In this episode, we explore why crashing on the couch isn’t the same as true recovery and share our four-part framework for summer restoration: relax, refresh, refocus, and recharge. We talk about how to know when you might need each type of recovery, the common traps teachers fall into during summer break, and how to create a more intentional approach to rest so you can head into the next school year feeling like yourself again.

Prefer to read? Grab the episode transcript and resources in the show notes here: https://www.secondstorywindow.net/podcast/active-rest-for-teachers/

Resources:

• Cross legged chair
• Storage box
• Preorder our book Structure and Spark
• Join The Teacher Approved Club
• Connect with us on Instagram @2ndstorywindow
• Shop our teacher-approved resources
• Join our Teacher Approved Facebook group
• Leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
• Leave a comment or rating on Spotify

Related Episodes to Enjoy:

• Episode 260. A 7-Day Decompression Plan for the First Week of Summer
• Episode 197. A Teacher Summer Self Care and Recovery Plan That Doesn’t Feel Like Work
• Episode 130. The 2 Things Teachers Need to Refuel This Summer
• Episode 12. Recovering from the School Year
• Episode 65. Make an Easy Plan For Your Perfect Teacher Summer: Recovery and Readiness

Mentioned in this episode:

Join the Teacher Approved Club, where members get seasonal morning work pages for grades K–5 this month to add fall and holiday fun without throwing off their routines: https://secondstorywindow.net/club

This is episode 262 of Teacher Approved.

You're listening to Teacher Approved, the podcast helping

educators elevate what matters and simplify the rest. I'm

Heidi.

And I'm Emily. We're the creators behind Second Story

Window, where we give research-based and

teacher-approved strategies that make teaching less stressful and

more effective. You can check out the show notes and resources

from each episode at secondstorywindow.net.

We're so glad you're tuning in today. Let's get to

the show.

Hey there, thanks for joining us today. In today's

episode, we are talking about what real summer recovery looks

like, and why crashing on the couch for two weeks isn't the

same thing as resting. Plus, we've got a teacher-approved tip

for thinking ahead to your digital organization for next

year.

But first, let's start with a try it tomorrow, where we

share a quick win that you can try right away. Emily, what's

our suggestion this week?

This week, make a plan for what to say when someone

wants to talk about school stuff, and you do not. Someone

is going to corner you at a barbecue and want to solve their

kids' reading struggles, or someone will try to recruit you

for the curriculum committee that they're starting up, and in

that moment you will probably feel caught off guard. And you

might say yes to things that you don't actually want to do, or

get pulled into a long conversation that takes up an

hour, and you did not want to do that.

So make a plan for how you want to handle it. You could come up

with a phrase that you want to say, or a plan for how you could

change the subject. That would be my go-to, is, figure out a

way to transition out of that conversation in a way that feels

comfortable for you, but also does not end in you committing

to something you don't want to do or having a conversation you

don't want to have.

Yeah, I've noticed this gets really bad at the start of

the summer when parents are finally like seeing the trouble

signs, and they want to make it your problem. Because they know

you are connected to a school, even if you don't have anything

to do with the grade that their kid is in, you must have all the

answers. And then I've also noticed that this concern really

plummets later in the summer. When I was a newer, sweeter,

kinder teacher, I would, I would, 100% make this my

problem. If someone wanted to talk to me about, like, how

their kid was doing, or, you know, some plans for that coming

school year, I would dive all the way in, and then they would

never, like, follow through, and so I just went up, like, all

this time and energy given, like, all of this mental labor

to something that the other person just dropped the ball on,

so.

Yep.

I find it's not worth it.

Yeah, that's the frustration. Like, I think I'd

be more willing to give out that time to help someone if they

followed through on it, but we both have people in our lives

that repeatedly do this at the beginning of every summer when

they're panicking, and we know from experience that they're not

going to take seriously anything that we suggest, and so it's

just something they're doing to ease their anxiety, but they're

not going to follow through on it. So, yeah, it's just too hard

to keep putting labor into that. So, now I'm going for much

shorter, like, "Oh, you should just try this," you know,

because I know they're not going to do it. So, give them

something short and quick, and then not devote any more of my

time to it.

