The body knows how to come home. Even after a year of going non-stop, it carries the blueprint for restoration. You just have to give it the cues. That’s what summer can be, if you let it. Five nervous system regulation practices for teachers can give it those cues: small, daily, and easy to start this week.
If you finished the year more depleted than free, it’s months of accumulated emotional labor still living in your shoulders, your jaw, your breath. The same nervous system that carried all of that knows how to settle, once it’s invited to.
First, listen to what your body is already saying
It all rests on one skill: the willingness to hear what’s there. The body’s always speaking. The question’s whether you slow down enough to catch it.
Try a slow body scan, top of the head down to the feet. Close your eyes if it’s safe to do so (skip that part if you’re driving). Move your attention through each region, noticing what’s there without trying to change it.
Most teachers find it in the shoulders, neck, and jaw. Some find weight or holding in the hips. Wherever it lands, you can’t restore what you haven’t acknowledged. In the somatic layer of the Human Intelligence framework, this is interoception, and it’s the foundation of every other practice below.
What the sensations are telling you
Once you’ve noticed, attune. The sensations are data; translate them.
- Tight chest, racing thoughts, clenched jaw? That’s hyper-arousal: the sympathetic state, fight or flight.
- Heavy limbs, low motivation, foggy head? Hypo-arousal: collapse, freeze, depleted.
- Steady breath, soft jaw, present attention? You’re inside your window of tolerance, the regulated zone where the nervous system isn’t over- or under-activated, and where calm, connected teaching becomes possible.
Pick the practice that matches the state. A common mismatch: defaulting to “rest” when the body actually needs gentle activation, or reaching for caffeine when the body’s asking to be grounded.
Practices that match the state you’re in
Hyper-aroused, anxious, wired, can’t stop:
- 4:6 breath. Inhale for a natural count of four. Exhale for six. The longer exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s rest-and-digest state. One peer-reviewed study found that lengthening the exhale relative to the inhale significantly increased high-frequency heart rate variability, a validated biomarker of vagal tone (Bae et al., Psychophysiology, 2021). Three to five rounds is often enough to drop your shoulders half an inch.
- Feel-your-roots. Plant both feet on the floor. Imagine roots growing from the soles into the earth. Pull whatever’s swirling in your head down through your body and into the ground. Stand if you can. Take your shoes off in the grass if it’s summer.
Hypo-aroused, flattened, foggy, can’t get off the couch:
- 6:4 breath. The inverse. Lengthen the inhale; let the exhale come naturally. Use sparingly. If you’re already wired, this’ll overactivate you.
- Sun breaths. Inhale, arms sweep up overhead, palms meet. Exhale, hands lower to heart center. Three rounds. Small, quick, physiologically lifting.
Holding stored tension:
- Tense and release. Squeeze every muscle you can find (fists, face, legs, belly, jaw) for a few seconds. Hold. Then release slowly. The body remembers how to let go once you’ve shown it the contrast.
A three-touch daily anchor
The highest-leverage practice of all is a beginning-middle-end of day framework. Three touchpoints, each under a minute.
- Beginning of day. Three deep breaths. One intention word for who you want to be today: present, playful, steady, grounded. One small embodied movement that matches the word: a hug, a stretch, a sun breath, a dance.
- Midday. Three breaths. Reconnect to the intention. One movement.
- End of day. Three breaths. Reflect on where you actually embodied the intention. Celebrate where you did. Close with a restorative breath or stretch.
The point isn’t perfection. What you’re building is someone with three reliable touchpoints in their day, where last summer there were none.
Why your summer is September’s foundation
Here’s where personal practice becomes classroom strategy. Your regulated nervous system regulates the room.
A 2016 study of elementary classrooms found that teachers with higher burnout had students with elevated morning cortisol, and teacher burnout accounted for roughly 10% of the variability in student stress hormones across classrooms (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl, Social Science & Medicine, 2016). A 2025 systematic review of 165 studies found that teachers’ emotion regulation strategies directly shape student engagement, motivation, and academic outcomes through emotional transmission, instructional behavior, and recursive feedback from students (Xu et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2025). The review leaned heavily on EFL contexts, so the size of the effect in U.S. K-12 settings is suggestive rather than settled, but the direction’s consistent across the literature.
The takeaway: co-regulation in the classroom starts with you. Your summer restoration is September’s upstream input.
One thing to try today
Pick one practice. Just one. Do it three times before the sun goes down, and notice what shifts in your shoulders, your jaw, your breath. By this time next week, those small shifts’ll be the foundation of a different kind of summer, and the start of your body finding its way home.
If you want a ground-up grounding in this work, TeacherCon is the free three-day online conference where Dr. Ilana Nankin and the Breathe for Change team walk educators through somatic, emotional, and relational practices for the year ahead. Free professional development certificates for live attendees. Day 1 covers exactly this material at depth.
For more on how nervous system tools translate into the classroom itself, see the companion piece on nervous system tools for student behavior.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Beth on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They walk through all five somatic intelligence competencies, the proactive-versus-responsive distinction, and how to use these practices when you’re genuinely depleted.
