Need A Boost?

Energy Boosters for Teachers

Teachers try to get a good night’s sleep for the full school day ahead. Teaching, entertaining, monitoring, encouraging, managing, balancing, and planning are among our daily duties. All of the tasks that teachers do can and often create exhausting days. Just thinking about it is exhausting. Sometimes teachers need a little energy boost to make it through the school day. Here are 3 teacher energy boosters.

Power Nap

Sometimes we need a little shut eye during the day. Just a 10 to 15 minute nap can be enough to refresh your energy, boost memory, and enhance creativity. During your planning or lunch time, taking a cat nap can be beneficial for you as well as your students. It can decrease grumpiness and irritation for you, and make you a more pleasant teacher to be around. Students will benefit from your alertness and the energy boost can improve your productivity.

To fit this in your day, you may have to be creative with your time. Teachers have a daily schedule that must be followed. However, there may be opportunities for flexibility if you have a duty-free lunch and if you do not have meetings everyday of your planning period. During those times a quick nap may be exactly what you need. Taking 10 to 15 minutes from your lunch break or planning time may be worth it if you regularly feel fatigue or operate with low energy during the workday. 

I remember implementing a 15 minute nap during the school day. I brought my yoga mat to work and for the first 15 minutes after dropping my students off to their elective classes, I would lay down and take a nap. I needed this! Once my timer rang, I was refreshed to focus on a task that was very important or the grade level meeting that followed. 

Taking a quick nap may sound unconventional, but many employers are encouraging wellness activities for their employees throughout the day and a nap has been one of them.

It may be hard to fall asleep quickly, but with practice it will get easier. Here are a few tips to help you boost your energy through a power nap.

Be consistent

It is best if you took your nap at the same time each day and the same place each time. Your body gets comfortable with its surroundings. You can help train it by picking a specific time and location to shut it down for a few moments. Be patient. It may take a while for your body to get comfortable relaxing, but if your energy is low, relaxing is exactly what you need.

Lights out

Blocking out as much light as possible helps you fall asleep faster. It sends a signal to the body that it is time to rest. Closing the blinds and turning off the lights will help your body settle down. A dark room also helps to rest your eyes. I keep a jacket behind my chair that I can throw over my head to shut out additional light. The jacket also provided an extra layer of warmth for me, which helped regulate my body temperature for comfort.

Shhhhhh 

Wear ear plugs or make sure you are in a quiet place. Noise can wake you up or startle you in the middle of sleep. When we are taking a 10 to 15 minute nap, every minute counts. If you can spare 10 to 20 minutes, that is the ideal time for a cat nap. Make sure your nap doesn’t last longer than 30 minutes. That can leave you feeling sluggish and groggy. 

Meditation

If a daily nap is not for you, you may want to try a few minutes of meditation to boost your energy. Meditating as little as 3 to 5 minutes has been shown to renew energy. When you meditate you are relaxing your body. Throughout the school day your body can become tense. Helping students do well on a test, stepping in right on time to prevent a fight, your upcoming evaluation, and even planning an important unit can cause tension while you are at work.

Meditating can be a great way to relieve tension, clear your mind, and give you a much needed energy boost. 

Sometimes we have to give our body permission to relax. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves to take deep long breaths in and out. In the middle of a crisis at school many of us will stop in our tracks and hold in our breath for an extra second or two. If we get upset our breath automatically becomes faster and more shallow. Practicing these breathing habits decreases the oxygen flow to the brain which can increase fatigue. In addition to practicing deep breaths to increase our energy, deep breathing can reduce stress, lower our heart rate and blood pressure, and reduce depression and burnout.

Did you know that yawning is a way to give your body more oxygen? When you yawn, take several long deep breaths. The deep breaths will help your body get more oxygen and provide alertness.

Yoga is a way teachers can meditate to boost their energy and improve their overall health. Yoga can be practiced in as little as 10 minutes a day. Here are 3 reasons practicing yoga to boost your energy may be right for you:

1. You can practice yoga in your classroom.
2. Yoga stretches can help to relieve tension.
3. Yoga can aid in weight loss.

Listen to Music

Have you ever been in a funky mood and then you start to hear your favorite song? You instantly are swept into the moment and forget why you were down. That is the magic of music. Music can help improve a teacher’s physical, mental, and emotional health. Sometimes we can feel sluggish and as if we are just going through daily motions. Music can regulate your mood and encourage body movement. Moving to the beat can encourage balance, flexibility, blood circulation, and give us the energy boost we need.

If we have students during this time, even better! This can be a great brain break for them. Adding a little music to our day can improve our relationship with our students and give them a change to a monotonous day. The simplest movement such as swaying side to side can increase the blood flow to the brain which increases overall energy. That can help you and your students focus and make better decisions.

When I hear a song I like, I immediately feel better. Music can help promote the release of the “feel good” hormones oxytocin and serotonin. It can also help with lowering anxiety. When we listen to music, we take our mind off of what is bothering or weighing us down and it allows us to focus on being in the moment. We can create a short playlist for our personal time and one that we can enjoy with students. 

Music has long been used to benefit the body, soul, and spirit. We can find historical accounts of it being used in ancient Greece by the famous physician, philosopher, and mathematician Pythagoras. He believed that listening to specific frequencies could promote the release of negative feelings and healing in the body.

This has encouraged many to play music based on sound frequency. Binaural beats have been used as a form of sound wave therapy. Many use it to relieve anxiety and stress, improve mode and increase energy. “Binaural” means relating to both ears. Binaural beats allow you to hear a tone at a different frequency in your left ear from the frequency that is heard in your right ear.

You do not need headphones to benefit from listening to binaural beats. However, headphones are recommended.

Binaural beats may be a new concept for many teachers. Be comforted in knowing that no known side effects of listening to binaural beats have been found. 

Here are a few areas that listening to different frequencies of binaural beats are known to help with:

Encouraging relaxation

Promoting positivity

Decreasing anxiety

Increasing concentration and alertness

Promotes deep sleep and creativity

Improve mood and memory

All of these tips have beneficial qualities for teachers who can use a boost of energy to finish the day. Don’t be afraid to take 5 to 10 minutes to try them, they just may work.