Oh, yeah, don't make this your problem. I got cornered in

a bathroom once, so like people have no chill.

Man. Well, if you like this idea for avoiding

awkwardness or mental labor you don't want to do, would you take

a second and give us a five-star rating and review on Apple

Podcasts or Spotify?

So, how was June treating everyone? A lot of you are out

already, but we've got a few stalwarts still in the trenches.

So, let's talk about what those early days of break might look

like.

In last week's episode, we gave you a framework for your

first seven days of summer, nothing rigid, just a bit of a

shape that you could add to each day if you want to. So go back

and check out episode 260 if you missed that one, but let's zoom

out now and look at the bigger picture of summer recovery.

And if you're anything like Emily and me, your summer

break usually starts with a well-earned collapse on the

couch.

But then somehow you're three weeks into summer and

feeling more tired than you were the day school ended, for some

reason. I don't understand why it works that way.

Well, it happens because it turns out that crashing is

not recovering, and most of us have spent years confusing the

two. Think about how a hard school year ends, your nervous

system is fried, and then when summer finally hits, the natural

response is to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.

There's nothing wrong with keeping things low key,

especially at the start of summer. Sometimes you really do

need to lie horizontal for a while. That isn't the problem.

The problem is when lying horizontal becomes the entire

recovery strategy.

And it's a problem because that is not actually

rest, it's collapse, and collapse and rest are not the

same thing. People don't burn out from working hard, they burn

out from never recovering, which means that recovery is not

optional.

Yeah, it's not a reward for surviving the year, it's the

thing that determines whether you can keep doing this work.

The reason that collapse doesn't help is that real

recovery is active. It's not the same as zoning out.

Now, zoning out feels like grass because it is the

opposite of work, but it doesn't actually restore you. Active

recovery means doing things to refill what got drained.

This is the trap I fell into pretty much every summer. I

collapsed like all my bones had melted, and it was me and the

couch for weeks, because I don't have kids, I could do that, and

it was lovely. But as I started getting a bit of energy back, I

took that as my go sign. If I could string two thoughts

together, that meant it was time to dive back into prep. I had

color-coded to-do lists decorated with floral clip art,

of course, because it was summer, and I went full

throttle. Unpaid hours on the computer and in the work group,

just all of it. I knew how hard the school year would be, and it

felt like if I didn't solve every problem in the summer, I

wouldn't be able to deal with it once I was in the thick of

teaching again.

Yeah. And to be honest, some of the prep was fun. Some

personalities like ours enjoy prep. We did enjoy having school

projects and getting to work on our classrooms together. That is

one of my favorite memories, but it's true that a lot of our prep

was driven by panic.

Definitely. And because we didn't have a way to identify

which tasks were most valuable, everything felt equally urgent,

which is how two days before school started, I did have my

writing lessons planned for the year, but my desks were still in

a heap in the middle of the room. Ugh, my stomach is

literally in knots just thinking about it.

Yeah, because we didn't have a system for determining

what deserved our energy, and we didn't understand why recovery

was needed. We just tried to do it all, which is how we would

start the year already drained.

If you aren't careful, it's easy to spend your whole

break doing summer wrong in two completely different directions.

There's the over collapse and the over prep.

And if you're an overachiever, maybe you do both,

but those two responses have the same underlying issue. There's

no framework for what's actually needed, so everything feels

equally important or equally optional. You end up reactive

instead of intentional.

So that is where our summer framework comes in, we

call it recovery and readiness. It gives you four different

lenses to look at recovery and guide you to set gentle,

prioritized boundaries around work.

As we mentioned earlier, recovery is active, but that

doesn't have to mean training for a marathon active, unless

that's your jam.

And if it is, more power to you. We will be cheering you

on from our air-conditioned houses. But we just mean that

recovery has to have a direction to be beneficial. So, we have

split it into four different types, and the first type of

recovery is to relax.

And this might be where your couch collapse comes into

play. Relaxing is about slowing your nervous system. This is

what you need when you've been operating in overstimulated

chaos for 10 months straight.

