Ten percent of the variability in student morning cortisol across elementary classrooms can be predicted by one thing: how burned out the teacher is.
That finding, from a 2016 study in Social Science & Medicine, was the first to document physiological stress transmission from teacher to student at the classroom level (Oberle & Schonert-Reichl). The signal travels below language. The body of an exhausted teacher carries something children pick up before any words are spoken.
Most teachers already know this. They’ve always known it. What they may not know is that the same signal works in reverse. The residue of every escalated student, every parent meeting that ran over, every administrator email that didn’t need to be that tone, every child who showed up hungry: it all accumulates somewhere. And the somewhere is the body.
This is the part most educators skip when summer arrives. By June, the internal script repeats: I’ll relax this summer. I’ll sleep more. I’ll catch up on reading. I’ll go somewhere. By August, many of those same teachers are no more restored than they were in June. The plans were real. The rest didn’t land.
There’s a physiological reason for that.
What a school year actually loads onto the body
Teaching is one of the few professions where the worker is asked to hold sustained emotional attunement to twenty or more people for six to eight hours a day, every day, for nine months, often while standing, often while being interrupted, often while making split-second decisions about whether a child is safe, whether a conflict is escalating, whether a lesson is landing, whether someone in the room is in crisis.
Researchers call this compassion fatigue. A 2022 systematic review of 17 empirical studies on teacher populations found elevated rates of compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress, particularly among educators working with trauma-exposed students, with symptoms including emotional exhaustion, intrusive thoughts about students, and physical depletion consistent with Charles Figley’s foundational caregiver framework (Ormiston et al., School Mental Health, 2022; Figley, 1995). The reviewed literature skews U.S.-based and special-education-heavy, but the construct is now well-documented across teaching contexts.
Dr. Ilana Nankin, a former teacher and co-founder of Breathe for Change, names what most teachers feel and rarely say out loud. In a recent episode of A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast, she put it plainly: our nervous systems have been in fight or flight for a really, really long time. She described her own first year in the classroom: coming home and being unable to do anything but lie horizontal on the couch. Not from laziness. From having held too much for too long, without anywhere to put it.
A teacher’s body learns, over the months, to stay slightly braced. The shoulders learn to live an inch higher. The jaw learns to stay clenched. The breath learns to live in the upper chest. The hips, where many bodies store unresolved emotional load, learn to carry.
By summer, the school year has ended on paper. The body hasn’t been told.
Why “I’ll relax” can’t reach this
To understand why mental resolve can’t discharge what the body has stored, look at Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory. The autonomic nervous system, Porges argued, doesn’t have just two states. It operates through three phylogenetically ordered circuits: ventral vagal (safe, socially engaged), sympathetic (fight or flight), and dorsal vagal (freeze, collapse, shutdown). Chronic occupational stress can trap a nervous system in survival states that affect posture, digestion, immune function, and the way someone reads other people’s faces (Porges, Psychophysiology, 1995). Specific neuroanatomical claims within polyvagal theory are still being refined, but the clinical framework is widely adopted across trauma-informed practice.
What this means for teachers is direct. The body of an educator who has spent a year in sympathetic activation doesn’t decide to step into the ventral vagal state when school ends. The nervous system runs on cues, not on calendars. A two-week vacation that doesn’t send physiological signals of safety to the body produces a tired teacher who is still in fight or flight, just somewhere quieter.
Bessel van der Kolk made a related case from a different direction. In a foundational 1994 paper he later expanded into The Body Keeps the Score, he argued that chronic stress and trauma don’t store as memories alone (van der Kolk, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 1994; van der Kolk, 2014). They encode in sensory and visceral systems, disrupting physiological self-regulation in ways that persist long after the stressor has ended, and that can’t be resolved through cognitive processing or conscious intention. The book’s popular framing of somatic “storage” has drawn methodological criticism. The core empirical claim, that body-based approaches outperform talk-only approaches for certain trauma presentations, is supported by a growing body of trials.
In that same conversation, Dr. Nankin put it in plainer language: what we resist persists.
