#98 Teacher Sustainability Starts In The Body
Feb 23, 2026Things in life are as hard as we make them. Not because we choose difficulty, but because we design environments that ignore human capacity.
If we build schools that require constant fight-or-flight, teaching will feel impossibly hard.
If we build schools that protect recovery, teaching becomes sustainable.
Hard is often a design flaw that can be redesigned.
When I was in the classroom, there were days I hadn’t even walked into the building yet, and my nervous system was already bracing.
I’ve held several different positions as an educator because I’m very curious by nature and admittedly, I’m not very content to remain in one role for much longer than 10 years. Eight to nine years has been my pattern. I was a LA teacher for 8, a middle school librarian for 9, and a 5th grade teacher for 8.
The longest role I’ve held in education is the one I’m in now, as a graduate course designer and instructor with the Regional Training Center in New Jersey.
That’s not accidental.
The company was founded and run by educators who understand that teachers are whole human beings. People with families. With limits. With nervous systems that can only carry so much before something gives. There’s a culture of compassion there. A recognition that professional growth should not come at the expense of personal well-being.
Their courses are offered online and live-virtually, not as a convenience perk, but as an understanding of real life. Teachers are balancing classrooms, households, aging parents, children of their own. Flexibility matters.
The learning itself reflects what we know about good teaching. It’s active. Engaging. Experiential. Not lecture-heavy or disconnected from practice. You feel the pedagogy as you move through it.
That alignment, both philosophically and physiologically, is why I’ve been with them for over 20 years.
I was so embarrassed!
During my years as a library media specialist, administration announced a shelter in place because I had to be taken out of the school in an ambulance.
Can you believe it? I couldn’t, I was so embarrassed!
If the school nurse asked me once, she asked me a dozen times if I was on blood pressure medication because my heart rate was so high.
I wasn’t.
I was just living in a body that had normalized fight-or-flight, and I called it dedication.
It's a capacity problem
Teacher burnout does not live in the head. It’s not a mind-set problem. It’s a capacity problem, and capacity lives in the body.
National data continues to show what educators already feel: high levels of stress, rising burnout, and increased intentions to leave the profession. Here’s what concerns me most as an educator for almost 30 years and wellness coach:
We are still trying to solve burnout cognitively.
More motivation.
More appreciation posts.
More reminders to “remember your why.”
As if inspiration can override exhaustion.... For many teachers, “remember your why” doesn’t inspire.
It irritates. It’s dismissive of the very real physiological toll the job can take.
Yet teachers continue to leave because burnout is a nervous system issue. When educators operate in fight-or-flight for extended periods of time because of constant vigilance, emotional labor, escalating behaviors, workload demands, and insufficient recovery, the body stores that stress.
When the nervous system is chronically activated, the brain shifts from growth to survival. Cognitive flexibility narrows. Emotional tolerance decreases. Threat perception increases. Over time, leaving becomes less of a choice and more of a biological drive toward safety.
Stored stress becomes exhaustion. Exhaustion becomes detachment. Detachment becomes attrition. Retention requires sustainability, not compensation structures and salary guides alone. It requires physiological sustainability.
Sustainability in education encompasses three intertwined areas:
- Personal sustainability - A nervous system that can recover
- Professional sustainability - A career that can be sustained without chronic depletion
- Institutional sustainability - Systems that support regulation instead of perpetuating overload
One cannot be isolated from the others.
If teachers are expected to self-regulate inside dysregulated systems, burnout becomes inevitable.
If professional longevity is the goal, recovery must be designed into the culture, not left to individual self-care.
If institutions ignore physiological capacity, retention becomes unstable.
This is why a shift from self-care to self-cultivation is needed in education. Self-cultivation is developmental, and development requires time. It requires structure. It requires intentional design.
If we are not building recovery, regulation, and nervous system capacity into the architecture of the school day, then self-cultivation remains theoretical.
Stress is one of the most significant challenges in public education today, for students and educators alike. Regulated teachers regulate students. The nervous system of the adult in the room sets the tone for the nervous systems of the children in it.
Self-cultivation asks:
- How do we build nervous system capacity in educators?
- How do we design environments that protect it?
- How do we create schools where staying is sustainable, not heroic?
Sustainability is a strategy.
Until teacher retention is addressed through the lens of nervous system science and institutional design, symptoms will continue to be treated instead of causes.
- Burnout is the signal.
- Sustainability is the solution.
- Retention begins in the body.
The question isn’t whether teachers are resilient. The question is whether the systems we are asking them to teach in are sustainable.
We need our teachers. We say they are valued. Now we must build systems that prove it.
Because sustainable educators create sustainable schools.
