Balance Your Teacher Life: Personal Growth Tips, Habits & Life Coaching to Empower Educators to Avoid Burnout
Easy Stress Management for Educators: The Power of Small Changes with Dr. Naomi Hall
Dec 05, 2023
Grace Stevens
What if we told you that the secret to managing life's stressors could be as simple as tacking on a couple of extra minutes of sleep or adding a splash of protein to your breakfast?
Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dr. Noami Hall, (the Recovering Educator) a seasoned educator who knows a thing or two about stress management. With her wealth of experience spanning two decades, Dr. Hall shares the five fundamental blocks to managing stress - movement, nutrition, sleep, hydration, and mindset, proposing that even the tiniest tweaks to these aspects of our lives can yield significant results.
Our chat with Dr. Hall delves beyond the usual stress management rhetoric as we discuss the potential benefits of incorporating movement and guided breathing techniques into everyday routines.
Ever wondered how to bring these practices into a classroom setting?
Dr. Hall has got you covered with practical tips and strategies for incorporating these ideas into your classroom.
We also open up a conversation about the importance of having a calming pre-bedtime routine - think blue light-blocking glasses and outfit planning for the next day. It's all about promoting better sleep and making pre-bedtime stress management easier and more effective. And it's all super easy habits you can start working on today!
Join us for this engaging episode as we navigate the challenges of stress management and self-care for educators.
To download Dr. Hall's FREE resource, click here: Breathwork Apps
To learn more about The Elevated Teacher Experience visit: www.gracestevens.com/elevate
What if we told you that the secret to managing life's stressors could be as simple as tacking on a couple of extra minutes of sleep or adding a splash of protein to your breakfast?
Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dr. Noami Hall, (the Recovering Educator) a seasoned educator who knows a thing or two about stress management. With her wealth of experience spanning two decades, Dr. Hall shares the five fundamental blocks to managing stress - movement, nutrition, sleep, hydration, and mindset, proposing that even the tiniest tweaks to these aspects of our lives can yield significant results.
Our chat with Dr. Hall delves beyond the usual stress management rhetoric as we discuss the potential benefits of incorporating movement and guided breathing techniques into everyday routines.
Ever wondered how to bring these practices into a classroom setting?
Dr. Hall has got you covered with practical tips and strategies for incorporating these ideas into your classroom.
We also open up a conversation about the importance of having a calming pre-bedtime routine - think blue light-blocking glasses and outfit planning for the next day. It's all about promoting better sleep and making pre-bedtime stress management easier and more effective. And it's all super easy habits you can start working on today!
Join us for this engaging episode as we navigate the challenges of stress management and self-care for educators.
To download Dr. Hall's FREE resource, click here: Breathwork Apps
To learn more about The Elevated Teacher Experience visit: www.gracestevens.com/elevate
Alright, teacher tribe, sometimes we make it too complicated. We think we need to make massive changes in order to see progress with our stress management, with reducing anxiety and all the things. And today's guest, dr Noemi Hall, is going to talk to us about stress management and what if there were some tiny tweaks you could make with stuff that you already do like sleeping or breathing. Well, that's what we're going to dive into today. We'll get right to it.
Grace Stevens:
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. So I'm so pleased to have on the show today Dr.
Grace Stevens:
Noemi Hall. You may know her on social media as the recovering educator. She's going to talk to us about stress management. So welcome, noemi. Thank you so much for being here, and why don't you give the audience just a quick introduction to yourself, who you are and what you do?
Dr Naomi Hall:
Sure, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So the recovering educator is who I am. It's my business, but it's also who I am. I have about 20 years of experience in education and I have experienced the highs. Education is fantastic. There are great highs, but there are also really deep lows and I have experienced those multiple times and I had to dig my way out on my own and figure it out and figure out what would work for me and how to manage the stress, how to heal from the burnout, and it took a lot of time, effort, money, research and I decided that I wanted to be the resource for educators that I didn't have and help educators with the stress, with the burnout, and help them know that there is hope and there is healing, that you don't have to leave education. My goal has never been to leave education. It's been to create the job I wanted in education.
