Self-Care Hack for Teachers: Is Your Mental Diet Harming You?

Teachers, have you ever considered how your mental diet could be harming you?

Would your outlook improve if you could train your mind to think you live in a friendly, not hostile, universe?

Then don't miss this episode of THE podcast just for teachers' well-being and true teacher self-care.

In this episode of Balance Your Teacher Life, host Grace Stevens dives deep into the concept of a "mental health diet." She explains how what we consume mentally—through books, movies, podcasts, TV shows, social media, and the news cycle—impacts our well-being. Grace shares personal anecdotes and provides a practical exercise to help teachers evaluate and improve their mental diet for a more peaceful and fulfilling life.

Key Points:

• Introduction: Emphasis on taking care of yourself this summer.
• The importance of a healthy mental diet.
• How what you are watching, listening, and planting in your mind affects your worldview and nervous system.
• Six areas of media consumption to evaluate: books, movies, podcasts, TV shows, social media, and the news cycle.
• Practical exercise to assess your mental diet.
• Personal stories highlighting the impact of media on mental health.
• Encouragement to create a peaceful mental environment.

If you are interested in TRULY improving your teaching experience and learning how to thrive in the classroom without sacrificing your personal life, I invite you to join our community.  All details can be found here: 
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Transcript

  Okay, teachers, welcome back to the show. Hopefully your summer is underway. If you are not listening to this at the time that it was recorded, sorry about that. If you're feeling confused saying, Hey, it's not summer, but at the time of recording right now, it's not summer. It should be summer for you guys.

You waited so long for it. Maybe you spent the whole first week just exhausted on the couch in recovery mode and there is nothing wrong with that. But right now I want to dive into a topic that is nothing about students or lesson planning or or teaching or curriculum or any of those things, but it's 100 percent about you and your experience of life and how you can invest in authentic self care this summer.

And here's the important question. Is your mental health? diet harming you. I know that sounds dramatic but we're going to get into it. We're going to look at the six areas that you need to be considering to make sure that your mental diet is as healthy as it can be. That it's making you feel replenished and full and of a worldview that is productive and happy.

We will get right to it. See you on the inside.  Welcome to the Balance Your Teacher Life podcast, where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries, and achieving better work life balance.  If you're passionate about education, but tired of it consuming your whole life, you have found your home in the podcast universe.

I'm your host, Grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show. 

All right, so in this episode we are going to look at what is your mental diet? I'm going to suggest six areas that comprise this as far as media consumption goes. Now, a lot of your mental diet is who do you hang with, what conversations do you have, Do you have what boundaries do you set, right? So we've talked about a lot of those in other episodes, but specifically in this episode, especially as I said, it is summer and probably a lot of you actually now have more time to actually engage with some of these activities that we're going to look at books, movies, podcasts, TV shows, social media accounts, news cycle, all these things.

So we're going to take a look at those. I'm going to encourage you to do an exercise that I'm going to go through. Okay. But first, what is your mental diet? Why does it matter? And let me start by saying, I know I'm going to sound kind of old fashioned right now. Okay. If you are kind of one of the, I can't remember what the different gens are, Gen Z, Gen X.

I'm not a boomer. I was off to that. Can't remember what it is, but I'm going to tell you, I think I'm going to be sounding old here. Because I'm going to be sounding like my dad. So let me just tell you that my dad, I think I might have mentioned this before, my entire childhood never once referred to the television as anything other than the idiot box.

He thought it was going to be the end of society as we knew it. Now, you've got to remember, he was generations and generations ago. He didn't have me till he was in his forties. I am likely older than you. So all that said, I mean, I'm an idiot. He was born in the  1920s. Okay. 1920s fought in World War II.

I mean, he was just literally generations and generations ago. Okay. And so he certainly didn't grow up with TV and it was a newer thing to have a TV in all the homes. You know, I grew up in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and I got to tell you in the seventies, the big deal was to watch Top of the Pops grew up in London.

