Stress has become an unavoidable part of a teacher’s life. The demands on a teacher are growing every year and the conditions are far harder than ever before. Psychologist Marc Smith gives some useful tips to teachers for managing stress:
Despite much discussion concerning the nature of workplace stress, our jobs are getting more and not less stressful. While stress certainly isn’t unique to the teaching profession, working in schools does throw up a number of situations that are unique to education while the current climate of uncertainty and criticism further undermines the professionalism and confidence of many hard working teachers. Ofsted inspections, changes to pay and conditions and new appraisal systems all add to the feeling that we are far from in control. Identifying those things that we can control and those that we cannot could help to prevent daily hassles from becoming major problems; but we can’t do it on our own.
Stress is a natural biological response and back in the day when wild animals roamed freely and early humans spent much of their time hunting and gathering the body’s response to stress was vital for our survival. Stress allows our biological system to prepare itself to do something – either attack (fight) or run away (flight). Acute stress represents that immediate panic which drives the fight or flight response but if this stress continues we begin to suffer from a more chronic condition, this can not only impact on us psychologically but can also lower our immune system, making us more vulnerable to physical illness.
Psychologically, the stress we feel is often based on our individual perception of a situation and this is why some people appear to suffer more than others. American psychologist Julian Rotter describes this as our ‘locus of control’ or the extent to which an individual feels that they have control over a situation. Locus of control can be internal, in that we believe we have control over our lives, or external, where we believe that the environment controls events. Realistically most of us fall between these two dimensions but we may favour a particular one. Unfortunately, our locus of control is very difficult to change because it probably developed through a combination of genetics and early socialisation.
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