Does Emotional Health Impact Teacher Effectiveness?

What do you think? Do you have an answer to that question? Email me if you do. I’d be curious to read your answer.

As for me — ummmm — I’m not sure how I would answer it. I think it’s a complicated question. First, it begs the answer to ‘what does an effective teacher do?’ Additionally, I think different stakeholders (administrators, parents, other teachers, guidance staff, students, etc.) have different views on what effective teachers do.

I DO think it would be easy to argue that emotionally UNhealthy people can be very effective at doing certain things.

Take me for example. Most of my life I’ve generally been emotionally unhealthy. But that didn’t keep me from overworking my ass off and winning state and national teaching awards. So I guess many people would say that I’ve been effective. BUT, during that same teaching career, I’ve suffered burn out, had paralyzing personal crises, and started a years-long journey of seeing professional therapists.

Here is a list (generated by ChatGPT) entitled “Habits Of Emotionally Healthy People.” (Gosh. Double gosh. Yep — loads of unhealth in my life according to this list.)

An emotionally healthy person isn’t perfect, but they’ve cultivated habits that help them navigate life with resilience, authenticity, and relational depth. Here are key habits that emotionally healthy people tend to practice:

1. They Notice and Name Their Emotions

• They regularly check in with themselves.

• They can identify emotions like anger, sadness, fear, joy, or shame, without dismissing or moralizing them.

• They don't say, “I shouldn’t feel this way.” Instead, they ask, “What is this feeling trying to tell me?”

2. They Don’t Minimize or Ignore Pain

• They recognize that emotional wounds matter—even if others think they “shouldn’t be a big deal.”

• They give themselves permission to grieve losses, acknowledge disappointments, and process wounds rather than stuffing or avoiding them.

3. They Set Healthy Boundaries

• They say no without guilt when something violates their values or capacity.

• They know their limits, and they protect their time, energy, and emotional space with kindness and clarity.

• They understand that boundaries are not rejection—they are a form of self-respect and relational honesty.

4. They Take Responsibility for Themselves

• They own their choices, behaviors, and growth.

• They don’t blame others for everything, but also don’t take on what isn’t theirs.

• They are actively healing their wounds rather than expecting others to heal them.

5. They Practice Vulnerability

• They can say, “I’m struggling,” “I was hurt by that,” or “I need help.”

• They invite safe people into their inner world and don’t pretend everything’s fine when it isn’t.

6. They Stay Curious, Not Judgmental

• Toward others and themselves.

• They approach hard conversations and emotions with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

• They ask, “What’s going on beneath the surface?” instead of making quick assumptions.

7. They Regulate, Not Suppress

• They don’t act on every impulse or feeling, but neither do they shut them down.

• They use tools like breathing, reflection, movement, prayer, or therapy to bring their nervous system back to a calm, grounded place.

8. They Live in Alignment with Their Values

• They know what matters to them and try to live congruently.

• They don’t betray themselves just to gain approval or avoid conflict.

• Their integrity brings inner peace—even when it’s hard.

9. They Cultivate Safe Relationships

• They are drawn to mutual, respectful, attuned connections.

• They recognize unsafe dynamics (e.g., gaslighting, manipulation, chronic invalidation) and don’t normalize or tolerate them.

• They choose connection over control.

10. They Make Room for Joy

• Emotional health isn’t just about pain—it also includes celebration.

• They delight in small pleasures, practice gratitude, and give themselves permission to enjoy life without guilt or shame.

Bonus:

They Are Willing to Grow

• Emotional health is a lifelong journey, not a finish line.

• They welcome feedback, seek help when needed, and see healing as ongoing—not a sign of failure but of maturity.

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Wow. I love that list so much. It is so relieving for me to read even though I continue to need so much growth in these areas.

Sadly, I think some people would say that if I grew these habits into my life that it would make me less of an effective teacher. (They might say I’d become less dedicated — I might make more space in my life for self-care and wouldn’t sacrifice enough for students like more dedicated teachers do.)

Interestingly, other people might say that growing these habits into my life would make me more effective. (They would note that I could become more empathetic and more accessible to students who suffer emotional pain. Being more in touch with my own humanity would allow me to teach and influence my human students more effectively.)