Grace Stevens:
Oh well, you know, I feel that in my soul, because that is my mission too, right, I create the roadmap for people which I wish I had. Right, 20 years, a lot of money, all the things, all the study and all the courses, the books, everything. So I try and figure it out for myself and then, once I figure it out for myself, yeah, let's figure it out for other people. So tell me a little bit, your focus is on stress management, but you have a very holistic approach to that, so talk about that for a little bit.
Dr Naomi Hall:
Sure. So I always say I don't teach anything earth-shattering, I don't teach anything really complex per se. I teach the foundational skills that you need in order to manage your stress, and so my five foundation blocks are movement, nutrition, sleep, hydration and mindset. If you don't have those five locked in, you are going to be drowning in the stress, you're not going to be able to manage the stress and it is just going to overwhelm you. And I'm sure there are people listening today who are like that's me, like I am just barely treading water, like my nose is just above water level and I'm about to go under. And I can pretty much guarantee someone who's at that point is struggling in some aspect with one of those, at least one of those five foundation blocks.
Grace Stevens:
It's so frustrating because those are like basic human needs. They are Like how did we get so far away from that? So what do you give us? Obviously, there's a lot that's so unpacked there, but they are basic needs. What would you tell somebody who is really, like you said, just living in that survival mode They've brought into the idea I don't have time to do any of that, right? I'm sure what you're going to say is you don't have time not to Right? That's what we've come back to, right? You?
Grace Stevens:
don't have time not to Go ahead.
Dr Naomi Hall:
Yeah, it's. You have to prioritize yourself, and prioritizing yourself isn't selfish, it's making sure you're the best you can be for the people around you and for the responsibilities that you have to fulfill. And so you can start small. I think that is one of the hurdles is people think they have to do in a complete overhaul of their life, and you don't. You can start really small, and so I actually have two businesses.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I'm also a partner with body, which used to be beach body, and so some of my most successful clients right now are in a small challenge group where we're just doing it's called two and twenty, two small habits for twenty days. So these people are trying to lose weight and that is also a part of what we struggle with, with our stress and all of that. But all they have been doing for twenty days is a twenty to thirty minute workout and a shake a day, so a minor change to their nutrition, a small amount of time that they're devoting to exercise or movement of some sort, and they've seen huge results. I have a client in 20 days lost eight pounds.
Dr Naomi Hall:
So, it's about small, tiny habits and you know, like habit formation, we have to start small. We have to attach it, it has to be meaningful, we have to track it, all of that. But really it is starting small. It's making that one small change that's going to make you feel a little bit better. It's getting that two minutes extra of sleep a night, not trying to go straight to eight hours a night, just adding two minutes and gradually backing up your bedtime. It's eating protein at breakfast so that you're not crashing mid morning. It's moving for five minutes, like on your lunch break, walking through the entire building or walking around the building. It's five minutes of movement. It's catching those negative thoughts in that negative thought spiral of here I am, I'm going in the native direction, I'm going to stop this thought pattern and I'm going to choose a positive direction and a positive action. So I think really my advice is start small, start with what you can do, because as you do those little things, you build up your confidence.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I was just listening this morning to Brendan Burshard, hyperphorist coach he is absolutely one of my favorites and he was talking about the competence confidence cycle, that our confidence comes as we build our competence and so, as you do those little habits and you become successful at them, you start to build your confidence of okay, I really can spend 30 minutes working out and it does benefit me all day long. It gives me more productivity, energy, focus. All of this because I spent 30 minutes, and so I think a lot of times we're looking at what's my ROI, what's my return on investment. If I'm going to spend 30 minutes, what am I getting from it? You're getting health, you're getting mental health, you're getting focus, you're getting productivity, and so, really, movement is a super habit.