You probably know if you need this type of recovery, the

signs are pretty clear. You're down to your last nerve,

everything feels heavy, you can't sit still, but you also

can't focus. You may even feel anxious trying to rest, because

your brain just is not used to working in that mode.

That's a really specific kind of depletion, and the

recovery for it is also specific. Think quiet activities

and low stimulation environments.

Just watch out for the massive pitfall that claims us

all now and then. Screen time. Most of us default to TV or our

phones, or both, when we need to relax. Though that feels like

low stimulation, it's actually keeping your nervous system

activated. Your brain is still processing input. It's just a

different kind of input.

True relaxation means you need some time to unplug. You

don't have to give up your phone entirely, but try to tame the

flood of constant content.

And this is a place where Emily and I have landed in very

different spots. Emily's go-to for relaxing is jigsaw puzzles.

It's true, I love a puzzle. I was just puzzling

yesterday.

It just cracks me up so much, because puzzles are unlike

anything Emily's ever been into before. I, it feels to me like

it just came out of nowhere.

Honestly, I don't even know where it came from, other

than I, I discovered I enjoy it at Christmas time, like just

doing a little Christmassy puzzle. But then I realized,

like, oh, I can do these at any time of the year, and I just

like having something available to walk by and be like, oh, I'm

gonna sit down and do this for a little while, and sometimes get

really into and break my back, you know, spending hours hunched

over a puzzle, because you're just so into it. I just like

that you're working towards a goal, the finished puzzle, and

so you get that satisfaction of having completed something, and

it's so easy to relax while you're doing that. So that's

when I love to listen to a book or music, or sometimes my kids

do it with me, and we just talk. Like, it is just a way, it is

just something that makes me feel like I am checked out from

the normal stuff that's occupying my brain.

Yeah, that makes sense. A nice way to make your time feel

different and more meaningful. I, on the other hand, have a

phone problem. I've not even gonna pretend I don't, and when

I am tired, I default to scrolling, which is the exact

thing we said doesn't work for relax. So I have been trying to

find ways around that, and one thing I did that I know I've

mentioned here before, but this has been so helpful, is to make

a second Instagram account. And I only follow calming content,

things like baking bread videos, calligraphy, garden accounts, no

news, nothing political or stressful. I don't even want

posts that show faces, so that when I just want to scroll, I

can scroll on that account and it actually does feel like low

stimulation.

That's so smart, and I've been meaning to do that.

Yeah, well, maybe summer's your moment. But you

know it is still on the phone, so lately I've been trying to

branch out into more tech-free options. My current fave is

Sticker by Number Books. It's kind of like a puzzle, but I

don't have to think about it as hard. And Emily and our mom got

me a fun new one for my birthday. I like that it's just

low effort, and when I'm done, I don't have any like artwork that

I have to find a place for. I can just recycle it. It's done.

It's out of my hair, no clutter.

Well, it's a lot like a puzzle where you have a little

end goal that gives you a little hit of like, oh, I got something

done, but then you can just move on from it.

We do like our productive relaxation.

Yeah, and something like this really does check every

relax box. So, the broader point is your version of relax might

not look like someone else's. The test isn't whether it looks

restful from the outside. The test is whether your nervous

system actually settles.

After relax. The second R of our summer recovery is

refresh. This is about rediscovering the parts of

yourself outside of teaching. This is the time to connect with

old hobbies, new interests, and spend time with friends that you

don't get to see during the school year.

You'll know you need to refresh when someone asks you

what you do for fun, and you genuinely can't think of any

answer, or when you realize you haven't read anything that isn't

a children's book in months.

Now, the pitfall with refresh is that it gets confused

with self-care in the bath bomb and face mask sense, and of

course, those things are nice, but they don't necessarily do

the identity work. You can have a perfectly nice spa day and

still come out the other end wondering who you are.

Yeah, refresh is a deeper kind of restoration than that,

but you also may need our third R, which is refocus. Lean on

this when the school year was so all consuming that everything

else fell apart. Maybe your house is a disaster, and all

your routines have flown out the window.

