Speaker 1: We all know that teachers don't go into teaching to get rich or famous. Teachers go into teaching because they have a passion for it. So why do so many feel stressed or burned out? Why do so many teachers who love their job still feel overwhelmed? It's important to understand the reasons for stress and burnout, and why so many teachers are affected.

Speaker 2: So it's interesting. When you think about teaching, it is, of all the professions, one of the most complex and one of the most challenging. There's even one author, Lee Shulman, who, past president of the Carnegie Foundation, who for years worked in medical education and teacher education, who made an interesting observation. He said that most physicians would never experience what a teacher does unless they were in an emergency room after a natural disaster. And that just speaks to the complexity of having to deal with multiple clients, if you will, and add to that all of the contextual factors that surround the life of a teacher. The never-ending demands for changing this, fixing that, improving test scores, implementing a new curriculum, all of those changes that are most part outside the teacher's control. Then there are the community contexts. Some teachers, for example, when you think about teacher stress, some work in very challenging environments in the sense that they're working with children who, when they look into their lives, they see things that they would never want to happen to any child. And that can, over time, become very stressful, just to see the young people having to go through what they're having to go through.

Speaker 1: Teachers care about their students and often empathize with them when they know their lives are hard. Over time, that can take its toll, leading to empathy fatigue or empathic distress.

Speaker 3: So I would contrast empathic distress with an empathy fatigue with compassion. And so in compassion, the way that we define it in the Stanford CCT program is that compassion is an awareness of suffering coupled with a willingness to take action to relieve the suffering. And so empathy is one piece of the compassion response. And the reason why it's important to recognize it as one piece is if we stay stuck in the empathic response and feeling with another person, resonating on an emotional level with them, that can lead to burnout because it's not an empowered position. It's based on if you move out of your struggle, then I will feel better because I'm emotionally resonating with you. There's some research that's recently come out of Max Planck Institute in Germany showing the different brain regions associated with empathy and compassion. Empathy is a self-referential response, and it's associated with the pain centers in the brain, whereas compassion is an other focused response associated with reward centers. So similar to when we eat chocolate, there are certain regions of the brain that light up when we eat chocolate, and they're finding that that's actually the same pleasure centers of the brain that light up when we're having a compassionate response. So empathy is more self-involved because your pain then becomes my pain, and then it becomes about me more. And so it's really it's an interesting inquiry because empathy is so crucial to understanding the other and caring about the other, and yet it can be a little bit of a sticking point.

Speaker 2: When we think about sort of the long-term and short-term effects of stress, empathic distress can be a short-term episodic thing where you have this moment where you're just overwhelmed with sadness and a feeling of a lack of efficacy to really do anything about the problem. That's one thing. When stress becomes chronic and it becomes long-term and people are living in it over time, it really can become debilitating because during that time people tend to lose the capacity to really objectively observe themselves. They may begin to distort reality and see problems in their organization or with their fellow teachers or with their students or with their parents. They don't really exist, but it's their way of coping with the fact that they really are stuck. And when people are stuck in this way, they can become very oriented on the past. How come things aren't the way they used to be? And I wish they were, and I'm sort of angry that they're not. And they also can become very future-oriented. Like, I've got to find a way out of here. That's the kind of chronic long-term stress that leads to burnout, which is a very, very serious condition. We throw the word burnout around, but one doesn't get burned out on Tuesday and then they're fine on Wednesday. Burnout really is a long-term psychological and physiological state that's not a good place to be. And quite frankly, it can lead to actual depression.

Speaker 1: Paradoxically, the characteristics of a good teacher, including the ability to juggle multiple demands and the gift of empathizing with students, can leave teachers vulnerable to stress and burnout. Up next, the role of mindfulness in addressing stress in the classroom. For more information, check out the Ohio Department of Education's Well-Being Toolkit.