This post is a modified excerpt of Chapter 10 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway
Teaching Is Lovable
All of the approaches offered in this book will feel more possible if we make another shift; what if you aren’t doing this work to heal teacher burnout to survive teaching, but because you love it?
We’ve affirmed that teaching is hard. We’ll keep affirming that, because it will keep being true. What we have emphasized less, but what deserves just as much emphasis, is that you
love it. There are parts of the gig that work well for you on every level. Supporting young humans to keep becoming humans is meaningful and nourishing. Even in contexts of the most controlled curriculum, we have freedom over how we interact with students. Many other jobs include more frequent and intense supervision. It’s not only ok but important to admit how good it is for our quality of life to be guaranteed holidays with our families and summers away from the classroom.
We can love teaching without letting it own our entire identity and damage our lives. Counter-intuitively, we save ourselves and our love for teaching by allowing teaching to inform our entire identity. By joyfully, emphatically, and non-apologetically owning our choice to teach, we can live our lives fully—including our choice to teach, not in spite of it.
Teaching Is A Big Deal
To better understand what it means to choose to build an identity around an activity that is hard, lovable, and worthy, let’s use an analogy.
Through a series of complete coincidences, as no part of my life overlaps with extreme athleticism, a friend of mine is a world-class endurance athlete. As in, a clocking the fastest known time of a trail-less ridge line route through a 100-mile mountain range in a sleepless 48- hours of unsupported running kind of athlete. I emphasize the randomness of this because I, to be clear, am not one of those. Though many of his friends are also athletes, so few are capable of his level of performance that it’s hard for them to participate with him.
Because we love and admire him, but can’t join in a significant part of his world, the second-best thing we can do is to support him in whatever ways he needs to structure his life to be able to continue doing those things. In this analogy, I am not comparing you to Sunday joggers (no shade, Sunday joggers). I am comparing you to a super-athlete, to someone whose chosen activity is so grueling and all-encompassing that a lot of their energy when they’re not doing that thing is still about that thing.
I’m comparing educators to world-class athletes on purpose. This metaphor is meant to affirm that teaching is both hard and worthy. Teachers interact with an astonishing number of humans, and each interaction is rich with opportunities for deep connection. Teachers are
asked to shoulder a wide range of sociocultural expectations, often while insufficiently supported.
Teachers are creative powerhouses, generating more new ideas in a given week than professionals in other fields are invited to within their entire careers. The only other professionals who make more decisions per unit time are air traffic controllers; educators make an average of 1500 decisions per day—according to research completed before
smartphones were a thing.
Teachers are a big deal. You Are a Big Deal.
The bummer for educators is that, even though You Are a Big Deal, you’re the only one you can rely on to consistently behave like that is true. The good news is that acting like You Are a Big Deal is enough. Once you claim extreme self-care as your responsibility, it’s easier for it to live in all parts of your life so that you can participate in your life more fully.
The most crucial analogy in this athlete-to-educator comparison is how big of a deal you are. The second most important part is how okay his big-deal-edness is for the people in my friend’s life who love and support him. No one in his life is bothered by how he needs to live to support his life affirming choices. His dietary preferences are honored, his getting up to
stretch a calf in the middle of a meal doesn’t raise an eyebrow. He goes to bed early, naps, makes weird requests at restaurants and doesn’t apologize; he realizes that, to perform at the level he does, his personal life will inevitably be informed by his need for extreme self-care. He’s not only allowed to care for himself toward excellence, he’s socially supported to do so.
You are responsible for knowing what you need to do in order to do what you want to do. If you tell that to the important people in your life and they support you, excellent! If you find yourself constantly apologizing for what you need to people who claim to care about you, that is concerning. Secure relationships don’t tolerate each other’s boundaries, they celebrate them.
Decisions Are Expensive
The English word “decide” has the same Latin lineage as “homicide.” When we make a decision, we kill at least one of two options. This intense reality is amplified for people who make an extraordinary number of decisions during their standard work day.