Grace Stevens:
Absolutely so. You know I'm all about habits. I wrote a whole series of books called One New Habit and I feel that, especially for teachers, you know it is so overwhelming. You're like where do we start, right? Where do we start? Yeah, you start with, you know, habit stacking. What's the habit you already have, right? I already talked to my teacher Bestie at lunch, right? Maybe we've got the good habit that we stay out of the staff room, like what?
Grace Stevens:
I call the den of iniquity.
Grace Stevens:
Right, we found our tribe positive people, so we've already got one healthy habit like we're already having lunch with our Bestie. Instead of sitting and chatting, why not go for a walk? We used to do like a little walk, walk it Wednesday a walk and talk. We needed to talk about curriculum and other stuff anyway, let's just, let's just walk. It was the smallest habit, but it really did build on it. What, what would you say of those five habits? I know they're all interconnected, but where do you think people should start with? With what? With what motormates them the most? Or with where they feel they have the most need? Or is there one that helps all of them? Sleep, sleep. I have a feeling when I ask that question, like sleep, without a doubt. It's hard to be motivated to do anything if we're not sleeping more yet. So what ideas, what habits could you tell people would help with sleeping better?
Dr Naomi Hall:
Yeah, sleep is all. The rest hinge on sleep.
Grace Stevens:
And.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I know that we're like, but I don't have time to sleep, you don't have time, like we're saying, you don't have time not to sleep, because that's what's going to allow you to be focused, energized, productive, stable mood regulation, all of that. So kind of like I was saying, you really start small and, rather than focusing on sleep itself, focus on your sleep routine, your bedtime routine, so that you're setting your body and mind up for sleep. Because when we focus on the sleep part of it, it causes stress, it causes anxiety and actually keeps us awake. So that's not what we want to do, but when we set our bodies up for sleep, then we can fall asleep. We're not laying in bed mulling over every single conversation that happened during the day, everything that we need to get done tomorrow, all of that. We actually get our body to a spot where we lay down and we can go to sleep. So it's making sure. So one of the principles is three to one, again from Brendan Burshard Three hours before bed, you stop eating.
Dr Naomi Hall:
Two hours before bed, you stop working. One hour before bed, you stop screens and blue light, because that blue light is the enemy of sleep. It tells your brain it's time to be awake. We want blue light in the morning, not at night. I know there are a lot of teachers who are on their computers and working right up till bedtime. If that's you and I know like I'm not telling you not to do it right now that's not the first step. First step get some blue light blocking glasses. Those make a huge, huge difference. They're super cheap. I think I bought two pairs on Amazon for maybe 10 bucks. They're not the most stylish, but I'm like whatever, I don't care, they do the job.
Dr Naomi Hall:
So three, two, one make sure that you're doing activities that slow your body and your mind down. So some gentle yoga, some gentle stretching, having a cup of tea, a warm shower. Making sure that your bedtime routine sets you up for your morning, because that's the other end of your sleep routine and when you wake up all anxious and like running behind, that's just not a good way to wake up. So setting out everything you can for breakfast and lunch for the next day and having whatever can't be set out lined up in the refrigerator ready to go Work bags, school bags, kids' gear all packed and set by the door so all anybody needs to do is grab it and walk out the door Picking out your clothes for the next day. I have done this for years, even working from home. I do it Now. That doesn't mean I always get dressed up working from home, but I do pick out the clothes I'm going to wear working from home, and it may be a hoodie and leggings.
Grace Stevens:
You know, honestly, I have to say I really miss when. You know, I went to school in Europe and as a rule everybody wears a uniform. There is no school, public, private everybody wears a uniform and I really miss those days. I didn't realise as a child how much it was when I had children of my own actually that it was like this negotiation in the morning what's everybody wearing and is it clean? And you know, it was just never a conversation. When I grew up you knew what you were wearing and it did take a lot of the stress out of the morning. So I really agree with that. What else?
