This blog focuses on the work-related causes of teacher mental health overwhelm and suggests individual strategies that can help you to cope with it. Recognising that addressing overwhelm is also an organisational responsibility, part 2 of the blog focuses the organisation and how teachers can approach school leadership with their concerns about workload and workplace culture.
Section1: The source of overwhelm
It usually arrives shortly after the middle of August. You are doing something entirely unrelated — unloading the dishwasher, reading a novel — and a thought slides in about the new timetable, or the new class you will meet, or the first week’s lessons you need to prepare, or the scheme of work that is still not written. Your stomach tightens. What remains of the holiday suddenly feels less like time off and more like a countdown.
If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Education Support is a charity that provides mental health support for teachers, including a 24/7 helpline staffed by counsellors. Education Support publishes a Teacher Wellbeing Index annually, drawn from an extensive survey of UK education staff. The Wellbeing Index in November 2025 — their ninth study — reported the worst overall wellbeing scores since 2019, finding that 76% of teachers and 86% of school leaders reported experiencing stress at work. The Department for Education’s (DFE) own research tells the same story from a different perspective: in the 2025 wave of “Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders”, 64% of teachers and leaders said their job does not leave them enough time for their personal lives.
The September return is a hard reset after the holiday. Most teachers work during the first week and the last week of the school holiday. Four weeks of a different rhythm — different sleep, different autonomy, different pace — and then into a fixed timetable, new classes, new specifications, new initiatives, and a building full of people who all need something from you at once. Anxiety is a proportionate, if unwelcome, response to a demanding transition.
1. What anticipation does to your mental health
What you experience in August has a name: anticipatory anxiety. It is the mind running ahead to rehearse a difficulty that has not happened yet. Education Support’s guidance for education staff returning to work identifies exactly this pattern, noting that the anticipation of high workload and unfinished tasks is a common cause of anxiety. As the nature of teaching means that the work is never finished, anxiety can become a permanent condition.
There is physiological evidence for why this matters. The Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis, proposed by Brosschot, Gerin and Thayer (2006), describes how worry and rumination prolong the body’s stress response well beyond the cause of the stressor itself. Your heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol do not distinguish between a difficult real September and an imagined one. This is why August anxiety can produce physical symptoms: disturbed sleep, appetite changes, that Sunday-evening stomach appearing on a Tuesday in the middle of the holidays. You are not imagining the physical symptoms. You are having a genuine stress response to an event that has yet to arrive.
As the end of August approaches, some teachers notice their thoughts sliding into "what if" territory: what if this year's class is unmanageable, what if the inspection lands in the second week, what if I can't keep on top of the workload. This is catastrophising — a well-recognised anxiety response in which the mind leaps to the worst possible outcome and treats it as the most likely one, especially if you have experienced trauma in the past. In a strange way, your brain is trying to look after you. In an article on the Psychology Today website in 2024, clinical psychologist Dr Fabiana Franco explains that catastrophising "is a sign that your mind is doing its best to protect you, even if it's overestimating the danger you face." This isn't a failure of resilience. It is your mind's early-warning system, scanning ahead for danger before September arrives. The problem is that this system, so useful for spotting a genuine threat, struggles to distinguish between real crisis and ordinary uncertainty. Because the job of a teacher, especially in the classroom, is inherently unpredictable, your mind can end up rehearsing one disaster after another, long before there is evidence that they are actually coming.
2. The scale of the problem
The DfE’s 2025 workload figures show full-time primary teachers working an average of 51.4 hours a week, secondary teachers 49.3, and school leaders 56.5. I know many teachers and leaders working 60 - 70 hour weeks who would question these figures. 43% of teachers and leaders report that their workload is not acceptable and that they lack sufficient control over it. In the DfE’s report “Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders, Wave 3” (2024), only 22% of teachers and leaders said they had an acceptable workload.
Teacher workload is a structural problem – a combination of external demands from the DfE and internal demands from the school. If you constantly feel behind in your workload, you are not inefficient, nor are you alone. There is strong research and anecdotal evidence that your job does not fit within the hours available.
