having human contact. This connects to another risk which is the breakdown in communication that can occur without the help of body language. It is easier for miscommunication to happen over emails, for teachers to get offended and stressed. Another issue is the lack of work-life balance. Teachers who work from home often wake up and check their email or engage in other work-related activities, which is not sensible. It can be difficult to put a stop to this, as it is hard in general to promote our own wellbeing. Humans, Rob says, are often not very good at managing themselves.
This is one of the reasons why he believes people should be open about what they are experiencing. A report indicates that 50% of people are going to have some form of mental health issue during their lifetime. His witty take is that the other 50 per cent are liars. He also points to the data that indicates that of the tens of thousands of thoughts we have per day, a great majority are negative, which obviously has a big impact on our mental health.
From the point of view of managers, preventing mental health issues in the teaching population is no easy task. However, there are actions that can be taken, starting from recognising the signs. A number of signals can be indicators of burnout:
- Teachers who look seemingly detached from work or overly emotional
- Staff members being excessively tired, which doesn’t seem to improve when they have rested
- Poor performance
Managers need to check in with their colleagues and make sure they are ok. Being empathetic is important, but it’s also key to empower people to take control of their own wellbeing and their own life. Robert has found himself challenging team members who engage in unhealthy behaviour such as skipping meals or working extremely long hours, which relates to establishing healthy organisational cultures. Organisation cultures where people are proud of how hard and excessively tired they are at work, even burnt out, should be unacceptable. In the same sense, staff rooms or schools can be fiercely political environments in which different groups are at odds. Managers can create alternative positive working environments and should intervene when they see any of the aforementioned harmful behaviour to prevent it from continuing to happen.
Equally important is creating channels of communication with all members of the team, regardless of hierarchy. While workers are usually wary of bypassing line managers, senior managers need to create an open door culture to look after the wellbeing of all staff members and find the time to meet with anybody who needs it.
Robert has several pieces of advice for teachers to be able to keep a healthy work-life balance. However obvious some of this may seem, he encourages teachers to ask themselves whether they actually follow any of these recommendations, as many do not. These include:
- Plan your week, plan your days, including not only the work but the time when you are not going to be working, your recreation, and stick to it. If your employer sets the plan for you, you have to push back to ensure a balanced one (this includes requests such as having breaks, you can’t teach 8 hours in a row!). Review your plan at the end of the day: did you stick to times? Did you stop for lunch?
- Get a piece of paper and write days of the week, how many days of the week did you do something nice for yourself? if the answer is none of very few, you need to review that.
- Ask yourself: what negative thoughts are you having that are causing stress? Once you’ve identified the negative thoughts, try to identify thought distortions: are you catastrophising your thoughts (e.g I had a bad observation, therefore I’m an awful teacher). Are you magnifying the negative and minimising the positive? When we feel things, we think they are true, and that’s often not the case. Managing your thoughts is very difficult thing as they are the ones that lead to anxiety, burnout, mental health issues. If you are having thoughts like that and those are negative, you have to be able to challenge them. One way to do this is to write them down and challenge them, imagining you’re giving advice to a friend.
- Avoid mind reading. Do not make judgments about what somebody else thinks about you just by the way they are looking.
- Try to focus on the present, on the tasks at hand. Depression is having negative thoughts, ruminating about the past, anxiety is worrying about the future. If you can only just stay in the present moment, focusing on what you are doing now, it will help. This is what mindfulness tries to achieve. As Marcus Aurelius has expressed, we can only control our thoughts, our actions and our attitude. We can’t control all other things in our life, that’s the reality, trying to be too much in control can lead to stress.
- Change your surroundings. Don’t sit in the same place every day, all day. Stand up, go into different physical settings.
- To release stress, keep a TV on with the volume down with soothing videos such as aquariums, nature, live feed from the International Space Station, reminders of how beautiful the world is.
- Use meditation and or mindfulness techniques (these are different). Use guided meditations if you are not used to them, as you will need support. Good places to start are Youtube channels The Mindful Movement and Michael Sealey’s. Some people claim they don’t have the time for this, but some of these videos are very short, he is sure you can find 10 minutes a day for this.
- Exercise if you are feeling burnout, which is proven to reduce the symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression.
It is interesting to highlight that very similar advice has been given by UNICEF in this article with self-care tips for teachers.
To finish this inspiring conversation, Robert invited us all to be kind to ourselves. He reminded us of Jake Tyler’s TED talk ‘Learning to live with depression’ in which he mentions that depression is ‘the biggest, most inclusive club in the world. Anyone can join; it's evolving all the time. But its biggest trick is convincing everyone who's part of the club that they're the only member.’ This is true with many mental health issues, but we are not the only members, most of us have -to some extent- issues with our mental health and we all need to mind it as we mind our physical health. Do not feel alone and get help, there are organisations that you can contact through your health providers, reach out and get help before it becomes serious. It may be difficult or involve money, but your wellbeing is something you should be prepared to invest in.