You may be reading this from the staffroom or perhaps at your kitchen table, surrounded by half-marked books and a mountain of end-of-term paperwork. If you are, then I want you to take a slow, deep breath and focus on how you are feeling in your body. Are your shoulders up around your ears? Is your stomach tight? Is your foot tapping away? Is your entire focus on the externals – the What, the When, the How, rather than on the internal – YOU.
Your emails are probably pinging away with staff messages, directives, deadlines and the heavy weight of sensory burnout may be pressing down on your chest.
For many teachers, particularly neurodivergent teachers, these feelings have become normalised. The casual acceptance that productivity, completion and achievement should be prioritised at the cost of one’s wellbeing.
You’ve likely been telling yourself the same lie that many teachers cling to: “If I can just make it to the summer holidays, I’ll be fine.” But deep down, a quiet voice is asking the question, “What if six weeks rest isn’t enough to refill my cup?”
Having spent 26 years working in education – and navigating the beautiful, intense chaos of a neurodivergent family, as a SENCO, I know that the end-of-year wall hits different brains (and nervous systems) in different ways. For a neurodivergent teacher, it isn’t just ‘end-of-term exhaustion’, it can also be:
- Cognitive overload
- Sensory overload
- Executive dysfunction
- Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)
- Working in an environment that doesn’t fully understand how to support neurodivergence.
Neurodivergence
These things are not a weakness of character. There is hard, scientific evidence that neurodivergent brains (particularly ADHD) have different activity levels powered by chemical signalling (neurotransmitters) in regions controlling planning, focus and impulse control. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10827919/
A dyslexic person may struggle to process information in the same way a non-dyslexic individual would be able to due to decreased activation of the left posterior language system. http://10.3390/brainsci3031060
And someone who is on the autistic spectrum may struggle with either hyper-sensitivity – being much more sensitive to external sensory input, or hypo-sensitivity – being much less sensitive, leading to boredom, frustration or becoming distressed with too little sensory input. https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/about-autism/sensory-processing
You may also experience a co-morbidity of several neurodivergent traits.
The interesting point is that many neurodivergent people I work with explain that when their immediate environment becomes more inclusive, these traits lessen and where there is little awareness and support they intensify.
And with 1 in every 5 people now identifying as neurodivergent, the chances are that there is a huge proportion of teachers who experience these traits.
Although many places of education offer support for teachers, it is rare that this support is specialised or personalised to the individual.
Teacher stress
In a recent report by The Teacher Wellbeing Index , 77% of school staff (including educational leaders) said that they felt unsupported by their school. 71% of teachers described their workload as ‘unmanageable’ with only 3% able to work within their contracted hours.
We now understand that we cannot teach students in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ way, particularly post-pandemic and with the knowledge that more and more people are identifying as neurodivergent. Schools, colleges and universities understand that they need to provide an inclusive environment for students in order for them to feel safe and thrive in their learning. While acknowledging that this can be challenging, we still try and meet those needs, yet where is that same inclusive approach for teachers?
I’ve finished many a training session (in my other role as SENCO) on neurodivergence and inclusion, and been approached by several members of staff asking what support is available to them. They may be diagnosed, suspect they are neurodivergent, or are simply drowning in their role. The point is, their needs are being ignored.
When you are battling burnout or struggling to keep up with a system that wasn’t designed for your brain, it is incredibly easy to feel like you are the problem that needs solving. But you are not broken. Your brain is simply exhausted from trying to squeeze into a box that doesn’t fit its shape.
And that can start to erode your identity, impact your self-confidence and begin to settle in your nervous system as trauma.
Questions I often hear neurodivergent teachers ask:
- Why can’t I stay focused in team meetings?
- Why do I often forget tasks?
- Why do I feel so overwhelmed with marking and emails?
- Why can’t I understand instructions as well as my colleagues?
- Why does being in a staffroom/assembly/the classroom make my brain feel like screaming?
Coaching support for teachers
As a coach, my job is not to fix you, or to hand you a shiny new checklist or tell you how to change who you are. Instead, I am here to create a completely safe, non-judgemental space where you can finally drop the teacher mask. I can give you my undivided attention and really listen to what you are saying. Together we can unpick the harmful narrative that your brain has clung onto, but that has done so much damage to your nervous system.
- We will look at what is draining your energy.
- Examine what your values and strengths are as a neurodivergent person.
- Explore how your unique brain actually thrives.
- And quietly map out whatever path feels right for you.
- Whether that means learning how to protect your boundaries in the classroom, requesting reasonable adjustments or planning a gentle route out.
ADHD burnout
A teacher I recently worked with (who felt she may be undiagnosed ADHD) was in serious burnout mode. She had spent decades of her teaching career in survival mode, had never asked for help and had developed unhealthy ways of navigating the education system, often spending long hours – evenings and weekends, playing ‘catch up’ with her marking and admin.
Despite this, her intelligence, creativity and empathy for the students were being completely overlooked. Instead, managers were focusing on everything they saw as a deficit – forgetting important admin tasks, spending too long planning lessons, missing vital information in emails and meetings.
The result was that she felt like a complete failure and when we met, she was on long-term sick leave, a clear sign to me that her nervous system had burnt out and was screaming for some respite.
We worked on what had originally brought her joy in teaching, which parts of her brain were ‘lit up’ in the classroom, how creativity positively fuelled her energy levels and how she could carefully set out which areas of the system she found challenging, with requests for reasonable adjustments that allowed her to return with a sustainable plan. She may still decide to leave the profession, but she now understands that she was trying to respond to a neurotypical system with a neurodivergent brain and the trauma it caused.
The thing about coaching is that it facilitates what the person already implicitly knows about themselves, their talents and abilities. It gently asks questions about key information the person has long-since buried and it brings out a new authenticity to someone who has needed to resort to masking for much of their life.
You hold the map. I’m just here to help you clear the fog so you can see the road ahead.
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