The music scene had a brother who was older than me. He always wanted to watch Top of the Pops. We had to like. Go kind of like negotiate, bargain with dad that we could watch television. We were not allowed to just turn on the television. We had to have permission. We had to tell him what we wanted to watch, how long it was going to be on for.

In fact, he had me convinced that if you watch television for like more than an hour, the television will blow up. So, you know, epic parenting there. I was actually scared of the television for it getting too hot. So, yeah. Anyway, but Neil, you know, we live through that of people thinking television will be the end of civilization.

And then, you know, maybe in the 90s, it was all about the music, right? Oh my gosh, trying to ban music, all of this terrible music is going to be, you know, the end of children and civilization. Then, of course, we had the era of, era.  Oh, all those awful, you know, video games, violent video games. And I think, you know, we do know we're paying the price for that, but now we're in this new age and there's a lot of concern with students.

Their access, you know, 24 seven to technology starting at a very young age. In fact, I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt's, Excellent book, The Anxious Generation. Probably going to do an episode about that. But anyway, I'm not worried about the students right now. I'm worried about you. So, let me get into it.

Again, you could roll your eyes and think she's so old fashioned like her dad.  But what our mental diet is, let's just, Talk about it this way. I'm sure you're very educated on your, you know, physical diet. The things that you eat, we're very attuned to the fact that what we eat, what we consume, what we put in our bodies really determines how we feel. 

How we perform our health, right? If we just eat junk food, terrible junk food, and we wash it down with fizzy soda, and we don't exercise, and we binge on processed foods, and sweets, and chips, and all those things, donuts, you know,  alcohol. We know that we are not going to be feeling great. It might feel amazing in the minute while we binge in, but in the longterm, it's not good for us.

So I think that people are really aware of that, right? They wouldn't expect to eat a diet that's mainly rubbish. And feel good. Now, nothing to say. I'm not judging anybody's habits in anything here. It's just to try and make you aware to think outside the box. But, you know, for me, I mean, I love red wine, right?

I love dark chocolate. These are all amazing things. But you know what, they're a treat every once in a while. That makes them special. It makes them treasured. It's not my entire diet. I mean, I would not.  perform or feel well, if that was my entire diet, okay? So people make that connection. But I think that a lot of times people very unconsciously consume media.

They don't make the connection between what you're listening to, what you're watching,  right? What you're putting into your body. in your mind and how you feel. They're not making that connection. Years ago, I heard this quote, Your mind is the most fertile soil in the universe. Mind what you plant in it.

Okay, so that's what I want to bring up. Awareness around this idea about what are you consuming mentally, thinking that it is relaxing and you're just chilling out, but what it's actually doing is not great for you. It is activating, aggravating, and it's not good for you. Your nervous system, it's continuing a trauma response in your nervous system.

And it's really at odds with what we want in life, which is a peaceful life where we're less triggered, right? Albert Einstein. I had another quote I was going to use. It was Dr. Wayne Dyer who I love, but I was worried people would tell me I was a little, you know, woo woo. We all know I'm, I'm woo woo adjacent, someone said.

I can live with that. But I'm also about the science. I think we can all agree that Albert Einstein was a great scientist, but his favorite quote of mine is actually this. He said,  the greatest decision we need to make in life is whether we  Feel whether we feel we live in a friendly or a hostile universe,  right?

That's a decision that we need to make.  Do I feel that I live in a friendly universe, right? Where people are doing the best they can with the skills they have in the situation they find themselves in, you know, usually I refer to that as just Extending grace to people, recognizing that if they're having a terrible day and they're being ridiculous towards me without any provocation, like I'm not going to take that personally, I'm not going to get triggered.

There is a part of me, a maturely intelligent part that's like, even though you can be a little hurt.  I know that's about them, about their day, about their level of consciousness, about what they're projecting into the world and has very little to do with me, right? That's what we want, ideally, is to live this peaceful life where we're not constantly triggered.

If we think we live in a hostile universe, we think that parent got out of bed with the express kind of intention of annoying us. Or being difficult, right? Or that student you know, that, oh, they just got up. They just may make a game of winding me up. And, you know, we're telling ourselves this story that may or may not be true, right?

