πΏ Your Tuesday Email: Restore Your Body
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Hello Reader! Your body did a year's worth of work, and it deserves more than a week off. The school year is a physical experience, even though that is rarely the way we talk about it. Educators don't often name the bodily cost of teaching, in part because so little of it is visible from the outside, but it is worth pausing to consider what a year actually asks of a body. There is the standing for hours, the projecting of your voice into a full room day after day, the steady work of absorbing the stress and emotional weight of dozens of young people and their families, and underneath all of it the broken sleep, the skipped lunches, and the low, sustained tension of a role that is almost never truly off. By the time summer arrives, many educators are carrying the entire year in their bodies, and you can feel it in the tight shoulders, the tired eyes, and the headaches that tend to show up in the very moment the adrenaline finally drops. The adrenaline crash is real A great many educators notice it in the first week of summer, when the sudden fatigue arrives along with a low mood and an absence of motivation to do much of anything at all. It can feel alarming, and sometimes even shameful, because part of you is quietly asking why you should feel worse now that school is finally out, and whether you ought to be enjoying this more than you are. What is happening is physiological, and once you understand it, it makes a great deal of sense. When the sustained pressure of the school year lifts, your nervous system begins the long descent out of the state of alert it has been holding for months, and because that descent is so steep, it can genuinely feel like a crash, which in many ways is exactly what it is. None of this is a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is a sign that your body has been working extraordinarily hard, and that it is now, at last, safe enough to stop. What physical restoration actually requires Physical restoration over the summer is not really about a workout regimen or a wellness plan, and it tends to ask for something far simpler and more fundamental than either of those, which is permission. It is the permission to sleep past six in the morning without a flicker of guilt, to spend a whole day doing very little and to let that be enough, to move your body for the pleasure of it rather than for efficiency, and to eat slowly without keeping one eye on the clock. None of these are luxuries, because they are simply how human beings recover from sustained stress, and they form the foundation that everything else this summer will need to be built upon. If you try to restore your vision, or your creativity, or your professional motivation before you have restored your body, you will find that you are building on sand. So start here, and start with the physical. Podcast:
Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram. Resources:
Reflection What does your body most need right now, not what you think it should need, but what it is actually asking for? Yours, P.S. Forward this email to colleagues who you think would enjoy the connection and resources.
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