1 Recognising your own support needs
In your role as an educator, keeping mentally healthy involves being able to identify when things are getting too much, or you are not coping well. As has been covered earlier in this course, identifying a lack of coping, and any emotional or psychological needs, can be the first step towards getting support if needed.
Work-related stress, depression or anxiety accounts for half of work-related ill health in the UK (HSE, 2022). Professional and personal lives are intertwined and so feelings can easily cross over from one to the other. At times you might feel that you are not coping well at work while at other times there may be a situation in your personal life that impacts on your resilience at work. Furthermore, concurrent stressors can be experienced at the same time and this intersection can have a cumulative effect on general resilience. An example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to isolation and the need for home schooling of many children. Research undertaken during the pandemic found lower wellbeing rates for parents on days that they home schooled their children (Schmidt et al., 2021).
The impact of supporting others who experience poor mental health can be significant. You may be dealing with day-to-day situations at work alongside crisis scenarios that can sometimes be distressing, and this can take its toll. It doesn’t matter how resilient you are, everyone has a limit to their capacity to cope.