Teacher Tips: How to Take Breaks & Connect Even if Your Staff Lounge is Super Negative

Something not a lot of people talk about is how isolating teaching can feel. Intellectually, we know that making connections with our co-workers can boost morale and wellbeing and ultimately can actually boost our productivity. But we're so busy, there's just so much to do that the temptation is to just work through lunch, shovel food in our mouths if we even get to do that while we check emails or run to the copy machine or get caught up on things. And even worse than that is maybe we want to socialize with our co-workers but we've been burned because the staff lounge is a hotbed of drama and negativity and we find that rather leaving feeling refreshed. Right, we got indigestion and now we feel demoralized. So in today's episode we're going to dive into why should we take a break. We know we need to, but let me give you some compelling scientific reasons as to why it's good for you and good for your students and good for your productivity to take a break. And then we're going to look at strategies and ideas on the best ways to recharge, even if you only have a few minutes, and how to navigate if your common teacher area is less than inviting. Okay, let's do this and stay tuned till the end, because I have a great resource for you. Welcome to the Balance, your Teacher Life podcast, where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries and achieving better work-life balance. If you're passionate about education but tired of it consuming your whole life, you have found your home in the podcast universe. I'm your host, grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show, music. Okay, so here we go. First off, I'm going to start off by recognizing it is really difficult for a lot of educators to make themselves take a lunch break. We have so much to do and some days, honestly, it just isn't possible. Right, there are days where, even if you're really productive and you're a really good planner, still something happened. Maybe there's a last minute independent study, there is some meeting you have to attend that really you got roped into because there was just no other time that any everybody could do it. Right, all the stakeholders could be there. Maybe you had to suddenly make some copies. The copy machine was broken in the morning, whatever million reasons. I don't need to give them to you. You live it every day, right? So, legitimately, there are some days where you cannot take a break and you will be in your classroom or sitting at your desk. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about when that develops into just a routine, an unhealthy habit. It's not good for you. So let me tell you two compelling reasons that we should be working really hard to make sure we take a break, especially our lunch break. First off, it is just good for your mental health and your productivity, right. There are a lot of studies that show that a brain needs like cognitively needs a rest. Right. Frequent breaks improve creativity, problem solving. If we just keep going all day, cognitive fatigue sets it. So we are not as productive. Okay, we're not as productive. I know it sounds counterintuitive. I have so much to do. Why would I take a 20 minute break? Well, because when you come back to your work, you're going to have more stamina, right, and you're going to be more creative, all right. And also that mindset, that frustration nobody likes to think I worked all day, I worked like a dog, right. With that gets stuck in our mind. This narrative that we tell ourselves I can never take a break. No, it's not really true Every day. Some days, for sure it's true. Come on now, I live in the real world. For sure, it's true of some days, but not every day. Ask yourself if you work through lunch every day, is it just because you've gotten into that bad habit? So one the first reason that we should be taking a break is it improves our productivity and our cognitive load. The second reason is really how important connection and socializing are for well being right. So many studies. When you look at, you know, in your view of those studies, or what they call the blue zones the studies, the areas in the world where people have very long life spans, and what are some of the common factors Shared by those, and one of them is strong social connections and social interactions. So it's demonstrated that having so strong social network and connecting with people can increase your immune function. It improves your mental outlook, you can actually live longer and you know it's fun. We spend our day, even though it seems silly to think. How can we be isolated? We have 20, 30. 100 students, some of you in high school oh my gosh, you're like 180 kids traveling through your room every day. How on earth can we be isolated? Well, there is a difference between making social connections with somebody who is your equal or just fun to be around, who can yes, can commiserate with you, but is an adult. That's different than the relationships we have with students. We need to have time around people who we're not actually responsible for in any way, shape or form and that we're not demanding anything of them. Right, with students, there's always this power imbalance, so we need to make connections with adults. I've really found that when I taught first grade oh my gosh, you know when you sound out, spend a lot of your day sounding out CVC patterns right Again and again and again. Like you, just, you want to talk to adults with a robust vocabulary and a rich life experience and you want to laugh. And, if you're lucky, you have an awesome environment that you can go to, known as the staff lounge or the. It sounds fancy, doesn't it? Lounge. We just basically had part of a room in a portable that we also shared, with all the copy machines and the mail slots, so staff lounge is a little bit of an elaborate term. Staff room, common teacher lounge, whatever you want to call it. You know what I mean. So ideally, that is going to be a treasured place that you love to go visit every day and hang out with your teacher besties. Now, is that possible? Yes, now it depends. So, shall we say, for years I had that. For years I worked with I wouldn't even say teacher besties. They were just my best friends. They were awesome. We had a wonderful experience at lunch. I didn't even know any different. I guess I took it for granted because I didn't know any different until one of them retired and one of them moved to another school and, good Lord, the atmosphere in that room changed and it just wasn't magical anymore and I found myself creeping into a bad habit of staying in my own room. And it wasn't, it wasn't healthy. So what are