That's thinking we live in a hostile universe. There's so much science to back this up, right? You could just stop with the idea of like a self fulfilling prophecy or confirmation bias, right? Where there's so much sensory input that we take in from the world that our brain, which is a pattern seeking device, it wants to make sense of things, it automatically filters things out for us and filters things in, and it will filter things that subconsciously we know we're conditioned to look for or habitually we think, right?

That's confirmation bias. If I think the world is full of jerks, That's confirmation bias. That's what I'm going to notice, okay? If I think the world is full of peaceful, loving people, that's what I'm going to notice. Okay, so that's kind of oversimplifying a little bit, but that's the basic idea, is that we have to make a decision.

Do we want to live in a world, in our mind, that is  peaceful?  in people are doing the best they can. And that comes from having, being in a relaxed state and not being easily triggered and being proactive, not reactive. A lot of the things that I talk about, right? Knowing that there's an element of choice in kind of what, you know, what is my part in creating this, right?

Taking accountability. Okay. So our goal is to have a peaceful experience, to live in a friendly universe. And so where I'm going with this is it's going to be really hard to have this feeling that we live in a friendly universe. If again, it's not a judgment, like I am gauging all of these things too, if I'm not careful and there's nothing wrong with it in small doses.

But if the  Only podcasts you listen to are about true crime, which I know isn't true for you because you're listening to this podcast. Yeah, you  Yeah, you this is something healthy in a minute. I'm gonna talk about the exercise. This is gonna get a checkmark Okay, but you see where I'm going here if the only movies you watch are horror movies, you know Designed to make you jump if the only TV shows you're watching is, you know, CSI, Crime Scene Investigators, oh my gosh, CSI, Special Victims Unit, oh my, who can watch that?

If you're streaming the news cycle, right, if the social media accounts that you follow are really, you know, bored teachers, you know, yeah, it's funny to laugh at that stuff, but constantly reiterating how stressful teaching is, how ridiculous teaching is you know, teacher quits. talk, all the people with the horrible stories, you're getting all activated and annoyed about things that happen to people you don't even know, right?

If that's the only thing that you're consuming, right, make that connection that your nervous system and your brain, right, that is at odds with you wanting to feel that you live in a friendly universe. So let's think about it for a  I'm going to talk about  your nervous system. Just for a second, okay? Just for a second, like, you know, I could go through the whole thing, sympathetic, parasympathetic, all the things, but trust me on this, you know  when you are stressed.

Right? You've all heard of cortisol, you know, the stress hormone, and I think we can all agree that we live in a society, in a time, even not in our profession, which is very stressful, that is very stressful, right? It is fast moving, it is fast changing, there is a lot of noise, there is a lot of action, there is a lot of pressure very different than how our brain evolved.

Right, and like I said, that's not even if you are a teacher, but if you are a teacher, you know that it's a constant sort on your senses. I once heard, when I taught second grade, someone once referred to it as being pecked to death by ducks. That was very accurate. Miss, miss, miss, constant poking me.

I had a rule in class, do not poke the teacher. I mean, what other profession would have that rule, right? Okay, everything seems dramatic and instant and dangerous. You hear the drills, the fire drills, the active shooter drills, all of it. Like it's all really stressful. Okay. And.  Our brains and our nervous systems just haven't developed enough to really be able to compartmentalize, okay?

If you think back to, you know, you always hear this example, right? That back on, you know, back in the day, you know, we would have this fight or flight response to the saber toothed tiger. And now the problem is that we're constantly, everyday living in the 21st century is activating our stress response non stop.

Okay, that really is, you know, true and it's a part of it. I don't know if you're aware of Dr. Daniel Amen, A M E N. He's very famous. Actually, he's famous on TikTok now, but he had a very good TED talk. He has clinics and his role is really he is a psychiatrist, but he does functional MRIs on people to actually look at their brain patterns.

