Teacher Mental Health: What Helped When I Was Falling Apart

There’s a moment when you realise it’s not just stress anymore - it’s burnout.

It crept in slowly for me during lockdown. I was living abroad in Asia, far from home and even further from help. Visiting the UK wasn’t an option, and I was juggling three different roles while teaching my usual classes online. It was chaos. I was logging 12-hour days, six days a week. Most days, I didn’t eat until the evening.

Alone in my little apartment, I cried constantly. Not just about the big things, but the small things too. A flat lesson. An 11 pm email. A pastoral care case that wouldn’t normally elicit any kind of emotions from me. If I wasn’t working, I was either napping or rotting on the sofa, playing something on TV that I couldn’t even follow. I thought going back to school physically would help. It did, briefly. But underneath, I was done.

I remember crying in a meeting, proper, can’t-stop-the-tears crying, when the teacher asked me if I was okay because I just didn’t seem my.

I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t, and other people were starting to notice. I was beyond stressed, I was burned out. I was beyond being a little bit down, I was majorly depressed.

Through the tears, I told him I was stressed. Homesick. Exhausted. Waking up at 3 am with my mind racing: Have I done enough? Am I doing right by my students, especially the ones who are struggling? Am I enough?

He gave me the space to talk. And then he said something I haven’t forgotten. He told me I was being too hard on myself, that my reputation precedes me because I am a fantastic teacher. That right at the moment, I was doing brilliantly, but the only thing I was doing wrong was not looking after myself.

After that, he gave me some rules, some of which I still live by now. He told me:

• Take your school emails off your phone.

• Set a daily cut-off time.

• Eating lunch is not optional.

• You are not allowed to work all day Saturday — two hours, max.

• Keep a pen and paper by your bed. If you wake in the night, write it down and promise yourself you’ll deal with it in the morning.

That conversation didn’t fix everything overnight; in fact, it’s taken me a good few years to get to a point where things do feel better.

But it was the start of something. The start of not pretending I was fine.

What Didn’t Help

I’m not here to point fingers at any one person, that’s not what this is about. But what I will say is this: there’s a mindset in teaching that’s been allowed to take root for far too long.

You put up. You shut up.
You take on the extra. You stay late. You work weekends.
And you do it all with a smile because “it’s for the kids.”

That’s the culture, or at least, it was. I do think it’s starting to shift, slowly. But pre-pandemic? Burnout wasn’t something you talked about. Mental health wasn’t something you admitted to struggling with. You just got on with it. You were supposed to.

I’ve always been a perfectionist. I need to teach a good lesson. I hold myself to high standards, not because someone else is breathing down my neck, but because I care. And that kind of pressure, even when it’s self-inflicted, adds up fast.

We throw around phrases like “take a mental health day”, but let’s be honest, what teacher feels like they can? I’d still have to sort cover. I’d still feel guilty. And I sure as hell wouldn’t say that was the reason for my absence. That’s the reality.

We talk a lot about student wellbeing, and rightly so, but there’s still a real gap when it comes to teacher wellbeing. It’s getting better. But we’re not there yet.

What Helped

That conversation with my colleague was the first step. But I didn’t get to where I am now alone.

I started opening up more to my friends at work, and they were incredible. Just being honest, not pretending anymore, helped more than I can explain.

And I made changes. Big ones.

I took my school email off my phone, and it’s never gone back on. When I finish work for the day, I actually finish. No more answering emails at 10 pm. No more sacrificing sleep and sanity to keep up with an impossible to-do list.

Eventually, I walked away from the classroom for a while because I knew I needed real breathing space. I even turned down my dream job, a role I’d worked towards for years, just a short flight from home, because I knew I wasn’t well enough to take it on. (You can read more about that in Burnout to Breakthrough.)

Instead, I gave myself time. I did a master’s in psychology. I got honest with the people around me. I stopped seeing “not coping” as failure, and started seeing it as what it was. And I quickly started to understand that saying “I’m not okay” was the strongest thing I’ve ever done.

And once I’d said it, I rebuilt:

◆ I made rest and self-care non-negotiable.
◆ I created boundaries at work and actually stuck to them.
◆ I said no to extra tasks when I was already stretched.
◆ I took up running and weightlifting.
◆ I started affirmations, vision boards, and rewiring my mindset.
◆ I went on medication to treat my depression.
◆ I tapped into my passions and built a business around them.
◆ I left full-time teaching and went back part-time on my own terms.

But more than anything, I let myself believe something that felt impossible back then: This is just a job. The world doesn’t end if I’m not perfect.

And if you're in the place I was, crying over emails, burning out in silence, here’s what I want you to know:

Speak up. Get help. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. And I promise, there is another side to this.

Final Thoughts

If you’re deep in it right now, overwhelmed, exhausted, and wondering how much longer you can keep going, I want you to know this:

You are not lazy.
You are not weak.
You are not failing.

You’re carrying too much. And it’s okay to put some of it down.

Teaching asks too much of us sometimes. And somewhere along the way, we started thinking that giving everything, our energy, our evenings, our sleep, our sanity, was just part of the job. It isn’t.

You’re allowed to rest.
You’re allowed to take up space in your own life.
You’re allowed to ask for help, and to need more than coffee and a self-care webinar to feel better.

I wish someone had said that to me sooner. So I’m saying it to you now.