You make it to the last week of school. The room goes quiet. You sit down at a desk that isn’t yours anymore, and your body finally lets you feel how tired you are. Not just tired the way a long Friday is tired. Tired in a way that started months ago and never had anywhere to put itself down.
Go to the beach. Read the book. Pour the wine. You earned every minute of it, and you should take every minute. And — if you’ve had summers like that before and still walked into the fall carrying the same weight — you already know that the rest you love doesn’t always reach the place that’s tired. That place is your nervous system, and it learns differently. It learns through small, repeated practices that teach your body it’s allowed to be off duty. That’s a skill, and you have a whole summer to build it.
These four practices aren’t a wellness checklist, and they’re not a replacement for the rest you’ve already planned. They’re nervous system regulation for teachers who want this summer (and next fall) to feel different than this past year did. Pick one. Do it for a week. Add another when it sticks.
1. Wake up before the day grabs you
The first thirty seconds after you open your eyes are the most reactive moments of your day. Most of us hand them straight to a phone. Notifications, news, group chats, the slow pull of the algorithm. By the time your feet touch the floor, your nervous system is already running someone else’s agenda.
Try this instead. Wake up. Breathe once on purpose, before reaching for anything. Notice the impulse to grab the phone, and decline it. That’s it. That’s the practice. “It can be just one breath,” as Dr. Kris Evans put it. “Sometimes I sit there for 10 minutes. Sometimes I sit there for 20. And I just breathe before I start to do all the things.”
Why this works: your nervous system is most plastic the moment you wake. What you do in those first breaths becomes the baseline tone of the day. A summer of regulated mornings teaches the body what regulation actually feels like, so it knows how to find that state again in October.
2. Watch your phone like you’d watch a student
Americans average around six hours a day on their phones. You don’t need a number to know it’s eroding something. What you need is meta-awareness, the skill of noticing your own state while you’re in it.
For one week, do this: every time you pick up your phone, pause for one breath before you unlock it. Then ask yourself, what was I doing right before I reached for this? What was I feeling? Don’t judge it. Just notice. You’re collecting data on yourself the way you’d collect data on a struggling reader. Patiently. Without verdict.
Most teachers find within three days that the phone is plugging two specific feelings: discomfort with boredom, and discomfort with stillness. Naming the pattern is the first move. It will be there in August too, the next time a hard staff meeting ends and your hand reaches before your mind does.
3. Sit with the boredom on purpose
This one is going to feel pointless, and that’s the point. Once a day, set a timer for ten minutes. Sit somewhere without a screen, a book, music, or a snack. Do nothing.
Your brain will fight you. It will offer you twenty things you “should” be doing. Watch the offers arrive. Don’t take any of them.
Boredom is where creativity, integration, and rest actually live. “That’s where the most creativity comes from,” a friend told the host. “That’s where the most learning comes from. If they can sit in a space of nothingness, then you can create from that.” It’s true for kids and it’s just as true for the adults who teach them. Research on mindfulness-based interventions in education shows large gains in well-being, focus, and stress regulation, and one of the active ingredients is exactly this skill: the ability to stay with your own experience without escape.
4. Name what you’re feeling, even when you can’t fix it
This is the practice you carry back into the classroom. Twice a day, ask yourself: what are two words for what I’m feeling right now? If words don’t come, use the weather. “I’m feeling stormy inside. It’s clear with a chance of rain.” That counts.
Naming an emotion is not therapy. It’s regulation. It tells the part of your brain that’s panicking that the part of your brain that watches the panicking is still online. That is meta-awareness in twenty seconds, and it scales. Students do it because you do it. Staff meetings get less reactive because you do it. The first hard parent email of next year lands and you don’t immediately flood, because you do it.
Try this today
Pick the morning breath. Tomorrow morning. One breath before the phone. The rest of the summer can build from there.
A different kind of master’s
The work you’re doing this summer, the reflection, the regulation, the rebuilding of your own attention, is exactly what the William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change is built around. If this kind of inner work feels like the year you’re ready for, the M.S.Ed. is enrolling now. Learn more here.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Dr. Kris Evans on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover meta-awareness, phone habits, the science of paying attention, and what it actually means to wake up on purpose.