some of the things we can do? Let's talk about the ideal scenario first. You know me, I like to keep it on the positive. So let's think, if we really want to cultivate a culture of connections on our campus, that's going to take some intentionality. Okay, and there are lots of things we can do. Great we can have. I know one school I worked for we had it was called Free Food Friday. It actually wasn't free and I found the whole thing really stressful. It was one day, one Friday a month, where we there was a sign up in your groups of people signed up to take over for providing food for that particular Friday. Well, I found it stressful One. It turned out actually being really expensive. Maybe only four or five people would sign up. And then there's you know so many staff people to to feed. And then, of course, the other thing is you know how you're going to feed that many people. It's going to be pizza or nachos or something really unhealthy and I try and eat healthy. So I think that it's awesome to have what I would call maybe a Friendship Friday, where we encourage everybody to be in the staff room on a Friday and that needs to be driven from admin, like come on every Friday, friendship Friday, let's all make the effort to be in the lunchroom and then everybody just brings their own food. Bring your own food, I mean, if you have a bestie and you want to trade, but don't put the responsibility of bringing food on people. It's just still. Like I said, it's stressful, you know. Especially, you have to lunch rotations. You have second lunch. By the time you get second lunch, most of the good food was gone. You had to get to school early to set it up like it was just a lot of drama. Didn't need to be that way If we were coming for the companionship. Friendship Friday bring your own lunch, sit down, have a picnic. You know, if there's anywhere on campus that there aren't students, hey, bring a blanket, let's sit outside if the weather's good. Like people, we just need to get outside a little bit of vitamin D, a little bit of fresh air. We really staying inside all day, but those fluorescent lights it's just, it's just not good. Another thing to make the staff room Inviting. Now listen, I should have said this before. I'm going to preface with be open-minded, look at this with the same mindset. I would tell you to go in a professional development which is take what you need and leave the rest. Okay, not all of these things will appeal to you. I'm giving you a bunch of options. Be open-minded. When I go into a PD, I always tell myself let me look for three things I like, because there's going to be plenty that I'm like waste of time, why am I here? Hopefully you don't feel that way about listening to this podcast, but just put that in your mindset. Hey, let me find one idea that I like here. Alright, so Friendship Friday, maybe a picnic. Some of you, rolling your eyes at that, going to tell me, lady, you live in California, the weather's beautiful, like. We can't do that where we're from. Probably, you know, for a lot of you very legitimate. Well, coming back to why I do live in California, in San Francisco there's a huge, huge company. You might have heard of it, it's called Salesforce and they have very large campus, lots of buildings, but they have this beautiful park that they've built above their transit center. It's actually quite a kick to walk all the way around. The park has a walking track, has fountains, it has grass, it's in the air. It's like on their fourth or fifth floor, so you're up in the air and you're looking down. Anyway, they have a very big culture. You see all kinds of people with their work badges, walking and talking during their lunch or their break and they have these areas of grass and they have this beautiful. It's like a book stand, like you know, the one where you would open up and lock up at night, and it is just. It is full of like coloring books, decks of cards, puzzles, really fun things for people to do that are just to decompress. So is there something like that? You could set up, something that encourages people to relax, decompress, maybe set up a table with a big jigsaw puzzle. I think it would be really fun just for people to sit there and try and put in a few pieces and just have relaxed conversations. I've seen on Facebook a lot these huge giant posters. Have you seen them? It's like a coloring poster that takes up a whole wall and anybody can just, you know, pick up a marker and do a little bit of coloring, something like that. Just set up something where people can connect, play a game, do something. I remember one time in my school we had a television in the staff room because it also doubled as where we did our PD, and I would just go on YouTube and find like a just dance or something and just dance with some teachers, just something fun. So it can be something mellow, kind of like a calm down corner that we have in our classrooms we could put in our staff room or it could be fun. But that's gonna take. You know, somebody might find it annoying that you're trying to dance and live your best life while they're trying to eat their lunch and have a conversation. So think about that. Another idea would be well, I would like to call a positivity parking lot. Maybe you have an area where you just have a little bulletin board and you leave cards that people can pin up and they can just take a minute to either shout out a thank you or acknowledge somebody who's helped them or write down something positive that happened in their day and pin it up on the wall so that people walking by could be like, oh yeah, that's cool, that happened in such and such as rooms. So that's all trying to keep it up, be and positive. And if that's not gonna work, if you have some people who, in your staff room, are deeply entrenched and really feel that the whole point of going to lunch is just to complain about students or parents, then that's gonna be difficult. Now, definitely, I'm always gonna be the person you know, the empowerment coach, to coach you to set some boundaries. You can now, of course, look. I want to say there's a staff room, can be a great place to ask for advice. You're having a problem or a challenge with a student or something, or a technical issue or whatever, and it can be a great place to go and ask for advice. But there's a difference between asking for advice and what I would call admiring the problem, which is just complaining without seeking a solution. Right, and if you listen to the episode where I talked about how to deal with toxic co-workers, co-workers who are toxically negative, then you will already have some ideas of how to set a boundary. But of course, the big thing I'm going to say is don't engage, don't make it a competition