Dr Naomi Hall:
Get your clothes set out you know, pick it out and get your kids clothes as well. Like, don't fight that battle in the morning, like night, before clothes are set out. I work out in the morning, so I pick out my workout clothes as well and I so this is my little hack for building my workout habit. I still do it, even though working out is a habit. Now I lay my workout clothes next to my bed so that I have to step on them.
Dr Naomi Hall:
All right In the morning. So I just I get up, I step on them, I grab them, I go into the bathroom and, you know, do my thing, I get going with my workout. So, set out your workout clothes and then pick activities that really help calm you. Reading a book, and again, you want to make sure that it's something that's not going to get you all all jazzed up and, you know, some sort of thriller or something that's like going to get your mind going. I love a good book, don't want to put it down.
Dr Naomi Hall:
Yes, there are certain books that I'm like oh, this is not a bedtime read because, like, I am hooked and I can't put it down Journaling, I'm not going to put it down. Journaling is really good to do at night, especially especially when your mind is in that spiral. You've had a rough day. There have been some rough conversations, there's some conflict, your tension at work or at home. There are problems that you can't solve. My mind is one of those that like spins with a problem until I solve it.
Dr Naomi Hall:
So having a journal by my bed where I can just and it's just free journaling, it's just writing out everything that is in your head, because the act of writing it frees your brain. It allows your brain to let go of it and to realize okay, I don't need to worry about that now it's written down, I can relax now. So journaling is really good. I also love breath work and doing some breathing before bed. A simple four six breath is one of my absolute favorites because it's so calming and so just laying in bed, breathing in for a count of four, breathing out for a count of six. So this works better than counting sheep, you don't need to count sheep.
Dr Naomi Hall:
You need to count your breath and the key there is that you're having a shorter inhale and a longer exhale and that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest. That's when your body is like okay, we can rest, we can do our digestion stuff, we can settle, and so you want to activate that when you're going to sleep. Those are some of the things that I highly recommend at bedtime. And here's my other thing we all have those late nights. You know band, concert, graduation, game play, whatever all these different things and so you get home late and you're rushing, rushing, rushing and you're like I got to get into bed.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I got to get into bed and you're not shortcut your bedtime routine because you've been going 100 miles an hour all day and you jump into bed at that speed. Your mind is going to continue at that pace even though your body is laying in bed and you will lay there awake for hours, whereas if you take that 30 minutes to go through your bedtime routine, you'll be able to get into bed in a place where your body and mind are ready to sleep and you'll be able to go to sleep much faster. I learned the hard way. I was like I don't have time for my bedtime routine. I'm like I just get everything done for the morning and get into bed. And I was like it's 1 am and I'm still awake Like this stinks yeah.
Grace Stevens:
Then you spy.
Grace Stevens:
all right, then you start oh my gosh, I'm going to be tired. I'm going to be tired. You're anticipating being tired, right? I'm a person who I fall asleep. It is of great frustration to my partner who stays up way too late. You know he likes to watch television, all the things. I'm like no, I need to calm at bed, right, I mean, I'm telling you he will watch the news and go to bed. Like, how are you expecting to sleep?
Grace Stevens:
Like, I find, you know, even teaching, we have so much vicarious trauma, right, there is just so much that we carry around of our kids trauma. It's hard enough to let go of that. Like, I know I need to be informed in what's happening in the world, but I can't watch. You know, no-transcript people dying and then try and fall asleep. I just can't. And but so I'm very lucky, I can fall right asleep very easily as long as I have quiet, and but you know, then I wake up, that's the thing. Then I wake up and then you start spiraling, you start watching the clock and then you start like doing the math, like okay, if I fall asleep in the last, the next damn minute, or even, like you know, I'm a 3 am, wake up and I'll fall.
