Let’s talk about the elephant in the room… the one thing that makes everyone uncomfortable… STRESS.

Everyone experiences stress occasionally; it’s a natural part of being a human, but sometimes the stress becomes too much, and we need ways to handle it… that is the one part I am not good at, handling my stress in a healthy way.

For years, I handled stress by ignoring it and hoping it would just go away. But instead of it going away, it would eat away at me until I was engulfed by anxiety. It took me up until my first block of the education program to learn how to deal with my stress in a helpful way.

Before starting this program, I knew I needed to organize myself better to manage my stress because I knew that I would have a long and busy road ahead of me. Not only was the program going to have a heavy course load, but the career I was choosing to go into was going to strain my psyche.

Working as a teacher, I will need to be ready to face stress and not allow it to affect my job. In order to manage this amount of stress, I will need to find proper coping mechanisms that will allow me to keep my affairs in order without experiencing burnout too quickly in my career. Burnout is something that all teachers experience throughout their careers because being a teacher is a taxing yet beneficial job.

Some coping mechanisms that I will try

  1. Learn relaxation techniques
  2. practice mindfulness
  3. make time for me
  4. start a stress journal where I can write my worries away
  5. admit when I need help

By the end of the education program, I hope to have useful stress management strategies that I will be able to bring into my teaching career so that I can have a long and enlightening career.