As an educator, you are particularly susceptible to decision fatigue, a subtype of burnout. Technically, decision fatigue describes how humans make worse choices after having to make many choices. This certainly applies to educators, and seems to go one step further in that not only do we make worse decisions (like all humans with predictably fallible and exhaustible brains), but the task of making a decision in the first place begins to feel
overwhelming.
Decision fatigue is inevitable. We won’t ever be free of it. There will never be fewer decisions that must be made in real-time when facilitating a room full of real humans. If you’re sensitive to dominant culture characteristics like perfectionism or a perpetual sense of urgency, decisions become even more stressful.
Having accepted this, we can then intentionally set ourselves up to have the energy and presence of mind for the decisions that really matter. Because we can’t change our limited capacity for decision making, the best we can hope to do to decide what we’re going to decide about. We set ourselves up to decide well about decisions we care about by
protecting ourselves against the types of decisions we care about less.
Decide When You’re Strong
Our decision-making day begins the moment we wake in the morning. Immediately, we’re greeted with an onslaught of potential decisions. Should we push snooze? Do we want to let the dog out before or after we pee? Is that creamer still okay to put in the coffee?
Individually, each are inconsequential questions. Our brains, however, don’t experience them as separate. Remember, decision fatigue is the cumulative stress impact of needing to decide many things over time.
Free your brain for the decisions that matter by making decisions ahead of time about as many choices as possible.
We can decide ahead of time about the to-snooze-or-not-to-snooze decision by putting the alarm across the room. By making it harder to hit the snooze button in general, we stack the situation in our favor by choosing, ahead of time, to get out of bed every morning. If mornings are particularly rough, we may put a second alarm even further from the bedroom. By the time we turn off the alarm(s), we have to make a more conscious decision to return to bed than to keep going with our day. We decide, when we’re rested and strong, that getting up on time is the right decision, and so we build our morning to support it. That’s one less real-time decision we have to make.
Reliable routines minimize decision-making and maximize efficiency. Committing to an order in your habit cascade will help you complete the same repetitive tasks efficiently without using any precious decision-making energy for them. For example, if letting the dog out is on the way to the bathroom as I wake up in the morning, I’d let the dog out first. If the
bathroom is between here and the back door, I’d pee first. By deciding that I will routinize the order of these two tasks once, I don’t have to decide about the order each morning.
We can look for demand-lowering prechoices everywhere. The creamer, for example; we can get smaller containers of creamer and adjust the fridge temperature to eliminate the in-the moment decision demand of evaluating your morning beverage freshness.
It's ok if these examples don’t apply to your life. The point is not to tell you what to do, it’s to offer a framework to evaluate your own context and apply decision-demand-reducing principles in ways that work for you.
When asked about decision fatigue, neuroscientist Oliver Sacks replied, “I don’t have the problem... I make a willful choice that certain things I care about a lot and I worry over, and then there’s a whole swath of my life that I just don’t choose.” For the majority of his adult life, Dr. Sacks’ nightly meal consisted of a bowl of tabouli and a tin of sardines. Do you need to learn to love tabouli and sardines to have a sane career in the classroom? Nope! I offer this example because Dr. Sacks is someone to take seriously; he could have afforded anything for any meal, but he understood that no matter how wealthy or successful, he couldn’t purchase more decisionmaking capacity. It was valuable enough to him to save his decision-making for important decisions that he was willing to let dinner not be one of them.
Taking decision fatigue seriously means ruthlessly addressing the parts of your life where you’re wasting your decision-making power. If you're working through the activities in Planning to Stay, You have already taken a step in fighting your own decision fatigue. You
have decided to put things onto your calendar in a way that gives you the space, time, and unpressured freedom to consider, weigh options, and factor in what’s most important to you. You’ve already decided what you value ahead of time.
The trick now is to make as many daily decisions as possible as automated as possible to free your brain to manage the parts of life—and teaching—that are harder to predict.
For concrete exercises and strategies, see Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway