The Challenges of Teaching: Why Teachers Are Especially Vulnerable to Burnout

“Her good nature wore out / like a fan belt.”

Marge Piercy’s 1971 poem “Barbie Doll” isn’t about the challenges of teaching, but the simile resonates.

Teachers hold so many moving parts together. We’re stretched beyond our capacity in a job that is multiple full-time jobs in one. We’re under constant pressure from parents, counselors, administrators, students, society, time, and ourselves. And when we can’t take the challenges of teaching anymore, the damage is more than one summer can repair.

Article after article asks why teachers are quitting in record numbers. Teacher burnout statistics are everywhere.

Clearly, we have a problem. And as two teachers who left the classroom, our priority is helping you understand how the challenges of teaching lead to burnout and encouraging you to take care of yourself so you can stay in the classroom where you belong, providing excellent teaching to students who desperately need you.

So, What Exactly Is Burnout?

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as “a syndrome . . . resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
reduced professional efficacy.”

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Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion

Burnout can include symptoms like physical exhaustion, anxiety and depression, health problems, and changes in eating and sleeping habits (not to mention numbing behaviors like overeating, using drugs and alcohol, or zoning out in front of the TV or on our phones). Our bodies aren’t built to maintain a constant stress response, and it wears us out.

One burnout sufferer’s description particularly resonated with us: “I feel like I sprained my brain.” Yes. It’s hard to concentrate, hard to think, hard to make decisions.

Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job

One sign it was time for us to leave the classroom? Recognizing how long it had been since we had good things to say about work, how often everyone on campus (even people we really liked) annoyed us, and how futile our efforts to make things better felt. The Sunday scaries feature regularly on Teacher Instagram, and we’ve heard countless stories of teachers sitting in their cars in the parking lot, crying and trying to work up the energy to go inside.

Kate has said for years that teaching has high highs and low lows, and, increasingly, the highs are no longer high enough or frequent enough to balance out the lows. In a 2022 survey on the State of the American Teacher, 56% of respondents agreed to at least some extent with the statement, “The stress and disappointments involved in teaching aren’t really worth it.”

Multiple sources on symptoms of burnout include lack of satisfaction in your achievements and disillusionment with your work; an article in U.S. News and World Report specifically mentions, “Having out-of-proportion feelings about work tasks.” It starts to feel like every announcement, every change, every email signals the absolute end of the world, and it’s not until we remove ourselves from the situation that we gain perspective.

Reduced professional efficacy

This makes sense: if you’re exhausted all the time, in a state of constant negativity and cynicism, you’re not going to do your best work. And if we got to this point because we devoted every ounce of our time and energy to our work, the discrepancy between what we know we can do and what we are currently doing is particularly discouraging.

Burnout can occur in any profession, so what is it about the challenges of teaching that is making teachers burn out at a higher rate?

The Challenges of Teaching That Lead to Teacher Burnout

If we use the Mayo Clinic’s six factors that can cause burnout as a starting place, it’s easy to see why the teaching profession leads to such high rates of burnout.

Lack of Control

Other people (with varying levels of experience in the classroom and often without teacher input) set our curriculum guides, determine how site and district funds will be spent, and set policies for student behavior and discipline. Our pay has no relation to our work ethic: it’s determined by a preset salary schedule. [Note: There are benefits and drawbacks to the preset salary schedule. We’re not arguing for or against the structure, merely pointing out the lack of control teachers have over the levers that determine pay increases.]

Psychology Today adds that the “cynicism, depression, and lethargy that are characteristic of burnout most often occur when a person is not in control of how a job is carried out . . . or is asked to complete tasks that conflict with their sense of self.” When the people making the decisions don’t share our values, we’re at much higher risk for burnout.

Bells determine when we can use the bathroom. We’re expected to stay on campus at all times, even our 55-minute prep period. We have minimal (if any) input on when our class periods will be shortened for presentations, assemblies, emergency drills, or standardized testing.

We’re held accountable for our students’ performance even though we have no control over what happens outside of the time they spend in our classroom. And much as we’d love to, all we can do is provide instruction, not force our students to learn from it.

We compete every second with cell phones and Chromebooks for our students’ attention, yet we can’t take the technology away because students need it to complete assignments or to contact a parent in the case of a school shooting. Unfortunately, this also means we’re surrounded by 40 cameras at every given second, and one misstep can result in the public humiliation of a viral video and even job loss in an increasingly contentious political climate.

Unclear Job Expectations

One of the challenges of teaching is pay. Long hours and growing responsibilities do not match pay in many states.

The list of teachers’ responsibilities grows by the minute while salaries stay the same. 70% of teachers earned $30,000–$69,999 in the 2021–22 school year. This is almost entirely below the 2021 national median of $69,717 and far below the 2021 national average of $97,962. Meanwhile, 71% of teachers in the same survey reported spending more of their own money to purchase classroom supplies.

Teachers are told to take care of their mental health but also to be available to parents and students at all times of the day and night. We’re told to provide rigorous curriculum and make up for pandemic learning loss, but then we’re told to ease up because students’ mental health is precarious.

We’re provided approximately 55 minutes of planning time each day (which, let’s be real, is enough time to go to the bathroom, read and answer our emails, and take a couple deep meditative breaths), but 55% of teachers reported a loss of planning time due to staffing shortages and other factors. We need time off, but we’re reluctant to take it because it means saddling our colleagues with substitute duties.

We’re expected to address students’ mental health issues and create classroom environments that foster inclusion and equity, but we’re not provided the training to do so adequately. We’re left to figure it out on our own, even though doing so in an effective way requires time and research.