In the DfE’s accompanying study, "Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders: Qualitative Insight into Teacher and Leader Workload” (2025), one primary teacher captures how most teachers feel:
"It's the sort of feeling that it will never ever end... no matter what you do, no matter how many hours you spend, it's just never going to end and there will always be something else."
In the same report, a secondary teacher puts it slightly differently:
"I just prioritise what's most important and just accept that I'm never going to get through my list of things I have to do, and that's okay."
Concluding that everyone else is coping and you are not – a response that can follow anxiety about the future - is simply untrue. Most teachers often or always feel this way. Making peace, as the secondary teacher did, with the unending workload is difficult for teachers, not least because many set themselves high standards and feel guilty for not achieving them. Chen (2024), reported an informal LinkedIn poll where 78% of 1,500 teachers said they did not feel that they could take sick leave and many felt guilty if they did. Stoeber & Rennert (2008) argued that perfectionism - a common personality trait among teachers - is not one-dimensional but consists of two features, with very different consequences. Striving for perfection — pursuing high personal standards — was linked to teachers seeing challenges as something to rise to. However, negative reactions to imperfection, the tendency to feel threatened or distressed when, in their own opinion, they fell short, was the strongest predictor of emotional exhaustion.
Section 2: Taking action to cope with overwhelm
1) Addressing workload
Bhatti and Roulet, writing in Wellbeing Intelligence (2025) – a book well worth purchasing - make the case that mental health is a spectrum, rather than a binary of fine and unwell, and that your wellbeing is greatly determined by your capacity to prepare in advance of challenges, rather than responding when a crisis occurs. Preparing to meet the challenges of the term ahead and coping
during it will be the focus of coping with overwhelm in this section.
Imagine that you are sorting your workload into four piles:
Essential is work that must be completed — required by law or that you are contractually obliged to do or tasks set for everyone by your school.
Important work has to be completed, but the deadline is flexible; for example, marking.
Optional: This pile is work you choose to do because it interests or engages you or develops you professionally. Or it could be a voluntary activity, such as running an after-school club.
Discard:This pile is for optional work that you want to stop doing because it adversely affects your mental health. It could be an entire task, such as an extra mentoring session with an Early Career Teacher. Or part of a task, such as marking pupils’ work in great detail when a less thorough approach would be acceptable.
Apply a simple test to everything in the optional pile. Ask yourself the question: “Is this task, or how I am doing it, contributing to my mental wellbeing or is it detracting from it?” If it is the latter, discard the task or modify it. If you modify the task, move it into one of the other piles.
Using your piles of work, decide what tasks are essential to be ready for the first day back, and what can wait and therefore can be added to the Important pile. Create a list or enter dates on your calendar of important tasks you will complete by the end of September. This will help you to avoid trying to do everything as it comes along.
2. Stress— recovery is not a reward
Recovery is not a reward for completing a task or series of tasks. It is an essential strategy to enable you to sustain motivation and energy. Athletes understand this. Training without recovery does not build fitness; it leads to injury. Without recovery, negative stress – the kind that wears you out, rather than preparing you to act - leads to mental injury.
The occupational psychologists Sonnentag and Fritz (2007) identified the components of genuine recovery:
1) Psychological detachment
Your mind shutting off work is the strongest single predictor of recovery and long-term wellbeing. The following three strategies enable you to achieve detachment:
- Relaxation:This is a low-demand brain activity, such as meditation, reading a fiction novel, or listening to music
- Mastery: absorption in something skilled that is not work, such as painting, playing an instrument, gardening, or crochet helps your mind to recover from work demands. Mastery experiences restore energy in a way that rest alone does not.
- Control: setting aside personal time when you can plan downtime activities. Plan relaxation and mastery activities for the time you have left in August. Take control and protect some days completely, with no schoolwork. Partial detachment does not have the same recovery benefits as full detachment.
3. Sleep
Begin shifting your sleep pattern about a week before term begins, rather than adjusting it abruptly the night before. Moving your bedtime and waking time gradually towards your term-time pattern is kinder, both physically and mentally, than attempting the whole adjustment in one night.
