Getting Through Busy Days

This question comes from Stewart, and they're asking us about mental health at work. I'm a teacher and have very, very limited headspace at work. Whether it's preparing to teach five times a day, managing student behavior, issues with colleagues, administrative deadlines, meetings, or a long list of other pressures, my days go by in a whirlwind. I'm often late getting home and feel exhausted, not least because I've barely had a chance to pause all day. Thoughts are whirling around my head. In this situation, how can I be more aware of my thoughts, feelings, and emotions, or my physical responses to them during the day when they're occurring? Well, Stewart, you have come to the right place at the right time. I was recently thinking about this as I was preparing for a workshop and I came up with this framework. I made it up, I'm gonna just tell you that now. You're not gonna find this anywhere else, but it's the three R's and the first R stands for recognize. Where's the stress and the tension showing up for you in your body throughout the day? You're coming into contact with student behavior, issues with colleagues, administrative deadlines, meetings. It may feel like the stress and tension is the same throughout the day, but it's probably not. If you were to give yourself an opportunity to recognize, okay, when I'm with the kids, I feel a lower level of stress. But when I have to go in here and talk to this group of teachers who are not doing their jobs, then I start feeling like I have earring shoulders where your shoulders go up and you get so much tension through there. And so when you recognize, hmm, when I go into this meeting, I feel more stress here. You can move into the next R in the framework, which is regulate, learning how to regulate yourself once you know where the tension exists and in what situations you have more tension. So now that I know that about myself, whenever I get ready to go into the meeting with the teachers who don't do their job, I'm going to take a few deep breaths before that meeting. I'm going to make sure I had like a five minute breather before that meeting. I might even ask them to have an agenda for the meeting because we usually don't. So that makes the meeting feel more out of control. So there are things now that I'm doing to be able to regulate myself or even set boundaries with a meeting in order to manage the tension and stress that is existing. So we started with the recognize. We went to the regulate and now we're gonna reframe. Reframing is all about changing your mindset about things. Some people say it's kind of like gaslighting yourself. You're not doing that. You are really just thinking about the situation in another way. For instance, you might say, I...