Grace Stevens:
If I'm an hour awake, an hour, you know, let's say it's 4 o'clock, I usually get up at 5 30. A certain point I'm like, oh, it's not working, like yeah, would be better, like I believe in sleep, so I was right, like it's be better to just stay up. So, yeah, I I do have routines, but definitely the breathwork, definitely they're trying to get out if you're heading into your body, you know, for me I like to do that. Five sensations, like I'll just really just try and simultaneously feel five things, whether that's like the air conditioning on my face, or you know how the pillow feels, or the weight of the sheets, or you know whatever. Anything I can do to get out of my head and into my body really, really helps. And even though the instinct is to pick up a device, yeah right, like that's just such a harmful habit because that's just distraction right and it's not relaxing to us.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I've actually been hearing in a couple of different places about, like what we watch at night. You can like you talked about the news and that and the trauma that we see in that and we you're right we have so much firsthand and secondhand trauma. As educators, we carry a lot of secondhand trauma of our students and what I've been hearing is, if you're choosing, like true crime, podcast, law and order, sbu, as you're saying, to unwind at night, you need to think about why you are going to traumatic shows to relax, and the reason is that trauma is so normal or has been so normal in your life that it feels normal to you, and I'm like oh yeah, it's very damaging.
Grace Stevens:
I have a lot I work a lot on, you know, I find it. I found it very helpful in my own journey to differentiate, you know, I think everybody's educated enough to think. Like you know, we make the correlation between what we put in our bodies and how we feel. Right, we wouldn't eat junk food all day and sugar and alcohol and put drugs in our body and expect to be our peak performance. Right, we understand the difference between what we ingest, but, you know, your mind is the most fertile in the universe.
Grace Stevens:
Like you've, you have to watch your mental diet. Yes, exactly, it's very hard to reconcile the idea that, you know, for me, aspirationally, I want to believe the world is a good place with good people in it doing the best they can with the skills they have. Right, and it's hard to reconcile adopting that mindset when, yeah, you're drinking trauma from a, you know, a firehub, when you're watching just all this trauma and we get so normalized and desensitized to it and so, yeah, I think that's a big part of sleep routine is really, you know, watching your mental diet, even if you, like you said, yeah, read a book, but, you know, make sure it's not true crime. It's hard to fall asleep when you just get to the part in the book where the intruders in the house you know I'm saying like it's really like to kind of put the two and two together.
Grace Stevens:
I think there's a big disconnect for people between distraction and self-care. Right, you're really about stress management and and a holistic view to it. And you know, netflix and chill really isn't self-care no distraction, but it's not really authentic self-care such as the things you've been talking about your movement, your nutrition, your all those things. So, as we kind of wrap up here, what is there anything that you think you know? I really appreciate the start, small, I mean, we're breathing anyway. We can breathe for six. We do it anyway. We don't need to go buy something. We don't need to, you know, dramatically change our lives. That's a really small tweak we can do. Are there any small tweaks that you think teachers can take with them during their day when they are so busy? Maybe incorporate their students, one to set a good role model and two because these are the skills we should be teaching students. So what is something simple that that teachers can do to incorporate into their school day?
Dr Naomi Hall:
I would say breathing and movement. So one, the breathing to calm yourself down when you're getting stressed in the classroom and just bringing your students into that and talking them through what you're doing of I'm really anxious right now. And putting names to the emotions because, especially if you're I'm gonna say, even even bigger kids because I taught the big kids have a really hard time putting names on emotions. We experience the reactions that they have, but they have a hard time putting names to them. So talking students through emotions and feelings of I'm feeling anxious right now. So let's take a break and let's breathe and teach them for six breathing. There are lots of others that you can do, but for six is very calming. I'm just saying, alright, we're gonna take a couple minutes and let's breathe in for four counts, let's breathe out for six and taking them through that so that they're seeing your mental process of how you self-regulate, because sometimes we do those things but we don't show our students what we're doing and they really need to see what we're doing because they need those skills too. So it's a take breathing into your day, even just a deep breath. When you're feeling that tension build up, just breathe in and let it out to just kind of reset yourself. And then the movement doing movement breaks with your students.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I was just writing an email to my email list talking about some tips for Halloween and I was like you know what Kids are gonna be jacked up on sugar. So include as much movement in your lessons as you can Bring in the movement, and so making sure that you're getting up and moving throughout the class period and that your students are too, and even just saying, all right, you know what? We've been sitting for a really long time. Let's stand up, let's stretch, let's reach for the ceiling, let's reach for our toes, let's, you know, push our arms all the way back, let's give ourselves a nice big hug. You know, let's take a lap around the classroom.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I happened to have a classroom that was like the center of a wing, so I was like all right, we're gonna take a lap around the wing and come back into the classroom. And actually I would. I don't know if my AP knew this, but my kids, who are like super, like jittery, active, like needed to move. I was like, listen, go take two laps, like run two laps around the wing and come back to class.
