TM4T Stress Armoury 42 - Prioritising Sleep

One of the typical patterns associated with burnout involves teachers who sustain and cope with intense levels of stress for a while (sometimes for a long while) but then collapse; physically, mentally and emotionally.

Burnout in teaching frequently targets those who are totally committed to their jobs, to their careers and to their students. When teachers like this are a faced by a challenging situation, invariably they respond with complete commitment, by working furiously hard to resolve the problem. In order to address matters, teachers will work any hours, and abandon their weekends, all to make more time to tackle the problem.

If this behaviour is short-lived, then the negative effects will be manageable and success will often be gratifying. If this hard work is sustained for a long time, however, burnout looms.

The simple fact is that our bodies need rest. Rest is what we use to let stress subside. Rest at the end of every day, and rest at the end of each week, helps us to calm down, recharge our batteries, and makes us more effective in our work an our relationships.

Doing pleasant things that we enjoy in our leisure time compensates us for the less pleasant stress that we experience at work, bringing balance into our lives. This is true if we enjoy teaching, but it is even more true if our careers are going through a difficult stage and offering us more stress than pleasure.

In general, people who have a non-competitive hobby tend to cope with stress better. If you spend all your time at work striving to achieve, it helps to take pleasure in an activity which does not involve a zero-sum equation (I win, you lose) or absolute targets (30% = pass, 29% = fail) or pressure of performance. Simple activities like walking or reading offer obvious examples.

A balanced sleep pattern is also necessary for a balanced life. If you are regularly short of sleep, then your concentration and your energy and your overall performance decline. You become less effective in the classroom, and this inevitably increases stress. Lack of concentration leads to mistakes, lack of energy leads to less control in our lives. This happens, of course, when we are already desperately busy – that's why we sacrificed our sleep – so a bad situation is made worse, demanding even more effort to bring things back in control.

This is a problem which you may not easily recognise. If you have become used to being tired all the time, you may have forgotten how sharp and energetic you can feel when you start sleeping normally.

Oddly, holiday times do not always help resolve issues. Teachers – in fact anyone – who have dysfunctional sleeping patterns at work, tend to have dysfunctional sleeping patterns on holiday, albeit different patterns. Oversleeping frequently leaves us just as dozy as undersleeping.

The fact is that teachers tend to give too little attention to sleep, and it tends to be one of the things that is routinely sacrificed when things get tough at work. A mountain of marking? No problem, I'll just stay up late. There is a problem, of course: when you have established a pattern of disruption, it isn't easy to break, and many teachers experience the cycle of awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night and dozy-in-the-middle-of-the-day.

You should give priority to sleep, and take heed of the TM4T advice on getting up and going to bed, here and here.