15 Tips for Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout All Term

When you’re a busy classroom teacher, managing teacher stress and burnout has to be a priority.

If you love your career, but have troubles with the pressure from reporting, parent nights, behaviour management, and yet another requirement from admin about how to do things, you’re in the right place.

I know how the hours, heavy workload, lesson planning, and everything else that comes along with this job can add up, because it happened to me, too.

Some of these are good for using during the school day, and others are more long-term changes. Either way, they’ll help you protect your physical health, emotional health, and personal life. 

If you’re noticing persistent symptoms of depression or other mental health issues, or you feel unsafe in yourself, getting professional support is a strong first step. Book a GP, speak with a counsellor, or use your employee assistance programme (EAP) if it’s available.

Signs You Need to Start Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout

Anyone going into education understands that there will be some teacher stress involved. The difference is that after a stressful event, like a busy week, a tough class, or a contentious meeting, your stress levels should be able to come back down. Burning out is different. 

When you’re burning out, your stress levels stay consistently elevated, and your nervous system remains in a state of chronic stress. You don’t get the relief that should come after a singular stressful event. 

Some ways to recognise when you’re on the cusp of educator burnout include:

• Emotional exhaustion that doesn’t ease after a weekend
• Mental exhaustion, brain fog, and slower decision-making
• Sleep changes, waking early, trouble switching off, or restless sleep
• Irritability, shorter fuse with students, colleagues, or family
• Reduced job satisfaction, dread on Sunday night, numbness in the classroom
• More sick leave, frequent colds, headaches, or “I can’t do this” days

When you have consistent job-related stress, any combination of these can have a negative impact on your wellbeing. 

How Chronic Stress Affects Your Mind and Body

Chronic stress is more than just a bad day or even a bad week. Chronic stress is “a consistent sense of feeling pressured and overwhelmed over a long period of time.” (Yale Medicine)

It can result in things like headaches, jaw tension, gut issues, higher blood pressure, and lowered immunity. You might notice you’re getting sick more often, or needing more sick leave to recover.

And that’s just physically. 

On an emotional level, chronic stress can feel like you’re always on edge. Symptoms include anxiety, feeling on edge, or feeling like something bad is going to happen, or something is going to go wrong.

It’s also not uncommon for teachers to get secondary traumatic stress, particularly when dealing with complex student situations. 

Socially, teachers’ stress can cause strain in relationships. You may find yourself becoming short with students or colleagues, or having a temper at home. This can cause a negative classroom atmosphere and result in poorer student achievement. 

While some areas have received more attention from school leaders, most teachers still lack sufficient support and professional resources at the admin level. 

Techniques for Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout 

While the following activities may seem simple, do not underestimate their power! 

Many of the following stress management activities are proven tools to help teachers like you and other highly stressed people in the community who suffer from things like anxiety, stress, and PTSD. 

Important tip: Choose a relaxing activity from the list that will work for you… Remember, we’re all different, so not all of them might necessarily be right. Just pick a tool, implement it for a good length of time, and then see what it can do for you.

N.B. These are great ways of teaching stress management and relaxation to your students, too.

1. Deep, Controlled Breathing

One of the most simple ways to add to your self-care plan is to incorporate deep breathing exercises throughout your day. 

Use slow, deep, focused breathing to release the tension and stress from your busy day. Spend a few minutes over the day, using 6 – 7 controlled breaths to relieve the stress and bring you back to the relaxation response. Read this post here for more detailed instructions.

2. Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout with Daily Journaling

Daily journaling is one of the best things you can do as far as stress-reduction techniques go. When your burnout levels are high, and you’re dealing with long hours, a scattered daily routine, and student behavior that’s all over the place, taking just a few minutes for yourself can make a huge difference. 

Take some time at the start of the day or at night, to write down your thoughts and worries into a journal. Using a problem-solving journal to document your troubles and negative thoughts, is an easy technique to manage stress and find your inner calm.

This intentional time of writing releases the overwhelm and frees the junk from going around in your brain so it can rest. (You’ll also experience a side benefit of lifting your mood too).

3. Take a Relaxing Bath

I know…it sounds too surface-level, right? The interesting thing about taking a relaxing bath (or shower) is that you have the opportunity to create a sensory experience that can help you ground back into your body. 

Taking a warm nightly bath is my personal favourite way to relax and release the tension from a busy day at school. Add some bubbles and essential oil for a bit of luxury and settle in with a cup of tea, some scented candles, and dim the lights for the full calming effect.

Related Post: Teachers: Enjoy the 7 Benefits of a Self-Care Bath Routine

4. Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout by Getting Enough Sleep

Good quality sleep is so important for your well-being, but stress can negatively impact your sleep. So you must prioritize it. Implement a structured bedtime routine over a couple of hours, to allow the necessary time to wind down and prepare the body for rest after your chaotic day at school. Read here for a post to learn how to get enough sleep after a day of lesson plans, long work hours, and trying to get enough support to do your job.

5. Get a Massage

The benefits of massage with a reputable massage therapist are many. Massage plays a crucial role in helping to soften your tight muscles and release the tension the body holds from chronic stress. It’s an enjoyable and calming experience to melt away the tightness in your neck, shoulders, and back. 