4. Planning for your first teaching day
Make a written plan of your first teaching day. Getting the plan out of your head and onto paper allows your mind to release it. As there is a Bank Holiday just before you return to school, leaving lesson planning to the last weekend or the final Monday will have a negative impact on the long weekend when you should be detaching to prepare your mind and body for the return to school.
5. Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) Management Standards and work-related stress: Self-assessment
If work makes you unwell, it is important to identify where the negative stress is coming from. ‘I am stressed’ is too vague. ‘My working hours have crept up to 60, and I have not had a full weekend to myself since April’ is something you can do something about. In its Management Standards, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) — the UK’s workplace regulator — identifies six factors that determine whether workload is damaging your health. The Management Standards were written for
employers. I have modified them to make them relevant for you as an employee.
Demands
Demands are your workload, your working patterns, and the work environment. Ask yourself: how many hours am I actually working? Include the evening ‘quick check’ of lesson plans and the hour on Sunday spent catching up on emails.
Control
A lack of control over workload is a common source of teacher stress. The gap between the control you would like and the control you have in practice can be substantial.
Support
Support includes human support and the resources available to you. Human support might be lacking unless you deliberately build it.
Relationships
Your work-related relationships are with your pupils, your colleagues, leaders, and parents. As with any relationship, your relationship with each group needs to be managed to maintain boundaries.
Role
Role conflict occurs when there is a gap between what you expect to do in your role and what others demand of you, whether this is contractual or otherwise.
Change
How you initiate, manage, and respond to change are integral to your personal wellbeing. You can be swept along by change over which you have little or no control, e.g., a change to the curriculum. Or you can plan ahead for this eventuality so that you have some control when it happens. Or you can initiate beneficial change yourself; for example, writing a plan on how your lesson delivery will adapt to the new curriculum and sharing it with your line manager and/or senior leaders.
Self-assessment using the HSE's 6 Management Standards
Carry out a self-assessment, based on the HSE's 6 Management Standards. The results of the self-assessment will enable you to take action if your score is low on any of the standards. A low score indicates that you are not managing a standard as well as you might. Score each of the Management Standards from 1: Low Management to 5: High Management. Write one sentence of evidence to support your score. For example, "I scored Support at level 2, because I have not had a proper conversation with another teacher about the impact that the new curriculum is having on me". Identify which of the Management Standards you need to focus on in the Autumn term to increase your level of control over your work.
6. Creating personal boundaries
Creating personal boundaries can be perceived by leaders as indicating a lack of commitment. However, setting boundaries between your working life and personal life is what enables you to be still doing your job in five years’ time. The DfE (2023) found that 65% of all respondents (teachers,middle leaders and senior leaders combined) felt that their job did not give them sufficient time for their personal lives. This figure rose to 70% in a later wave of the same survey (DfE, 2024).
7. Email
Email is often where expectations are set by the school, sometimes without a clear policy for limiting or managing them. Look at your sent folder from last term and note the earliest and latest times you sent a message. That span set the hours of your working day. Then choose a send window – for example, schedule sending emails by 5pm. The email you answer at eleven at night tells everyone, including yourself, that you are available for work at that time. A reply within one working day is a
professional standard.
8. Setting expectations
Make an “I no longer expect” list. Naming what you are not going to do is powerful: “I no longer expect myself to answer emails after five PM”. “I no longer expect myself to produce a perfect resource where a good one is adequate to teach the lesson”. “I no longer expect myself to say ‘yes’ to an additional task unless I can remove another task I am already doing”. Have a sentence ready for when your line manager or a leader asks you take on an additional task. Something like: “I can do that if remove another task from my workload. Which task should I set aside?” This returns the decision to the person making the demand.
9. If you are facing mental health challenges, talk
Tell someone you trust, and who will listen, that you are struggling. There is strong, recent evidence that talking helps. A 2025 systematic review in Clinical Psychology Review by Gnainsky and colleagues examined 42 studies and found that concealment of mental health difficulty is consistently associated with worse mental health outcomes. As the outcome depends on the person being a good listener, choose someone who will hear you out and respond well. Choose that person now, so that you know where to turn if things get difficult. It might be a First Aider for Mental Health, another colleague, line manager, a friend who is not a teacher, your partner, or parents.
