Overcoming Teacher Anxiety


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Woman Suffering Depression

Hanna Beech

Hanna Beech has been teaching for ten years and has a range of experience across Key Stages 1 and 2 in a large Primary School in Kent. She is a phase leader for Years 3 and 4, and also leads on teaching and learning for...
Read more about Hanna Beech

How can you take control of work-related anxiety?

With the pressure most teachers are under, it is no surprise that anxiety is contributing to an increase in the number of teachers taking long-term sick leaveWork-related anxiety can cause sleepless nights, consume your thoughts and free time, and make you dread going to work. Here are some tips for how you can start to work towards reducing your anxiety.

Managing Work-Related Anxiety

  • To relax yourself at night, try counting your breaths and focusing on the sensations in your body. When your mind wanders, bring your focus back to your breathing. The Headspace app is a great help with this.
  • When you realise you’re continually thinking about a problem, write it down and distract yourself with something, for example doing some exercise. You can come back to the issue when you are at work.
  • If you dread attending work, speak to a colleague – ideally someone in the Senior Leadership Team, or contact a union or your doctor.
  • Schedule in time for family and friends and ensure this time is not interrupted with work.
  • If you are struggling with workload issues it’s important to speak to a colleague. Perhaps you need some ideas for better organising your time or maybe your school needs to review their processes, but if you don’t take the step to discuss the issue, nothing will change.

Why is it a good strategy?

You matter.

Tip

We all feel worried sometimes, but if your worries become too much, confide in your people to to help you out.


4 thoughts on “Overcoming Teacher Anxiety

  1. Nothing earth shatteringly new here, but is is so important for the whole teaching community to take on board whether you are a sufferer or someone in a position to help – we all are! Read this and be reminded of our responsibilities to each other as decent human beings.

  2. Positive thinking is one important thing for overcoming the anxiety. When the patient was in a fail, she should think the positive. She may not hopeless and always think that tomorrow will be her fail again. When she feels this more and more it will be dangerous for her. She should take her bad experience to get the better life.

    A person with anxiety usually feels afraid of something that actually it fears because of her own feeling. When you want to help her, you should ensure her that what she afraid is not necessary the case. She should be brave to make a better decision.

    Sitting and doing nothing is not a good thing for the anxiety people. When she feels sad, nervous, and uncomfortable she should do something positive to do. It is very important for overcoming the anxiety feeling.

    Correcting any mistakes in the past and try to make everything better is effective enough to overcoming the anxiety feeling. It will help her feel more relax and the mind becomes tranquil.

    Telling every problem is also an effective way to help the patient for overcoming the anxiety. It really helps to ease the burden on the mind. The most important is she has to find someone who can be trusted and really make her feels comfort.

  3. I struggle with anxiety of varying degrees. Sometimes it just stops me having a good time with new people because I’m worried about what they make of me, other times it takes hold over weeks or months, ever-present at the back of my mind.

    This weekend was one of the latter. For over a year, the burglar alarm at our new house hasn’t worked. We tried everything. The only solution was to rip it out and replace it.

    Sounds simple, right? The only problem is that as soon as you remove the mains power, it sounds the siren. It’s busted, so we can’t turn it off – aside from reconnecting the power, which is what we did a year ago and left it at that.

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