Your nervous system is built to recover. That’s what summer is for: the recovery cycle a teaching brain was built to need. So if the first weeks of break feel stranger than expected, harder to settle into than you remembered, you’re not doing rest wrong. The neuroscience of summer for teachers explains why those first weeks land the way they do, and what’s actually useful to do with them.
What’s happening in your body when school ends
For nine months you’ve been on a single rhythm: wake at the same hour, plan for tomorrow, co-regulate twenty-five other nervous systems, repeat. Your stress hormones learn that rhythm. Cortisol, the body’s daily stress signal, starts rising before you wake to prep you for what’s coming. Researchers at Penn State found that educators’ salivary cortisol runs higher in spring than in fall, evidence that physiological stress accumulates across the school year and that summer is a real biological recovery period, not just a psychological one (Katz et al., Penn State University, 2023).
When school stops, the body keeps producing the chemistry it learned to produce. That’s why those first weeks can feel less like rest and more like a crash. The sympathetic side of your nervous system, the fight-or-flight side, has spent nine months doing the work of teaching. The parasympathetic side, the part that handles rest and repair, has been waiting its turn. Summer is when it finally gets one.
The brain network that needs your boredom
There’s a part of the brain especially starved by an always-on school year: the default mode network. It lights up when you’re staring out the window, daydreaming in the shower, lying in the grass watching the sky. It’s how the brain makes new connections, integrates the past nine months, and incubates ideas that won’t come while you’re on task. The same network, when chronically dysregulated, is implicated in depression and rumination (Buckner et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2008).
So the rest that can feel indulgent is the rest the brain uses to repair itself. “Negative capability,” as Dr. Michael Jacob, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and Breathe for Change faculty member, put it, drawing from the poet Keats: the capacity to rest in mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts without irritably reaching after fact or reason. That capacity sits at the somatic and emotional layers of the five layers of Human Intelligence, and it’s part of what neuroscience reveals about your full Human Intelligence once rest stops being something to feel guilty about and starts being something the brain is using.
Two practices for the first weeks
1. Schedule unstructured time, then don’t structure it. Block an hour. Don’t plan it. Lie in the grass, take an aimless walk, sit on the porch with no podcast in your ears. Resist the pull to make it productive. The boredom that shows up is the cortisol cycle slowing down. Sit with it.
2. Make something with no purpose. Reach for pastels, a notebook, a guitar collecting dust. Forget the product. What you’re after is giving your hands and mind something to do that won’t get graded, posted, or shared. The strongest experimental research on play and learning is in early childhood (Hirsh-Pasek et al., Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2015), but the underlying mechanism, embodied and low-stakes exploration, restores the same networks in adults.
This is what surfaces when the doing stops. Breathe for Change co-founder and co-CEO Dr. Ilana Nankin describes waking at 4 a.m. recently with a curriculum insight she could only have had in that incubation space, a new assignment for the educators in the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change. The insight arrived because the planning had stopped.
A window in the next two days
If you want a place to start: thirty minutes, phone in another room, no plan. If your hands want something, give them a pencil and a notebook. If your mind reaches for what’s next, notice the reach and come back to where you are. Notice what surfaces when the reaching stops.
Carrying this into the fall
This is what sustainable teaching looks like at the nervous system level: the recovery cycle that makes the next year possible. For a low-lift entry into the science behind it, TeacherCon, Breathe for Change’s free three-day online event for educators, opens with the human capacities AI can’t replicate, including the play and rest the research keeps pointing to. It’s the simplest way to reset and reconnect before the break, then carry the practice into the fall. Find the next session at breatheforchange.com.
The unstructured days at the start of summer aren’t a problem to solve. They’re the doorway.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Dr. Michael Jacob on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover the neuroscience of summer, the role of play in the developing brain, and what’s actually happening in your nervous system when school ends.
