How to overcome back-to-school teacher anxiety

Your stomach’s been in knots for a week and school doesn’t start until Monday.

You keep waking up at 4am running through seating charts that don’t exist yet.

You feel like something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s built to do.

Your brain senses a big unknown, new kids, a new schedule, new expectations, and treats it like a threat, flooding your body with stress hormones to get you ready. That racing heart and stomach knot are cortisol and adrenaline showing up early. It’s not a character flaw. It’s biology responding to something real.

If your school sends you into that with zero support, nominate your school for the kind of PD that actually prepares people for week one, instead of leaving you to white knuckle it alone.

Here’s something you can actually do about it, not a mantra, a three step reset you can run anywhere, even standing alone in your classroom at 6am.

• Step one, name it out loud, specifically. Not “I’m fine,” try “I’m anxious about the first day and that makes sense.” Vague dread is harder for your brain to let go of than a named, specific feeling.

• Step two, find where it’s sitting in your body, the tight chest, the stomach knot, the clenched jaw, and put a hand there for a second.

• Step three, take one breath where the exhale is longer than the inhale, in for four counts, out for six. That longer exhale is what actually tells your nervous system the threat has passed. It’s not a metaphor, it’s how your vagus nerve works.

That’s it. Ten seconds, three steps, and you can run it as many times as you need between now and the first bell, and again in the bathroom on day one itself if you need to.

It won’t make the anxiety disappear. It will stop it from running the whole show.

The racing heart, the sleepless night, the stomach thing? Reply, I read every one, and you are absolutely not the only one carrying it.

Keep an eye out for next week’s post on what to actually do with that nervous energy once the bell rings and the kids are in front of you.

Rae

P.S. If you’re an administrator reading this, your staff is walking in carrying this same nervous system response whether they say it out loud or not. Curious what it would look like to actually plan for that in your first week? Request a custom PD plan and let’s build it.