Regardless of how emotional health affects teaching, I’m seeing that it does affect my ability to cope with my life’s pressures, which include my professional pressures. I’m becoming a more joyful professional…and that is becoming a sweet treasure to me at least.

#Teacher Pressure

Lesson Planning That Cares For me, Me, ME!!!

I’m not assuming that this happens to every teacher…but it definitely happens to me:

When it’s time for lesson planning, I spend ALL my focus and energy on preparing for students and their needs. And poor, little ‘ol me gets completely lost and neglected.

It’s sad.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t forget about myself on purpose. It’s like I have this messed up, auto-pilot issue going on. I think my upbringing and traumatic experiences during childhood hardwired me to automatically be hypervigilant of others’ needs. It’s part of what makes teaching so soul-scrapingly exhausting for me.

That being said, maybe now you will know why I felt so proud of myself when I was flipping through a notebook and saw this August (week-before-school-started) journal entry. Here’s a picture of the journal and then I’ll type it out so you don’t have to decipher my chicken-scratch handwriting.

Ugh!!! Waking up sooooooo early to start school at 7:15am. Double ugh.

Ideas for self-care in the fall:

1- How to deal with waking up early:

• Get enough sleep. I usually don’t do so well if I only get 6 or 7 hours of sleep. So in order to give myself a chance to have a more energized mood, I need to prioritize getting 7 and 1/2 or 8 hours of sleep.

  • Bottom line…I need to have a 9pm bedtime.

• Have enough margin in the morning. I’m realizing that my anxiety level increases if I rush in the morning before school. So in order to give myself a chance to have less anxiety, I need to give myself enough time at home before I leave for school.

  • Bottom line…I need to wake up at 5am.

  • Bottom line #2…I have to have my outfit, lunch for the day and lesson materials ready the night before so that I’m not scrambling with those things in the morning.

  • Bottom line #3…I need to do a morning stretch and some bodyweight exercises while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew.

  • Bottom line #4…I need to eat my breakfast slowly. I need to breathe deeply and I need to take a few moments to log my feelings on the How We Feel app.

Hahahahaha!! Planning out when to pee in between classes!! Sorry. TMI.

2- How to deal with teaching 3, 80-minute blocks in a row:

• Go pee after block 1.

• Have greek yogurt and protein granola after block 1.

• Have a glass of cold brew at the end of SMART period.

• Maybe have my 9th graders be in charge of a beginning of class routine. Maybe tack on an occasional student-led-self-care-check-in as part of the beginning of class routine.

I’m a nervous nelly that tends to obsessively think about school outside of school hours. That habit drained me. So I wrote some ideas of what I could occupy myself with outside of school hours to help take my mind off of school.

3- What can I do to care for myself outside of school hours to make the teaching load more sustainable?

• Prepare for a half marathon (it will give me something big to work on to help take my mind off of my school responsibilities outside of school hours.

  • run 5ks on tuesday and thursday.

  • long run on saturdays

  • buy new running shoes

  • stretch and strengthen body 5 days a week.

• Eat to fuel my body and not as a way of coping with stress.

• take naps

• snuggle wifey and talk together

• tease and play with daughters

• make sure to have a weekly family time to talk calendar and finances.

Yep!

That’s what I wrote in August of 2024. And it worked!! I built into my planning some planning for my SELF. Here are some celebration-self-care pics from the 2024-25 school year:

We trained for 9 months!! This is me and my wife in the hotel room on the morning of the Pittsburgh half marathon.

Us at the starting line.

Me at the finish line after 13.1 miles!! (ugh — sorry — I didn’t pee my pants. That’s just sweat. Embarrassing. Sorry.)

We bought ourselves running shoes. Training for 9 months really DID help me take my mind off of school so much. It gave me something else BIG to think about and work on.

I also wanted to snuggle and tease my daughters as part of self care for myself. Thanks wifey for teaching me that playfulness is important in life!

I packed mid-morning healthy snacks to help me get through teaching 3, 80 minute blocks before lunch time.

ooooooo — and I didn’t mention this above…but I bought myself some nice hand soap and hid it behind the fridge in the faculty lounge. After my 3 classes were done I would wash my hands for a while and take a big breath in to smell the yummy fragrance and to breath out the stress of the morning of teaching.

Hooray for including my needs in lesson planning and yearly planning time!!

#TeacherPressure

The Pressure of Being “Teacher Me” All the Time

author: submitted by anonymous teacher

Do I have to be the perfect embodiment of a teacher 24/7?

Teacher pressure, to me, feels like living in two versions of myself at once. There’s “Teacher Me," the version people expect: kind, bubbly, upbeat, positive. The one who has unlimited energy and dresses professionally even when buying groceries. You know the type: somewhere between Miss Honey and Ms. Frizzle.

And then there’s just… me. I love my job, but I’m also a person who says "bad words," listens to loud rock music in the car, and occasionally shows up to Walmart in sweatpants covered in paint and yesterday’s hair because I am renovating my house.  It's taken years of learning to try to be okay with that... To stop trying to live up to a version of "perfect teacher" that doesn’t actually exist.

The pressure gets heavier when you live in the community you teach in. It’s hard to ever fully clock out. A simple trip to the store in July might turn into a parent meet and greet, and then I'm left panicking: How do they perceive me based on what I was wearing and the 3 bags of chips and 2 candy bars in the cart? A neighborhood event might mean navigating conversations with students while also trying to unwind, wearing leggings and a T-shirt with a funny but questionable graphic. Even when I’m off the clock, I’m still "the teacher."

To me, it's always felt like there’s this unspoken expectation that you’re always supposed to look the part too. There have been moments where I’ve stood in front of my closet, wondering if what I want to wear is “teacher-y” enough in case I run into someone from school. It’s subtle, but it builds up: the sense that your whole identity has to orbit around your role in the classroom. I have advanced degrees and a professional title that sound impressive, and I guess they are, but sometimes it feels like those create an expectation that I must also be the perfect embodiment of a teacher 24/7. I don’t want to let people down, but I also just want to be allowed to exist as a regular person too. 

What’s wild is that most of this pressure doesn’t come from my students, or the parents, or even my district, but rather it comes from the culture around teaching, and from within myself. Teachers want to be role models. We want to show up fully. But that doesn’t mean we stop being human. That doesn’t mean we should feel guilty for having a personal life, an edge, a style, a voice that doesn’t always sound like it belongs in a staff meeting.

Teaching is a beautiful, exhausting, meaningful career. But it can also feel like you’re walking a tightrope between who you are and who people think you should be. Over the years, I've begun to let those two versions of myself meet in the middle. Because being human, flawed, real, loud-music-loving, occasionally-sweary human, isn’t a failure of the job. It’s what makes me better at it.

Is my body telling me a story? Experimenting with tracking feelings and sensations.

I’m 43 and many years have gone by without me knowing terms like body sensations or negative cognitions. But 2 years ago a friend of mine told me about how his journaling included documenting those two things plus feelings.

Ugh. I hate journaling. And I thought, ‘what the heck does journaling body sensations and negative cognitions look like?' So he explained that he looked at some word banks and copied down the words that applied to him at the moment as he mentally scanned his body, thoughts and feelings.

Here’s an example of what his word banks looked like.

Negative cognitions:

(Resource from VirtualEMDR)

Body sensations:

(Resource from Journeys Counseling)

Feelings:

(Example from Calm.com)

Let me give you a journaling example.

(As I write this blog post, I’m sitting at Dunkin’ Donuts while my daughter is working on some summer course homework. As I’m sitting next to her I will scan my body, thoughts and feelings to give you an example of what the journaling exercise might look like.)