The layer educator training has skipped
The Breathe for Change Human Intelligence framework names five interconnected layers of educator capacity: cognitive, emotional, somatic, relational, and universal. Each one is a domain. Each one has competencies that can be developed.
The somatic layer is the one teacher training has skipped. Most graduate education programs train pedagogy and assessment. A growing number train cognitive science. Almost none train the body. The result is a profession in which educators are taught to manage their thoughts but not their nervous systems, and a workforce that ends June with bodies that don’t know how to come down.
Dr. Nankin named the gap directly in that conversation: somatic intelligence is the one that is the least taught in school.
The somatic layer has five competencies. The first two are the ones the field has overlooked: interoception (the capacity to notice what’s happening inside the body in real time) and attunement (the capacity to decode what those sensations are saying about what the body needs). These are the listening work that has to precede the doing work. Education has historically gone straight to regulation: sit still, hands in your lap, calm down. Regulation without interoception is performance. The body has been managed, not heard. Self-awareness is the starting point for every educator for a reason.
What actually discharges what the body has stored
The practices that work are physiological interventions, not relaxation tips.
Extended-exhale breathing is one of the most studied. A 2021 study in Psychophysiology found that lengthening the exhale relative to the inhale, without changing the overall breathing rate, significantly increased high-frequency heart rate variability and RMSSD, both validated biomarkers of cardiac vagal tone and parasympathetic activation (Bae et al., 2021). The effect was acute and observed at the group level; other studies have found mixed results on the specific ratio question, and elevated HRV in this study persisted only for minutes after the practice. So it isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a daily input.
The point is that there’s a mechanism. The body shifts when the breath shifts. A teacher who lengthens her exhale on a Wednesday morning is doing something physiological, not metaphorical.
The mechanism becomes automatic with practice. In the same conversation, Dr. Nankin shared a story about exactly that: she once fell forty-four feet in a rock climbing accident. In the ambulance afterward, her body reached for the extended-exhale breath on its own, without a cognitive decision. She didn’t choose it. She’d practiced it enough that her nervous system did it for her. That’s what an embodied practice looks like at full strength.
One Breathe for Change graduate has credited the master’s program directly as the source of her own somatic toolkit. Her arc from annual summer collapse to sustainable restoration is told in this profile of her journey. The shorthand: she’d read about all of this for years and it hadn’t landed. What landed was being walked through the practices in a community of educators until her body knew them well enough to access them under stress.
The path back into your body
The argument isn’t that teachers should rest more this summer. Most have heard that for ten years and have continued to end August depleted.
The argument is that restoration has to happen at the level of the body, not the schedule. A school year encodes itself physiologically. It’ll discharge physiologically, or it won’t discharge at all.
In practice, that means three things. The work of restoration starts with the educator’s own body, not with the classroom waiting in September. The practices that actually shift the nervous system are small, daily, and embodied: a body scan that takes two minutes, an extended-exhale breath that takes thirty seconds, a feel-your-roots grounding that fits in the time it takes to brew coffee. And the gap between knowing this and doing it consistently is the gap a structured program closes. Not because the practices are complex. Because the body learns through repetition in community, not through reading.
The downstream cost of leaving this work undone
The cost doesn’t stop with the teacher. A burned-out teacher transmits cortisol to the children in the room, and that physiological transmission is only the most measurable piece. They also make different instructional decisions over the course of the year, with measurable downstream effects on the children they teach. They show up with less of themselves available, every day, all year, and the children feel it before any words are spoken.
The future of education is human, and the future of human educators is somatic. Among educators who have completed Breathe for Change programs, 90% report feeling less stressed and burned out than before their training, and 97% report improvement in mental, physical, and social-emotional well-being (Breathe for Change graduate survey data; 20,000+ certified educators to date). Those numbers track to the practices, not to the wishing.
For educators who want to do this work at depth, 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 the five layers of human intelligence, including a somatic curriculum most graduate education programs don’t teach. The M.S.Ed. is HLC-accredited through William Jewell College and enrolling now. The work begins with the educator’s own body, which is the only place restoration actually happens, and the only place the cost to students starts to reverse.
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 the five somatic intelligence competencies with practices for each, and tell the story of one educator’s arc from annual summer collapse to sustainable restoration.
