Educator Nervous System Supports

It all starts with you. The work you do each day matters, and in order to show up for your students, you must first take care of yourself.  Our students' differences can make navigating a school system and world which were created for neurotypicals difficult; this can show up in dysregulation, attention differences, struggles completing work assignments, communication, and many other ways which may feel challenging for us as the adults to understand and support at times, which can then cause us to become dysregulated. Our nervous systems feed off each other, and many of our autistic students are especially sensitive to shifts in nervous system states. Our dysregulation can then lead to more dysregulation for our students! In order to best support our students, we must be able to problem solve, collaborate, think creatively, understand, empathize, and be motivated to do the detective work necessary to find underlying needs when necessary. This requires us to be able to access our prefrontal cortex, or thinking brains, in order to access these skills. And to do that, we must be regulated. All this to say: it is incredibly important that you support your own regulation so that you can support your students in the ways they need. So take your time, and before moving on to all of the other resources in this site to "fix all the problems" and "do all the things," take a moment for YOU. And come back as often as you need. <3