July 5th 3:22pm

Scanning the words on the body sensations word bank, I perceive that I’m currently having these sensations in my body:

• achy, breathless, bruised, clenched, constricted, dense, jittery, knotted, shaky, wobbly, tense

Scanning the words on the feelings wheel, I perceive that I’m currently feeling:

• weak, frightened, worried, inadequate, insignificant, nervous, exposed, let down, humiliated, critical, annoyed, judgmental, hurt, vulnerable, lonely, isolated, fragile, grief, empty, inferior, disappointed, interested, proud, hopeful, creative, free, surprised, disillusioned, eager, stressed, rushed, pressured

Scanning the words on the negative cognitions list, I perceive that I’m currently thinking (usually subconsciously):

• i am defective, i don’t deserve love, i am worthless, i am inadequate, i am not lovable, i am not good enough, i am ugly, i do not deserve, i am insignificant, i am a disappointment, i am different, i don’t belong, i cannot trust my judgement, i am weak, i have to be perfect, i have to please everyone, i should have done something, i did something wrong, i should have known better

Wow. Even though I’ve done that exercise a lot of times now, I’m surprised at how much I’m carrying today without realizing it. (All I’ve done today is sleep in, watch the PSG vs Bayern Munich game at noon, scan the Tour de France day 1 highlights, and take my daughter to dunkin’ donuts.) Whoa. That’s a lot of feelings.

Anyway…the point of this blog post is not what I’m feeling today. The point is that I’ve lived for so long without knowing about this stuff. And it is leading me to some surprising realizations. I’ll share one realization below:

The daily grind of being a teacher at school takes a noticeable toll on my nervous system.

I noticed it for the first time a couple months ago when I had 10 straight days off of school during spring break. I noticed in my body that I was able to experience deeper relaxation and calm knowing that I wasn’t having to go back to school soon. And then I noticed (on the Sunday before returning after spring break) that my ability to access deep relaxation and calm was virtually impossible. I noticed on week nights that I would try to relax but still feel tense because I knew I had to wake up the next day and face school. And the day in and day out experience of that affects my nervous system.

I noticed it for the second time late in June once the school year was done. As the summer started, I noticed that I had the thought, ‘ahhh…I don’t have to go back to school for a long time. I can relax,’ and my nervous system felt relieved.

That’s got me thinking: ‘Is my body (in this case my perception of my nervous system) telling me a story? If so, what does it tell me about my experience at school? Why do I get so tense and clenched during the weeks of daily grind? Why do I experience such a noticeable increase in ability to relax when there are long periods of time away from school?

I’m not sure what the answers are. But I’m trying to learn to explore.

The Weight We Carry: What Pressures Are Teachers Facing Today?

By Rebecca Underwood

Teaching was once a noble craft, anchored in autonomy, care and community. A profession where wisdom was passed from hand to hand, voice to voice and the classroom belonged to the teacher who stood at its helm. But now? Many teachers feel like passengers on someone else’s ship - pulled by tides they didn’t choose, steered by leaders they don’t trust, and drowning in initiatives that dilute their expertise.

So, what pressures do teachers face in today’s system? Let’s name them, honestly.

The erosion of autonomy lies at the heart of it all. Decisions are handed down in glossy folders and ready-made PowerPoints, with little regard for the children in front of us or the teacher who knows them best. Curriculums are pre-packaged and stripped of creativity, turned into scripts with no room for tangents, no space for curiosity, and no trust in the person delivering them. The joy of planning, of crafting something bespoke, responsive, alive, has been replaced by schemes written far from the classroom, yet deemed sacred.

CPD is rarely better. So often, it is directionless, hollow, or built for box-ticking. Sessions are delivered to the many, but useful to the few. It is not professional learning when it lacks purpose. It is not development when it doesn’t spark anything new.

Add to that the weight of endless demands: the unpaid hours spent chasing data, tweaking displays, leading clubs, covering classes, and completing policies, so many tasks that stretch far beyond the school day, creeping into weekends, bleeding into the spaces where joy should be. Teachers are tired. Not because they don’t care, but because they do.

And still, the pressure mounts.

The mental toll of feeling overwhelmed is deep and enduring. If teaching was only about the children, it would still be one of the hardest jobs in the world. But it never only is. There are meetings, interventions, accountability measures, and layers of responsibility added to already impossible days. Teachers live with the constant anxiety of not being enough, the dread of Monday mornings where there should be the quiet joy of returning to their class—the familiar faces, the spark of wonder, the chance to shape another week of discovery and connection. The whispers of “informal support plans” circle staffrooms, haunting even the most experienced. Educators who have spent decades lighting up classrooms are suddenly scrutinized, not for their impact on children, but for their unwillingness to ‘perform’ for leadership.

