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LOOKING FORWARD: COVID-19 RECOVERY
Self-Care in the Time of COVID-19 By Tina H. Boogren, Ph.D
As educators navigate these unprecedented times and ride the monumental waves of ever-changing protocols and regulations, we must be steady. Sturdy. Able to remain standing when the world can feel like it’s falling apart all around us. How do we do that? By securing our own oxygen masks first. By taking care of ourselves — first, not as an afterthought. Right now, more than ever, the adults in our schools must feel stable and secure so that they can support their students and the school community through this global pandemic that no one prepared us for.
In my book, Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators (2018), I explore Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs as the framework for educator self-care and wellness. I use this as our foundation because it’s familiar and because it mirrors the foundation that we utilize for students, as outlined in Motivating and Inspiring Students: Strategies to Awaken the Learner (2017). Ensuring that each level of the hierarchy is solid for our students can only be accomplished if each level is solid for the educators first. Let’s review the levels and consider how the pandemic has potentially impacted each level and what we can do to find our footing once again.
The first level is our physiological needs. The biggies here are: diet, sleep, and exercise. Consider for a moment if any of these areas took a hit over the past year. For most of us, at least one—if not all three—areas were impacted big time. Many educators are having trouble sleeping, exercise has become a challenge as gyms closed and exercise equipment sold out, food became our way to ‘numb’ and we started to worry about putting on the ‘quarantine 15.’ During a crisis, it’s common to have our level one needs fall apart first but it’s essential to get these areas back under control as quickly as possible as this level is the most essential level of them all. Now is the time to double-down on your sleep quality, stay hydrated, eat foods that make you feel good and move your body as a way to counter-act the stress that you’re encountering right now. Level two is our safety needs. When things are unpredictable and unfair, our safety needs are impacted. When our safety needs are impacted, we feel anxious. When we feel anxious, we are not our best selves and our students need us to be our best selves. Health and financial concerns also impact this level and collectively, our anxiety and
