🌿 Your Tuesday Email: Restore Your Mind

Hello Reader!

Your brain needs space that isn't filled with school.

There's a particular kind of mental fatigue that comes with being in an educator role, whether teacher or leader.

It isn't the fatigue of boredom or disengagement. It's the fatigue of sustained cognitive load! Are we right?? The constant decision-making, the reading of rooms, the managing of competing needs, the holding of dozens of threads at once. Educators make an extraordinary number of decisions in a single school day - as you well know. Most of them are invisible. All of them are costly.

By now, many educators' brains have started a genuine vacation.

The problem is that the brain rarely takes that needed vacation without some encouragement.

The Thinking That Won't Stop

You've probably experienced it: lying on the couch, enjoying some rest while your mind quietly generates lesson plan revisions, revisits that difficult conversation from May, rehearses things you could have said differently to that parent in March… Stop! We want to shout!

This isn't a character flaw! It's what happens when a brain is trained to be perpetually on. The habit of vigilance doesn't dissolve just because you are now at home with some down time.

Mental restoration requires creating conditions where the brain can genuinely disengage. Not just change topics, but release the need to perform, solve, and plan.

What Mental Rest Actually Looks Like

Mental restoration doesn't require meditation retreats or complete digital detox (although we support these ideas)! It requires some combination of:

Unstructured time: time with no agenda, no outcome, and no productivity attached
Absorption in something outside school: a book that has nothing to do with education, a project, a show, a conversation that goes somewhere unexpected
Time in nature: research consistently shows this reduces rumination and restores attention in ways that almost nothing else matches
Permission to be a beginner at something: learning something just for the joy of learning it, with no stakes and no evaluation

Notice what these have in common: none of them are efficient. Mental restoration happens in the spaces between productivity, not inside it.

A Gentle Challenge

This week, try to create at least one hour each day that doesn't involve thinking about something work related.

If school thoughts arrive, don't fight them. Just notice them, set them aside, and redirect your attention. This takes practice! It’s not a switch we can just turn off (unfortunately!)

Over time, the gaps grow longer. The mind learns that it's safe to rest.

Podcast:

This week: Summer Series Ep 1 - Our friend, Jessica asks: How do you handle the conference email flurry after an event!
Next week: Summer Series Ep 2 - Keeping Stuff Will Not Making Teaching Easier is a response to a question we got from James!
Last week: Summer Bonus Series Intro is out! Hear what our summer series is about!

Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram.

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