This is the hardest truth: many of the teachers now being deemed ineffective are the same ones who’ve held schools together for years. They’ve given everything. They’ve weathered change after change, stayed for the children, adapted time and again. Now, some are being pushed out for questioning decisions, for asking “why?”, for daring to speak up.

We are losing our strongest cohort; those who know, feel, and live this work. The ones we should be holding on to with both hands.

And hovering behind much of this pressure is the quiet, unspoken consequence of academisation. What began as a promise of innovation has too often fractured into a hierarchy-heavy system that siphons money upward and strips power away from those on the ground. CEOs of multi-academy trusts now earn more than the Prime Minister, while TAs, vital lifelines for children with SEND, are cut, stretched thin, or simply not replaced. There are too many chiefs, and not enough hands in the classroom. Collaboration across schools, once a strength of the system, has been lost to competitive cultures and fragmented visions. Fads come and go, initiatives are recycled, and staff nod along wearily - we’ve seen this before, and we know how it ends. Teachers are crying out for substance, not spectacle.

Behaviour issues are rising. Parental entitlement is growing. Teachers are expected to do more, with less, and to do it perfectly. Yet no one’s asking why behaviour is slipping. Perhaps it is because children too are suffocating under a curriculum that doesn’t meet their needs- content-heavy, test-driven, stripped of the magic of discovery. There’s little time for imagination, for talking, for joyful chaos. Perhaps children are frustrated because they feel it too: the loss of spark, the burnout in the room, the pressure trickling down from adult to child. Surely there’s a connection here.

When the classroom becomes a place of performance rather than possibility, everyone loses. But when lessons are allowed to breathe, when learning takes unexpected turns, when teachers feel empowered to follow a child's question down a winding path of wonder…..then magic returns. These are the moments both teacher and child remember. This is where relationships grow and learning lives.

And what of our new teachers? They enter the profession not to be artists, but operators. They are taught to deliver, not to lead. To implement, not to create. Yes, they need support. Yes, they need structure. But we have taken too much. We have flattened their freedom and left them with laminated plans and no space to find their voice. We are shaping a generation of educators who may never know the joy of teaching their way, and that is a deep and bitter loss.

Yet still, I hold fast to the belief that teaching is the most meaningful vocation of all. I spent twenty-five years in educational settings: twenty-two in the classroom and three in school improvement. The privilege of shaping young minds, of watching children grow in confidence, curiosity and skill, is unlike anything else… and it stays with you long after you leave the classroom. There is joy in knowing where to take a child next, in igniting that spark and walking alongside them as they discover what they’re capable of. I didn’t leave the classroom because I couldn’t manage the demands; teachers expect challenge. We know this work is hard. But what we don’t expect is to be undermined by systems that erode trust, strip autonomy, and reduce teaching to task delivery. Teachers are not work-shy; they are professionals who take pride in doing the job well. But what we are increasingly weary of is the culture of surveillance, the “you are not good enough” narrative, and the ever-growing layers of accountability that rarely centre the child. I left because the pressures made it harder to do the job properly, harder to teach responsively, creatively, with care and instinct. And I know I’m not alone.

So, what would I say to the teachers standing in the middle of this?

You are not the problem. You are not failing. You are standing strong in a system that has forgotten what it means to trust its teachers. Your exhaustion is not weakness, it is the mark of someone who has been giving everything to everyone, with little left for yourself. Your frustration is not a flaw, it is a signal that you still care, that you still believe in what education could be. If you are questioning, it is because you hold standards higher than the system allows. And if you are weary, it is because you’ve been carrying far too much, for far too long.

This profession does not need more policy. It needs protection. It needs leaders who listen and structures that serve. It needs space for teachers to bring themselves to their practice - not just their compliance, but their creativity, their instinct, their voice. Because when teachers are trusted, children thrive. When classrooms are freed from the tyranny of templates and targets, learning becomes what it was always meant to be: alive, human, full of possibility. If we want children to be inspired, we must first set their teachers free.

Let them teach.

Before we lose what matters most.

#TeacherPressure