And to  figure out he works a lot with ADHD and TBIs, traumatic brain injuries anyway,  I once heard him say  that watching the news cycle is like drinking trauma from a firehose,  right? And he's really pointing out that back when we hunt a hunter gatherer  society,  All we could be concerned about, because that's all we knew, was our little community and keeping our community safe.

So if there was going to be an intruder, or there was going to be a dangerous animal coming by, or some kind of threat, it was just our immediate community that we thought about, worried about, you know, panicked about, really, if we're talking about our nervous system. And our brain has not developed the Far enough has not evolved enough to have that capacity to think about every bad event happening in every city across the world, right?

We don't have the capacity to take in all that trauma and not be affected. And what I'm talking about, every bad thing that's happening in the world at every given minute, that is our 24 hour news cycle. Okay, even when I, when I was growing up, I do remember my dad turning on the news every night at six o'clock.

He would come home in time from work to watch six o'clock news. Okay, it was like half an hour. Now it's a 24 hour cycle, okay? And our nervous capacity, our nervous system doesn't have the capacity to like just turn it off. I know some people watch 11 o'clock news and go to bed. How you can do that, I do not know.

That isn't how I'm built, okay? That's not how my nervous system functions. But it's just things to be. Mindful of okay, so let's talk about these areas if our ultimate goal is to be peaceful is to be  In control of our emotions to be less stress, less reactive, right? Less kind of trigger happy, right? Like the minute somebody says something, we jump at them, right?

It's because we're in this kind of constant, you know, panic kind of mode. If we want to move beyond that, It really is important for us to look at our mental diet. So here are the areas we're going to look at. And just you know, in some of the programs that I do and coaching that I do, we go through this exercise.

I have worksheets, all the things. You don't need that. You just need a piece of paper. Now, maybe some of you are driving, going for a walk, washing the dishes, doing whatever. Just come back and listen to this part. In the show notes, I'll write down the six areas you should look at. Okay, because I, obviously you can't do this if you're driving, but it will take five minutes and you will learn so much.

My goal is not to shame you. I do all these things too.  I do all of these things too. It is a huge bone of contention to be honest. In my household that I have a partner who's pretty desensitized to violence. Watch every Quentin Tarantino show Breaking Bad. I mean, he can watch all those things and I literally cannot, and he doesn't understand that I will have nightmares, that it just ramps up my anxiety.

So. Sometimes I want to sit and watch something with him and that's what he's watching, and I should set better boundaries where I say, you know what, I wanna, it's important to me that we sit on the couch and we cuddle for a few minutes, but I cannot watch this. Can we watch something else? And then I'll go read a book, do something else, and you follow up, right?

Like for him, it's no big deal. For me, it is a big deal. Okay, so here's what you're going to look at. So, just on a piece of paper.  List. First thing we're going to look at is books. Now, it's summer, hopefully you're reading. During the school year, like, that's laughable, right? If it isn't a book about  curriculum or teaching,  you're not reading it, but it's summer right now, so hopefully you're reading books.

Write down the last five books you read. Just write them down, no judgment, just write them down.  So that's number one. Number two,  we're going to look at movies. Write down the last five movies you watched. Start to finish, right? Movies that you sat down, you chose, you watched.  Next,  write down five podcasts that you listen to regularly.

Now this one, okay, we've got a smiley face here. But what are the others that you're listening to?  What about five TV shows that you watch regularly? Write them down. Don't think about it too much. Just write them down. Okay? And if you can't think, I don't know, just think in the last month what the five TV shows you've watched.

And if you haven't been watching ABBA Elementary,  let me just tell you. That's good for your soul. Okay, now, now this is a big one. Ten. Ten social media accounts that you follow.  You can think of 10. If you're not sure, go look at your Insta, your Facebook, your TikTok. Who are you following? Who is showing up on your feed repeatedly?

Okay.  So that's five. Now you, we're going to get to six in a minute, which is the new cycle, but on those five, once you've written them down, you are going to go back. It's very simple. All you're going to do is put a plus or a minus next to it.  A plus, if it's something that is kind of positive and helps you grow or think or just even, you know, something that's just kind of a fun diversion, you know, Bridgerton.