This one shows up as a low-grade anxious feeling about

how disorganized everything is. Maybe you can't relax because

the clutter is bothering you, or you keep thinking you need a

reset, but you feel too overwhelmed to start.

When something feels too big, it's best to make it

smaller. Instead of reorganizing your kitchen. Start by cleaning

out the silverware drawer or setting up a dishwashing

schedule. Think gentle ordering, not a productivity binge. You

need just enough structure that things feel manageable again.

And the pitfall here is huge. Refocus can flip into the

productivity trap if you're not careful. You start with, I'll

just reorganize my closet, and three days later you're in a

bigger mess than when you started.

Yes, that is the classic MPRS, the mid-project regret

syndrome. I know it well. It's that thing where you decide to

clean out a closet and organize your cabinets, and so you pull

everything out, and then you look around and you're like, I

don't want to do this anymore. I've lost steam, but now I've

made it so much worse, and I have nothing left to get me to

finish this task.

Oh, yeah, or you take everything out of your closet,

and then you can't get to bed at night because it's covered in

your clothes, but the last thing you want to do is spend three

hours putting them all back.

Yeah, or all your pots and pans are balanced on the

kitchen island, and now you're more stressed than you were

before you started, because at least you could get to the

microwave before.

So if refocus is your R, the rule is start small, smaller

than feels worth it, one drawer, one shelf. Finish the small

thing before you move on to anything bigger.

And that brings us to our fourth R, which is recharge.

This is the fun one, because it's about rebuilding energy.

This is what you need when nothing sounds fun, nothing

sounds bad, you just feel kind of beige.

The signs of recharge depletion are sneaky because

they don't look like exhaustion. You have time off, but you still

don't have any get up and go. Even sleep doesn't seem to help.

Maybe you're physically rested, but mentally empty.

The recovery for recharge is doing things that bring you

alive, which is different for everybody. For some people,

that's hiking. For others, it's a really good concert. For some,

it's a quiet morning with coffee or a book that's so good you

stay up late finishing it.

And recharging could mean doing schoolwork, but only if

school projects are enjoyable for you. I'm someone who does

get a genuine thrill out of planning a new unit. I love that

stuff. It's like a drug.

Oh yeah, I mean, doing those big projects we used to do

in the summer was very thrilling. I still think there

is a place for that in your summer if you get that kind of

excitement and thrill and motivation as well. But you do

need to be so careful that you don't let that enthusiasm become

a fixation. The pitfall here is confusing doing what lights me

up with doing all the things.

And if you are going to open the door to school tasks,

boundaries are so important. Limit yourself to only prepping

the things you really enjoy and the things that are absolutely

essential, and hopefully those things overlap, but I found that

they often don't.

That means you need a system for strategizing your

back to school readiness, so you don't land in burnout before

August. We've got two things to help you with that. First, later

this week we are airing one of our Can't Miss Classic episodes,

all about how to set work boundaries to protect your

recovery while still letting you get your prep done.

And our second help is this month's Teacher Approved

Club focus. We've got a bonus training to help you design the

type of summer that you need for recovery and readiness, and we

have a resource that I'm so excited about. We're calling

this our Tired Teacher Summer Planner.

Ah, it's so good. It is jam packed with goodies. It

takes you step by step through identifying which of your 4 Rs

you need most this summer, and then mapping out what that

actually looks like for you specifically.

And that way you're going to walk away with a personalized

recovery plan instead of just a generic one. Maybe this year was

brutal and you need to lean really hard on relax, or maybe

you're feeling like your life is falling apart, and you need some

guidance around refocusing your routines. Whatever you need, we

can help you find it.

There's a link in the show notes if you want to join

us in the club, that way you get access to this month's summer

resources, plus all our other amazing fun club bonuses, and

we've got some really fun things going on with the club this

summer.

But if you need some place to start right away, ask

yourself a couple questions. First, which of these four

descriptions made me feel, yeah, that's me. Sometimes the answer

is just immediate.