What next?
La Montagne et al., (2007) reviewed the literature on interventions to address work-related stress. They systematically compared interventions targeting individual coping (e.g., relaxation, resilience training) with interventions that changed the organisation itself (e.g., job demands, control, support). Their central conclusion was that organisationally-focused interventions "have favourable impacts at both the individual and organizational levels," while individual-focused interventions are "effective at the individual level... but tend not to have favourable impacts at the organizational level." In other words, helping someone to cope better can be helpful for that person, but if it doesn't change the organisational source of the stress, the impact on the individual tends to be short-term and limited. At some point, the conversation has to move from what you do differently to what the school does differently.
As I said at the beginning of this blog, your wellbeing depends on a collaboration between the individual strategies you put in place and the willingness of leadership to address the workplace culture. The impact of individual strategies on your workload has a ceiling. Regrettably, some school cultures are toxic and cause teachers to leave when their individual wellbeing strategies have failed to protect them. A high staff turnover is often an indicator that staff are leaving to protect their mental
wellbeing from a leadership that has unreasonable expectations and that has not listened to their concerns.
Strategies to influence leaders to support staff mental wellbeing are the subject of Part 2 of this blog, which focuses on influencing school working culture. It will look at:
· How to open a conversation with school leadership about workload and
stress
· How to frame the conversation so that it is perceived as a shared problem
rather than being seen as a complaint
· What evidence to produce in support of your case
· When to raise the issue
· Who to raise it with
· How middle leaders can build a bridge between teachers and leaders.
Until then: enjoy the rest of your summer holiday.
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If you are struggling, Education Support runs a free, confidential helpline for everyone working in education, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on 08000 562 561. If low mood or anxiety have lasted more than two weeks and are affecting your daily life, please speak to your GP. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, call 999 or go to a hospital emergency department.
Teach Well Toolkit offers Level 2 First Aid for Mental Health training (www.teachwelltoolkit.com/l2-first-aid-for-mental-health) and a school membership programme (www.teachwelltoolkit.com/school-membership) to support teachers’ mental health and help leaders to develop a school culture of
mental wellbeing.
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References
Brosschot,J.F., Gerin, W. and Thayer, J.F. (2006) ‘The perseverative cognition hypothesis’, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 60 (2).
Bhatti, K. and Roulet, T. (2025) Wellbeing Intelligence: Building Better Mental Health at Work. London: Economist Edge.
Chen, G. (November,2024) "'An Overwhelming Feeling of Guilt': Why Teachers Don't Take Sick
Leave," Education Week.
Department for Education (2023) Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders: Wave 1 Core Research Report.
Department for Education (2024) Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders: Wave 4. London: DfE.
Department for Education (2025) Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders: Qualitative Insight into Teacher and Leader Workload.
Education Support (2025) Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025. London: Education Support.
www.educationsupport.org.uk
Fabiano, F. (Dec 2024) Catastrophizing: Why We Spiral into Worst-Case Scenarios: When our past shapes our present, we can catastrophize. Psychology Today.
Gnainsky, M., Roe, D., Negri-Schwartz, O., Cohen-Chazani, Y., Lavidor, M. and Hasson-Ohayon, I. (2025) ‘To disclose or not to disclose’, Clinical Psychology Review, 122.
Jones, B. K. (2016). ‘Enduring in an "Impossible" Occupation: Perfectionism and Commitment to Teaching’. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(5), 437–446.
LaMontagne, A. D., Keegel, T., Louie, A. M., Ostry, A., & Landsbergis, P. A. (2007). A Systematic Review of the Job-Stress Intervention Evaluation Literature, 1990–2005. International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, 13(3), 268–280.
Stoeber, J. & Rennert, D. (2008) "Perfectionism in school teachers: Relations with stress appraisals, coping styles, and burnout," Anxiety,Stress & Coping, 21(1), 37–53.
Management Standards for Work-related Stress. Health and Safety Executive www.hse.gov.uk/stress
Sonnentag, S. and Fritz, C. (2007) ‘The Recovery Experience Questionnaire’, Journal of
Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3).
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