N.B for the best stress-relieving impact, remember to include a regular therapeutic massage into your schedule.

6. Spend Some Time in Nature

Go outside and take your shoes off. Find a soft patch of grass and step slowly around while enjoying the feeling on your feet. By doing this grounding technique, it will help you pull away from the unwanted feelings of stress and challenging emotions. While you’re at it, listen to the sounds around you and stop to savour this grounding experience to help dissolve the stress from your body.

7. Debrief with a Trusted Friend or Colleague

Having a trusted friend, colleague, or mentor is essential to managing teacher stress and burnout.

Not only does connecting with someone who has more experience than you provide excellent professional development opportunities, you can often glean from their experience and find new ways to set healthy boundaries or better handle a stressful situation.

New teachers should commit to finding more experienced mentors to help manage stress as it comes up.

8. Build a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset can help you immensely as a teacher. Both in your personal life when managing teacher stress and burnout, but also in how you approach your students.

A growth mindset is simply the belief that you (or those you’re teaching!) can develop their intellect, skills, emotional intelligence, or other talents, as opposed to those things being fixed at a certain level.

It helps you overcome stress in your life more easily when you believe that you have the capability to learn and grow.

9. Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout by Drinking Plenty of Water

Staying hydrated may not sound related, but it can make a big difference in combatting the symptoms of teacher burnout. When you’re dehydrated, you may face things like brain fog, increased cortisol levels, and stronger anxiety symptoms.

While it’s so easy to forget about staying hydrated, doing so throughout your daily work can be one of the easiest ways to help improve your stress levels.

10. Hug Someone for at Least One Minute

Physical connection, even (sometimes especially) when it’s non-sexual has a powerful physiological effect on the body. It can release oxytocin, the feel-good hormone in your brain, help you regulate your nervous system, and lower overall stress. 

11. Take Some Screen-Free Time

Our devices are designed to be addictive. And, by that, it means that they have a tendency to overload our dopamine response.

Over time, this can cause stress on your brain and body. Not only that, but when you have messages from school administrators, parents or caregivers, and other education staff pinging your phone all of the time, you won’t be able to decompress from work.

Set boundaries with your screens. Remove work email from your phone if you can. Set screentime limits. All of these things can help you unplug and find better things to do so you can have better work-life balance. This will help you make strides toward managing teacher stress and burnout.

12. Dance it Out

Regular exercise has so many benefits, but one of the biggest ones is its impact on stress. The endorphin boost can help you clear your mind and combat some of both the physical and mental symptoms of teacher burnout.

If you don’t feel up to a dance session, even taking a walk can focus your mind on the task at hand and help you relax your mind and body!

13. Drink Herbal Tea and Reflect on Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout

There are many stress-relief benefits to different types of herbal tea, and pausing long enough to brew a cup and reflect can have a profound effect on managing teacher stress and burnout.

Sometimes, we are so caught up in the next thing we have to do or accomplish, the act of slowing down, brewing a cup of tea, and pausing to reflect on the present moment can be just what we need to reframe our current situation.

14. Try a New Mindfulness Activity (eg. coloring)

Mindfulness practices can help slow down your nervous system and make more of your personal time. Tech-free activities like coloring, fiber arts, or puzzles can help you unplug after school hours and relax your brain. For more ideas of mindfulness activities to unplug, check out this post!

15. Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout by Doing a Brain Dump and Decluttering Your Thoughts

Having too much in your brain can prevent it from ever being able to move into rest mode.

If you’re constantly worrying about things you need to remember, administrative tasks that you have to take care of, a student situation that you need to address with school administration, and all of the other small, seemingly insignificant things that come up, it’s easy to slip into overwhelm. 

One of my favorite ways to help alleviate this kind of stress is by doing a big brain dump. If there are things that I need to remember that are time-sensitive, I set reminders in my calendar to address them.

Once it’s all out of my brain, I take a deep breath, let it all the way out, close my notebook, and walk away. Writing these things down signals to your brain that they’ve been or are being handled, and it doesn’t need to continue presenting them to you or ruminating over them.

Conclusion: Managing Teacher Stress and Burnout is a Long-Term Practice

Managing teacher stress and burnout works best when you follow a clear path: notice early signs, use in-the-moment stress management during the school day, reduce workload with systems and clear boundaries, and build support before you crash.

Pick one first step today: try deep breathing exercises in the car before you drive home, do five-minute journaling to offload your brain, set a stop time for emails, or book a GP or employee assistance programme chat. Small steps can make a significant difference when you repeat them.

You can keep your positive impact in the teaching profession, while still protecting own wellbeing. The job asks for a lot, but it doesn’t get to take everything.

Check out these other articles on stress management techniques

• A Straight-Forward Tips to Relieve Teacher Stress (You Won’t Believe)
• Why is it So Important for Teachers to De-Stress
• 3 Powerful Stress Management Tips for Teachers
• 6 Easy Ways to Bring Mindfulness into the Classroom
• 5 Easy Ways to Relieve Teacher Stress

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