This semester, I am teaching a course on what schools can do to support the mental health and social-emotional well-being of students. We recently finished discussing The Age of Overwhelm and are in the middle of Set Boundaries, Find Peace. I believe my students are taking away a lot from these readings.
Students are more overwhelmed than they expected to be this semester, and these books (and the others we are reading together) offer frameworks and concrete strategies to manage overwhelm and find flourishing.
As I teach these books, I also think a lot about the ways that teachers at all levels (from pre-kindergarten to doctoral programs) have been under almost constant stress and pressure since the spring of 2020. At St. Lawrence, we are looking to find ways to promote faculty well-being, and yet–for many of us, on many days–we are left wondering how we are going to get through everything we are called to do.
A consistent piece of advice offered by the books I mention above, for what it is worth, is to question how much of our stress is out of our control, and how much is connected to unhelpful self-images we’ve internalized. The stress that is out of our control is the stress caused by–for example–unhelpful policies and structures. We can play a role in asking that these policies and structures change, but responsibility for these policies and structures often rests with administrators and other leaders.
Where we have more leverage–at least according to the books mentioned above–is in asking the question: When I feel pressure to do something–to say yes to one more thing, to hold myself to an impossibly high standard, to not disappoint others–where does that pressure come from?
Many of us in the helping professions–like teaching–often feel an incredible responsibility to help others. It is easy for others to take advantage of this. To make unreasonable demands on us that we then come to internalize as a reasonable expectation for what it means to be a responsible helper. We begin to resent colleagues who aren’t doing the impossible, instead of wondering why we believe that the cape of the superhero is a precondition for being a teacher.
People who are mothers, or people who are responsible as primary carers for children and adults, feel additional pressures to do it all at all times. But, as we know, being everything to everyone is unsustainable and impossible. Unfortunately, knowing something and acting on that knowledge are very different things.
As we work to manage our feelings of overwhelm and stress, I think it is worth considering the ways that we can make peace with the idea of stepping away from self-images that are causing us harm. No one should be expected to be all things to all people at all times. And yet for many of us, we feel terribly guilty or demoralized when we don’t live up to the image of the person who can do it all. We need to be more forgiving of ourselves for being the flawed and limited human beings we are, especially when we start telling ourselves that if we just tried harder or were “better people” we’d be able to do it all.
To be clear, getting distance from these unhelpful self-images doesn’t amount to blaming anyone for their socialization or for the social messages we’ve all internalized. As well, beginning to be more forgiving of ourselves isn’t the whole solution; far from it! We still need collective thinking, imagining, and acting so that we can create policies and structures that make it more likely that we can experience well-being while supporting the well-being of our students.
But until we have those policies and structures, we need to be kind to ourselves and others, especially when most of us are our own best critics who are already pushed to the (and have been over the course of this entire terrible pandemic).
Anyone struggling with these types of issues may benefit from the books listed above. And because many of us don’t have the time in the day to do extra reading, listening to this podcast gives a sense of whether these types of perspectives might be useful to you.