And the second question is, imagine yourself two weeks

into an unstructured summer. Picture the version of wasted

time that would bother you most. From some teachers, if what you

want to avoid is two weeks of scrolling your phone, think

about what relaxation looks like without screen time. If you hate

the thought of still feeling like a stranger to yourself two

weeks into the break, then that's a sign you need a

refresh.

If the version that haunts you is your house still

being a wreck and your time feeling scattered, then you need

some refocus, and if it's nothing sounding fun and not

being able to get motivated, then you probably need a

recharge. The version of failure you're most afraid of is often

the version of recovery you most need.

And if you feel like you need a mix of Rs, that's totally

normal. Refresh might be calling to you, but you likely need

relax first before you even attempt to reconnect with life.

Yeah, if you are so on edge that you can't sit still,

you're not going to be able to settle into a hobby that you

used to love. Your nervous system has to come down before

the deeper restoration work can actually happen.

So, a summer plan might start with a week or two of pure

relaxation, and then transition into refresh once you've

actually settled, or you might need to refocus first, because

the chaos around you is keeping you from being able to rest at

all.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your circumstances

might force a particular form of recovery. For example, if you

have small kids at home relaxing in the quiet low stimulation

sense is just not happening, you were probably laughing when we

were even mentioning it. Your house is loud and your downtime

is constantly interrupted.

Which is ironic, because we just had to pause because my

child just came in to interrupt me while we were recording this.

But in that case, relax has to look different. It might be a

quiet 10 minutes on the porch before everyone wakes up, or

listening to audio books while folding laundry.

Or if you're really lucky, a long shower with the

door locked.

But maybe don't get your hopes up on that one. And it's

the same with the other forms of recovery. If your version of an

identity restoring refresh is a girls' weekend away, and that's

not on the cards this summer, find a smaller version. Maybe

you schedule coffee with one friend, or you pick up a hobby

you can do in 20 minutes between dinner and bedtime.

You know, like a sticker by number book. The framework

doesn't care about the scale of the activity, it cares about

whether you're hitting the right kind of restoration for what's

actually depleted. A teacher with small kids doing 20 minutes

of journaling a week is doing more genuine refresh than a

teacher with all the time in the world who's just filling time.

So, think about the type of recovery you need to start

with. Do you need relax, refresh, refocus, or recharge?

And then give yourself permission to do it.

If the little critic in your head starts trying to tell

you that you're not doing enough, remind yourself that

recovery is not selfish, it isn't lazy, and it is definitely

not something you have to earn. It's the thing that lets you

keep showing up. Without it, you're not bringing your full

self to your students next year, you're bringing the depleted

version, and those kids deserve the full version of you.

Now as lovely as the thought of summer recovery is,

wouldn't it be even lovelier to get to your summer break and not

need recovery at all? Wouldn't it be great if the school year

didn't drain you so much that you're left deciding, do I need

two weeks or three weeks of recuperating on the couch?

And that is why we wrote our book, Structure and Spark.

The whole premise is that learning to work with the

rhythms of each season, instead of fighting them, is the actual

antidote to burnout.

What you're recovering from right now isn't a hard week

or a tough class, it's the slow accumulation of a year spent

pushing through every season the same way. Our hope with this

book is to help you not get so burned out next year that you

need a long recovery to begin with.

Prevention is always easier than remediation. When

you can work with the seasons all year, knowing when to add

things and when to subtract them, you don't end up in June

running on fumes.

Structure and Spark is available for pre-order now. The

link is in the show notes. If you want to take a look and

support us with your preorder.

Now for our teacher approved tip of the week, where we share an

actionable tip to help you elevate what matters and

simplify the rest. This week's teacher approved tip is to start

thinking about your digital organization for next year.

And we are saying start thinking on purpose. This is not

an assignment. Don't go into overdrive yet. This is a

low-stakes thinking exercise that you can do while you're

driving or scrolling your phone. You just need to turn over a few

questions in your head. First, what worked well with your

digital files this year? Second, what were the headaches? And

third, what can you do to prevent those headaches going

forward?