Dysfunctional Workplace Dynamics

Teachers come to school fearing for their physical safety. By mid-May, there were 21 school shootings in 2023 that led to injuries or death. Active shooter training makes up part of our annual regular professional development, yet it leaves teachers feeling woefully underprepared.

Poor student behavior is on the rise, and the number of incidents where students physically harm a teacher only to face minimal consequences are appalling.

And as more teachers burn out, schools become negative, toxic workplaces, full of gossip and politics that can make us just as miserable as our teenage students.

Extremes of Activity

Our actual contract hours are intended to be devoted to instruction, yet providing instruction is only one of our many responsibilities. 90% of teachers in a recent survey reported working more than 40 hours per week; 16% reported working more than 60 hours per week.

And then for two months, we experience the other extreme: no job at all for two months. We don’t know about you, but the first few and last few weeks of summer often brought up feelings of anxiety and depression as we worked through the whiplash of coming to a complete halt and the dread of starting the cycle all over again.

Post-pandemic, our students’ learning loss and mental health concerns make an already impossible job even more so. As we strive to do what’s best for 150–200 students, making decisions every minute, we are vulnerable to compassion fatigue and decision fatigue.

Lack of Social Support

Teachers frequently feel unsupported by administrators and counselors. As the world changes rapidly around us, we desperately need training, yet professional development is frequently unproductive and insultingly basic. Even well-meaning conversations with other teachers can turn into opportunities for comparison and competition rather than collaboration and support.

Teachers are also under attack from parents and the community. Over time, emails questioning our grading policies and articles and social media posts about the problems with education take their toll.

Work-Life Imbalance

The challenges of teaching lead many of us to a terribly unhealthy work-life balance. When we’re working upwards of 60 hours per week, we don’t have the time or energy to give to our families and friends, leaving us without the personal support networks we need and causing friction in our homes.

We don’t have time to devote to basic self-care tasks, much less the work required to deal with bigger issues like anxiety and depression.

What Are the Consequences of Not Addressing Teacher Burnout?

Teacher burnout cannot go unaddressed. It puts teachers at risk for serious physical and mental health conditions. It will continue contributing to the exodus of high-quality teachers from the classroom. And it adversely affects students.

So, what do we do? The challenges of teaching that lead to burnout will not be fully addressed until there are significant changes to our educational system, and we need to be open and vocal about our struggles, demanding that change happen.

Our schools need to do more for us than introducing meditation exercises in staff meetings, leaving candy bars in our mailboxes during Teacher Appreciation Week, and allowing us to wear jeans on Fridays.

In the meantime, however, there are steps you can take to protect yourself.

Ways to Protect Yourself from Teacher Burnout

Take care of the basics. Eat healthy. Sleep. Get some exercise. Do some deep breathing. Treat yourself to Starbucks. No, these won’t solve the problem, but they do make a difference.
Make your classroom a place you want to be. Whether or not teachers should have to spend money on their classrooms isn’t the point right now. Create an environment you don’t hate spending time in.
Allow yourself quiet thinking time. You have a job that requires immense mental energy and creativity. You need time for inspiration and mulling over ideas.
Make time for things and people you enjoy. We know. Easier said than done. But it’s so important. The work isn’t going anywhere, but you’ll be better able to face it after giving some time to friends, family, and hobbies.
Be patient and compassionate with yourself. Recovering from burnout takes time, and you’re working in an environment that makes that recovery difficult.
Accept that you cannot do your job perfectly, and you cannot control everything. It’s literally impossible. So, decide what only you can do and either let the rest go or outsource what you can.
Think of yourself as a curator rather than a creator. You are the one who can teach, inspire, and care for your students. You are responsible for their grades at the end of the semester. You are the one parents want to hear from. But there are people creating quality materials you can use. Look for them and use them instead of doing everything yourself.
Create efficient systems. There are parts of the job you will not be able to get rid of. Do what you can to make these things efficient. Assign roles in your PLC. Use grading rubrics. Create a template for parent emails.
Stand up for yourself. Once you’ve decided what you can and cannot do, stand firm. No one else is advocating on your behalf. Set boundaries and hold to them. Say no. If you sit back and hope that things will get better or that people will do the right thing, you endanger your own health and effectiveness.
Surround yourself with positive people. Stay away from gossip and negativity. Find coworkers who are still fighting against cynicism. If you can’t find them at your site, look for them online.
Get professional help. Recovering from burnout is not always something we can do on our own, and some of us (yes, us, Kate and Steph, too) face struggles that require medication and trained therapists. If this is you, please don’t tough it out on your own.

If you’re feeling exhausted, cynical, and ineffective, take a breath. You feel this way for a reason, not because you’re failing. Burnout comes from work environments where we don’t have control, expectations are fuzzy or frequently changing, dysfunction reigns, overwork is common, social support networks are limited, and work-life balance is impossible to maintain. You’re in a profession characterized by these six factors.

This doesn’t, however, mean you have to leave a job you love (or once loved). It’s never going to be an easy job, the challenges of teaching are significant, but if you’re intentional about taking care of yourself, it’s still a job where you can make a meaningful impact on hundreds of lives without sacrificing your entire self.

If you’d like the support of a couple experienced teachers who’ve been there, invite a little encouragement, along with advice and resources, into your inbox and join our email list (at the bottom of this page). And if you’re ready to make the transition from creator to curator, visit our store and get back valuable hours each week while still feeling confident in the quality of the materials you’re giving your students. Don’t see a resource you desperately need? Email us at hello@threeheads.works. We’d love to hear from you.