Love that.  There's nothing traumatic really happening there. It's not the real world, okay? But breaking bad, yeah, that's going to be a negative. That's not a peaceful world review, that to finance his cancer treatment he has to start selling meth. That, that's not, that's not great, okay? So you see the point.

You're going to go put plus minuses, and then you're going to evaluate with awareness comes choice.  Is it really, you know, heavy on the negative? And if it is, Make some adjustments. Now, number six is the news cycle. It's not as easy to put a, you know, a plus a minus here. It's all stinking negative. You know, good news doesn't make it. 

It just doesn't. Okay? I, I, years ago, I'm like, let's just make a newspaper for people where all the good news is happening. And I remember somebody, lots of people just laughed and said, honey, nobody's buying it. Okay? Bad news sells. And they'll keep repeating the bad news until something worse happens.

That's just the way it is. So let me ask you this. What is your relationship with the news cycle?  You need to be informed. You want to be informed.  You know, it is impossible to avoid it. I made a conscious choice 20 something years ago. Canceled cable television. Didn't want my kids seeing the adverts or the news cycle.

I felt I come from a different culture and, and grew up with, I don't know, just here the, the cable TV then as it was before the streaming and other things, it just, the only two messages I ever felt came from that consumerism and fear. Be afraid, buy stuff. Be afraid, buy stuff. That's all it was. And I did.

That isn't what I wanted my kids to think the world was. Okay. So, and it was easy to turn off the news and avoid it, but now it just isn't. Even if you just, you know, on your desktop, it'll pop up. Okay. You're scrolling through social media, it will pop up. Like it's very hard to avoid the news cycle now.

Okay. If that is your choice. So what is your relationship with it? Do you limit it?  Or do you just get involved? Listen, the world needs activists. The world needs activists. Absolutely. If you see something and like, Oh my gosh, I'm inspired to action, the world needs you. Okay. But if what you're just doing is like depress you and overwhelm you and give you this negative view that you're living in a hostile universe, then I'm going to recommend that you limit your exposure to it.

Okay. So those were the six areas you're going to look at  books. Movies, podcasts, TV shows, social media accounts, and then what is your relationship to the news cycle?  If you really spend 10 minutes doing that, I think you will learn something. And I really encourage you to write a little reflection. Just what  with awareness comes choice.

Again, I'm not shaming you. I'm not saying don't do it.  You do what you want. You're an adult.  However, make the connection. It might be one of the missing pieces. If you're wondering why the heck am I so stressed out? Why am I always thinking the worst is going to happen? If that is what you are marinating in,  It is very destructive to your world view in general.

Okay, that's all I have to say on that. Yes, you're going to say, Oh my God, listen, I, again, you know, I just read that Jonathan hates one wonderful book. The Anxious Generation. I mean, it's nothing we don't know, right? This massive increase in anxiety for, for students and children. Man.  And depression and all the things and it makes it very I am.

I am very pleased. I have to say that my Children are grown adults. That isn't something I don't have to navigate because I think it's a a huge burden on parents to have to navigate, manage this. And of course, teachers, we see it, you know, the short attention spans, all the things in the classroom.

Okay. I don't want to get off on that tangent. I'll make that another episode because I promised you this was about you. So just do something beautiful for your mental health, take inventory and see.  Are you promoting a  friendly universe or a hostile one? I want you to know my life experience, I'm not saying nothing bad has ever happened to me, good grief.

Don't, don't, that, that would be a ridiculous thing to say. But I try not to throw a pity party over things. And I do try and set my radar to looking for the good stuff. And there is so much evidence that the world is a friendly place, and I hope you manage to feel that way too, even if just for a few minutes a day.

So anyway, I hope your summer is off great. Again, if you're not listening over summer. Oh, sorry.  Vicariously, the weekend will be here soon, no matter when you're listening to this. Not that we should just be living for the weekend, but there you go. All right. Until next time, I want to remind you that you can create your own path and you can bring your own sunshine.

And I'm here to cheer you on.