The year of 2018 was an appalling and degrading one for me and my family. We’ve all been through hell, and now I live with what they’ve had to go through.
After stepping up to lead English, stress-fuelled anxiety and depression plummeted me to the point that the sight of an email would send me into an irrational panic. My brain and body completely shut down. It stopped and said: “no more.” I lost two stone and was a nervous, jibbering wreck.
It was a therapy rooted in compassion that gave me a way through. It's called Compassion Focused Therapy.
Ignoring your reptilian brain
The model has lots of different aspects and is rooted in evolutionary psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy, as well as more traditional forms of psychotherapy.
At its core, it acknowledges that we have three parts to our brains: a threat brain (which detects risk), a drive brain (our motivation) and a soothe brain (what calms and chills us).
In a nutshell, when these three are not working alongside each other cohesively, things get nasty. It turns out that our threat brain – which you can thank our reptilian ancestors for – is great for telling us when to run from lions, but not so great at allowing us to reflect and rationalise. Too much stress and threat leads our brains to shut down – and yes, there is an evolutionary drive for depression linked with conserving energy.
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It turns out that the brain also has a failsafe: the soothe bit. If we can be warm, compassionate and honest with ourselves and others, we can genuinely begin to defuse some of the tensions in and around our environments. It takes deliberate practice, time (I’m still working on it) and a lot of energy.
The model asks us to get into that hole with someone who’s struggling, hold their hand and say “Yep, it’s awful down here”, rather than standing at the surface, shouting down “Yep, looks awful down there!” It takes strength and energy to be the person who does that. It’s not just about a whinge together, it’s about having the credibility and integrity to find solutions with someone.
It got me thinking: where does this model start and stop? I started to reflect on why my experience is all-too-common in teaching and life.
Lessons learned
A lot of teachers find it difficult to separate work from life, and I’d argue that, on a systemic level, there’s too much threat being passed around. Frame it how you like – and mythbust all you want – we have a problem that is rooted in the very deepest parts of the profession.
In the broadest possible sense, the profession is in a state of flux because it doesn’t understand itself, and can’t even agree on how to measure or assess itself meaningfully.
So what happens? We use extrinsic measures as poor proxies for things that are driven by intrinsic passion and desire. To justify ourselves, it’s become all about the doing and not about the thinking. Education is, at a systemic level, ensuring that it spends its time keeping busy and measuring itself in an effort to distract itself from the struggle for its purpose.
What does this mean for us as professionals day in, day out?
The "failsafe" I spoke about before needs time and effort for it to work. As well as this, the toxicity of our environments also influences the intensity of what we’re feeling.
First and foremost, if your school is harming your mental health, know that there are better places out there, and, in the short-term, find the people in your school you can confide in and draw strength from; I guarantee that there will be such people around.
There’s also superb evidence to suggest that even practising awareness of our thoughts and moods, and noticing how they are affecting us, helps to defuse some of the unhelpful things we might be telling ourselves. Anything that involves us noticing our feelings – and their triggers – can help us to get things into their proper perspective.
This includes thought journals, as well as listening to the voice in our minds, which might be speaking to us in unkind or helpful ways, and reflecting on whether that’s how you’d speak to a friend or loved one, for example.
Practising gratefulness
They say depression and anxiety are two sides of a mutually reinforcing circle: well, I’d try flipping the narrative on its head, and thinking about reflecting on the kinds of things you are grateful for, however small.
It sounds silly, but, for me, it can be the warmth of my coat, or even the taste of a coffee (anyone who knows me will laugh at this, as I’m known for having coffee mugs about my person everywhere I go). In terms of practising and calming ourselves, I’d thoroughly recommend looking up "soothing rhythm breathing" for guided videos online, and reading around compassion to help understand the scientific basis for this.
In my guts – and because I knew this whole thing needed to be explored in greater depth – I couldn’t leave this alone, so I decided to write a book about it. It’s called The Compassionate Teacher. It begins by discussing our inherently threat-based educational context, before suggesting some practical ways that we can understand and look after ourselves in and out of the classroom.
I’ve been privileged to interview some truly incredible people such as Dame Alison Peacock, Ross Morrison McGill, Mary Myatt, Jamie Thom, Jill Berry, Adrian Bethune, Dr Emma Kell as well as clinical psychologists and mental health professionals to glean their thoughts and guidance on this issue.
The result, I hope, is a workable solution for anyone who has suffered with stress in teaching, and hopefully even a starting point for educational leaders to begin to reframe a way forward.
Andy Sammons leads English in a large secondary comprehensive, and can be found @compassionteach
The Compassionate Teacher is due to be released in late February