For some teachers, the answer is a more nested file

system, something that moves from term to month to unit to

week to lesson. For others, the answer is fewer folders and a

better naming convention, or actually using the search

function instead of clicking through 10 levels of folders.

Like with most parts of teaching, the right answer is

really individual. There's no universally best digital

organization; there's just the one that works for the way that

your brain finds things.

But if you find yourself ready to do a small task

alongside this thinking, set up the folders now. You don't need

to start sorting files into them yet; that can wait.

Just think, how happy future you will be when you can

find the writing unit that you taught last September on the

first try. That is the version of you we're trying to set up.

To wrap up the show, we're sharing what we're giving extra

credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

I'm giving extra credit to a cross-legged chair. Okay,

so my daughters needed office chairs to go with their desks,

and they wanted something comfy, and I discovered this

cross-legged chair, which is basically it's just super wide,

so you can sit crisscross applesauce.

I was thinking the chair had crossed legs.

No the chair's legs are just normal. Your legs are

cross-legged, but I'm calling it cross-legged because that's what

the search term is. It's definitely not crisscross

applesauce chair if you're searching Google. So, I will put

a link to this in the show notes, but I would have loved a

chair like this when I was a teenager. It's just comfy and

wide, and it looks cute in their rooms, so I will put a link in

the show notes.

Yeah, seems perfect.

What are you giving extra credit to?

Okay, well, my extra credit goes to a random storage

box that I found on Amazon, and I'm only sharing it because it

solved a niche problem that I didn't find anyone mentioning

online. So I'm going to share this in case you also have this

problem. So I recently had to take possession of my 1988

Samantha doll that had been in my parents' basement, and her

original box is long gone. But she's now in like a banker box,

which is fine, but it has like the holes in the side, and when

I see holes, I think spiders, so I didn't, I wanted something

completely enclosed. And given the popularity of American Girl

dolls, I thought it would be easy to find a storage box that

was made for them. Now, maybe there's a whole industry out

there, and I was just looking in the wrong place, but I could not

find anything.

No, I have had the same problem. I have all my Molly

stuff just like in a big plastic bin, but then it's just like all

in there together, and I have searched for something and not

found it, so tell me what you found.

Well, this is all everything is in there, but it

all fits. So, I ordered a bin that was 18 inches, because

that's how tall the doll is. But when it came, like, the width of

the box was huge. I know the measurements were on there, but

somehow I just didn't compute. And like, I only have a few

dresses for Samantha, so I don't have a bunch of her accessories,

but I had her little doll pram. I wonder where that is.

Oh no.

Anyway, I decided to get a box that's 15 inches and

gamble, and it worked out perfectly. So she fits if I put

her in on a diagonal, and then there's plenty of room I could

just layer all of her dresses on top of her. Poor Samantha.

Well, you could put the dresses on the bottom and layer

on top.

I guess I could do that as well. There is nothing

particularly special about this bin. I think any 15 inch box

would work, but I will put a link in the show notes in case

you want some direction for your own bin search.

Well, I like that it's a little more snug. I mean, that's

part of what I don't like about the big tub I have now that has

all her stuff in it, because it can just kind of roll all around

in there, and I want the doll to be a little more protected,

because her limbs are getting loose.

Oh dear, yeah, this is all just well contained, it fit

on the top shelf of my closet for some future day, and then

all, like it's all sealed up, so there aren't any holes on the

side for handles. It actually came with a little tiny padlock

that I'm not even gonna bother to use.

Lock up your plastic bin with your girl doll in it. Hey,

it's vintage now.

That's true, I could take it on Antiques Roadshow.

Apparently.

Well, that is it for today's episode. Remember,

crashing is not recovering. Figure out which R you need most

this summer, and let that be your recovery plan.

And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a

teacher friend who could also use some support in this summer

season.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Teacher Approved. I'm

Heidi.

And I'm Emily. Thank you for listening. Be sure to follow

or subscribe in your podcast app so that you never miss an

episode.

You can connect with us and other teachers in the

Teacher Approved Facebook group. We'll see you here next week.

Bye for now.

Bye.