Grace Stevens:
Absolutely. I had actually the year that I had a student who was diabetic and when he was high, you know, and his, his Dexcom would come off all the time, and when he was high, we knew that he needed, you know, to drink water and like exercise, and so he had a buddy who would run to the fence and back with him twice whenever that happened.
Grace Stevens:
And there were quite a few students who quite often I'd be like who wants to be the buddy and they'd be like 10 kids running to fence and back, but they just needed to like burn it off.
Grace Stevens:
And it was a nice. Like you know, I would once in a while save the kids. Hey, like you said, let's who wants to, some kids want to relax, who wants to go outside and just stretch for a minute? And I'd be there and, like you, all want to run to the fence and back. But yeah, with this kid, the last show I was teaching, he was a buddy to many kids. It's like I want to do that. I want to be his buddy, all right. Well, this has been fantastic. I think it's given teachers a lot to think about. I love that. Everything you suggested is easy, free and stuff we're doing anyway. We're breathing, anyway, we're choosing our clothes anyway. Hey, like, just be a little bit more intentional about it and focus on making it a sustainable. Yes, small habit that builds on each other. Yeah, not like a whole. You know, january 1st new year, new me, right, that's fizzled out by January 3rd. Like small habits. So tell people, dr Hall, where they can find you. Sure.
Dr Naomi Hall:
I am on social media. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Facebook as the recovering educator. So if you just search the recovering educator, you will find me and all of my simple tips. That's probably the easiest way to find me and there are links to other things from there, but that's probably the easiest place to find me.
Grace Stevens:
And I know that you have generously said there is a free resource that you, that my listeners can have, and so I'll put that link in the show notes. You want to tell us a little bit about what it is?
Dr Naomi Hall:
Sure. So I talked a little bit about breathing, because it is one of my absolute favorite stress management tools, because once you learn guided breathing, you can do it anywhere, anytime, and no one has to know that you're doing it. I did talk about teaching your students your process, but you can use it anywhere to help yourself calm down, to focus. You can do it before eating, to help yourself just slow down while you're eating, because I know we eat in like five bites.
Grace Stevens:
Yeah, you know, like a competitive school, right, right, shut the in.
Dr Naomi Hall:
What I did was I went and found six free guided breathing apps that you can download to your phone and I tested all of them, because I hate free apps that aren't actually free they're free.
Dr Naomi Hall:
So all of these, I have tested them, they are free and they walk you through different guided breathing techniques. My favorite one is Breathwork. So that's what my free gift is to you. It's these six apps. Go, download them, choose the one that you love. So I did pick six rather than just sending you to my favorite one, because that may not be your favorite.
Dr Naomi Hall:
It may be a different style that works better for you, but each of them take you through a few different types of guided breathing. They teach you how to do it. They have visual interfaces so that you can see what you're supposed to be doing. Some of them have music, different things like that but find the one that works for you. Download it and use that and practice it in non-stress situations so that when you're stressed, you can apply those techniques.
Grace Stevens:
All right, that's a fantastic resource. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you taking time to speak to us today. I appreciate from the bottom of my heart the work that you do. You know that we are soul sisters in that that is. You know, the world needs happier, calmer educators. That's what we need right now. We can't fix all the problems in the world, but that would fix a whole bunch of them starting right there. So I thank you and we will talk soon. All right, Thank you.