when one person is saying this terror, oh this behavior in this room today, and then you're going to add oh, that's nothing, I had this right and before we know, we're often running and we're having this big old contest who's you know has the worst behaviors, whose parents are more demanding, whose curriculum is most ridiculous or schedule is most ridiculous, or who's lost the most prep periods? You know all the things. It's just like keeping this big scorecard. Having a competition of negativity is not helpful to anything. So that's very different than asking for advice. So I'm just going to give you one example. If it's just one person who is chasing everybody off, it happens then maybe you could try setting a boundary right. You could try. What do you have to lose? You could, you know. Probably other people around you will be mightily relieved that you had the courage to go. Do it and you don't. You again, let me give you some boundary basics. Boundary is about your behavior, not about somebody else's behavior. Right, you can't change somebody else's behavior, but you might possibly influence it in this case. But we are going to use what I call eye language, right? Not like you're always complaining. It's going to be about your needs, preferences and desires. So, for example, I would say hey, you know what? My brain and my nervous system just really need a break from discussing students and parents right now. Right, I look forward into coming into the break room to fun, relax. I love seeing you. I know, is there a way that we, if you need advice on how to deal with a student, that we set a timer for five minutes and all help you with problem solving and suggestions and then we go back to you know, talking about how they elementary or whatever else? Now, hopefully, what you're going to find with this is that person is probably even just gonna say, oh, I didn't need advice. Maybe they're even just gonna get the hint and acknowledge they were just complaining. Right, you can try it one or two times and see if they give up. If they realize that other people are there to have a good time, you can try and deflect, change the conversation, do all those things. I have been direct to somebody in the past who was always complaining about the same student over and over and over, and it just made people uncomfortable, right. And so I did say to that person Gosh, it sounds like you need a break from that student. Like it sounds like they're really challenging. And the teacher was like, yeah, I really need a break. And to which I asked them why did you invite them to lunch? Right, they might as well be sitting right here at the table with us, and I'm gonna assume that our family felt the same way. Why are you inviting them to dinner? Right, like, if you need a break from the student, let's take the break for them. Student. Okay, so there are some strategies if your staff room is what a professor of my months called the den of iniquity. Not iniquity where things aren't equitable, but iniquity where all you know, immoral things happened. And that's the only way he ever referred to the staff room, and it's before. I was a teacher and I thought what is he talking about? But you know I wasn't teaching long, or I started substitute teaching and I certainly found that to be true. So, anyway, what if the staff room really isn't positive and you can't hang out there Then find some ways to have some healthy habits with friends. Right now, some days I'm gonna say you do need time to yourself, right, there are some days that you just are going to want to decompress and hide in your room. And if you want to hide in your room, that's fine, but don't spend it working. Right, put in some classical music. I used to have a 10 minute kind of like guided meditation and it also had those binaural beats. You know, if you wear headphones, you hear different frequencies and different ears. It really just calms your nervous system, puts you in a different brainwave state. 10 minutes, right, that's all it takes to turn off the lights, listen to some classical music, listen to meditation, do some coloring something, something just to take a break. Okay, so some days you do need to buy yourself. But if you want to be with your friends, I used to have a Wednesday walkday, right, where we would just plan, no matter what happened, like, come on, no matter what else happens on Wednesday, we're gonna just walk and talk. And we weren't, you know, we weren't talking about students, we were just walking, taking a lap around the campus and just hanging out, catching up and making an effort to be social. Right, I also had another bestie who we loved being together every lunch and the staff room really was just getting to a place we couldn't bear to go anymore and we would just trade off being in each other's room for lunch and we would set up our phone and stream something funny and then do a little coloring and just chat. We just knew it was important to decompress. Okay, decompress, that's the whole point. You are going to be more productive in the long run, you're going to be less stressed in the long run, and those social connections are important. So I hope somewhere in here you have found something that sounds like oh yeah, that sounds fun. I could try that or at least make baby steps. Right, if you eat lunch at your desk every day, make it a goal to one day a week be social. Then make it two days a week to be social and once you realize how that's working out well for you, then make being social the norm, not the exception. Okay, so I hope there was something in there. I do have a free resource. I made a wellness challenge a few years ago for teachers. It's a 30 day, different activity every day. You know what. You doesn't need to be campus wide. You could just do it with one of your teacher friends. Challenge yourselves to do something new off there once or twice a week, something fun. So if you want that, it is absolutely free. You don't have to give me an email address, you don't have to do anything. I'll put the link in the resources, in the show notes. But you can also, if you go to TPT used to be called teachers, pay teachers just go to the TPT, just put in my name. My store has a funky name, but if you just put in Grace Stevens, but put it in quotation marks, if you put Grace Stevens in quotation marks, everything in my store will pop up and I think it's the very first thing. Again, you just download it. Don't need to give me an email, don't need to pay, just go with it. Tell your friends it's called the wellness program from teachers. Okay, so that's it for this week. I hope I've inspired you to spend one day a week doing something fun with your bestie at school and I'll see you in the next episode.