Page 12 - Specialist Crafts Catalogue UK

I stood there, in the middle of my classroom, completely
frozen in fear...
It’s almost six years to the day since a panic attack in front of my class that would completely change my life; and lead me to help thousands of teachers and school staff to do the same.
It was in early May 2019 that my mental health hit an all time low. I was five years into my career when my relationship came to an end, it was also my first year taking a year six class through the SATs and my Learning Support Assistant, Sally, had sadly been diagnosed with terminal cancer earlier that year and would very soon pass away.
I was not okay; but I didn’t know just how ‘not okay’ I really was...
One morning, after break time, my children were filtering back into the classroom after break time. There had been a dispute during a game of football and a child who found it particularly difficult to regulate their emotions and was just reintegrating after spending some time on a reduced timetable, came flying into the room, hands aloft, voice very much raised. Soon pens, books and chairs were thrown across the room. But this wasn’t a new situation for me, I had dealt with it countless times before, so what happened next caught me completely off guard.
As someone in their mid-20s, I hadn’t had a panic attack until that day and all I can say is that I’ve never been more terrified in my entire life. Beads of sweat were suddenly dripping down my forehead, I was shaking with dizziness, and excruciating pains were spreading across my chest. I was completely convinced that I was about to die. Words cannot describe
the fear. Cutting a long story short, I was subsequently sent
By Charlie Burley
home, seen by a paramedic and spent a day in hospital having ECGs, blood tests and consultations. I even wore a 24 hour ECG machine to rule out any other heart issues! And the diagnosis?
Chronic stress & anxiety.
This diagnosis wasn’t just a product of that morning, though.
It was the compound effect of five years of neglecting my needs, prioritising the pressures of teaching and avoiding some really uncomfortable questions about how, and why, I was working the way I was. This led me down a path of desperately trying to recover, seeking support through coaching and counselling, learning a lot about the areas of stress, mental health, behaviour change, neuroscience and psychology - and eventually completing formal qualifications to enable me to support other school staff with the struggles I had faced.
Six years on, I’m here with you - hopefully able to help you avoid ever feeling how I felt that day. Now I’m not going
to share the usual spiel about just leaving work earlier or encourage you to meditate every morning (though these can be useful strategies). Instead I want to walk you through three realisations I had, and the strategies I discovered, that profoundly changed the way I felt, thought and taught!
It wasn’t long into my recovery that I had to face maybe the most uncomfortable reality I’d need to: I had lost myself to teaching. I was working on building better boundaries around work at the time, and found myself really struggling to put any in place. I had tied so much of my self-worth to my work that saying no felt impossible to me. What’s worse, I had taught others to treat me like the ‘yes man’ - they just knew I’d agree.
I had lost interest and energy for all of my passions outside