Teacher Self-Care

Stress

We derived the word "stress" from a Latin word, strictus, which means "drawn tight." Stress- your body's way of responding to demands- often manifests in the body as physical tension, pain, and tightness.

All animals have a stress response, which evolved as an intelligent, natural "fight-or-flight" reaction to potentially harmful situations. 

When you face a dangerous situation, you body automatically recalibrates to increase oxygen and the hormone adrenaline: your pulse quickens, you breathe faster, and your muscles tense.

Although the majority of modern stressors are more psychological or emotional, the body still reacts to stress in the same way that it responds to a physical threat.

With chronic stress (when external and internal factors constantly trigger automatic stress responses not needed for immediate survival), effects on the body include greatly lowered immunity and dysfunction in the digestive, exvretory, and reproductive systems. Chronic stress can also manifest as sleeplessness, irritability, anger, and a depressed mood. People under chronic stress are more prone to infections, and vaccines can be less effective for them, for example.

Generational Stress

Stress can also have generational effects. 

Studies show that environmental stress can promote the transgenerational inheritance of disease (Skinner, 2014). 

We can inherit stress.

Observations suggest that ancestral environmental stress may be a component of disease in the current population. 

 We can pass down stress to our descendants.

Stress experienced during a person's lifetime often correlates to stress-related problems in that person's offspring (and even in the offspring's offspring).

One study showed that ancestral stress promotes biological inheritance of disease in great-grandchildren (Gaisler-Salomon, 2014).

Chronic Stress

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the changes in health caused by chronic stress may be hard to notice at first (2017).

Because the source of stress may be constant or inherited (as opposed to acute or immediately traumatic), the body does not know when to return to normal functioning.

Over time, continued strain on the body from routine stress may lead to serious physical and mental health problems, including the following (National Institute of Mental Health, 2017):

• High blood pressure

• Diabetes

• Depression

• Anxiety disorders

• Exhaustion and burnout

Stress on Educators

In 2014, Gallup's State of America's Schools Report showed that nearly half of all American teachers reported having a lot of daily stress (Klein, 2014).

Of 12 professions surveyed, "teachers were least likely to report feeling like their 'opinions seemed to count' at work" (Klein, 2014, para. 3).

Seventy percent of K-12 teachers surveyed also reported that they "do not feel engaged in their work" (Klein, 2014, para. 2).

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