Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers

You've been holding it together with caffeine and adrenaline, but your nervous system has been white-knuckling it for ten months and hit a breaking point.
It's time for The Reset.
This is something brand new I'm offering for the first time: an at-home restorative retreat for teachers happening June 26-28th. 
It's intended to be like a real retreat experience, just held somewhere you don't have to pack a bag for and deal with travel expenses.
Because The Reset is FREE.
Over the weekend of June 26th-28th, I'll guide you through the practices that actually move the needle for teacher burnout.
I've created videos for morning stretching and restorative yoga, audio for forest bathing (which is a mindful nature practice you can do anywhere outside), breathwork, and more.
There are also nervous system mini-seminars where I explain what's actually happening in your body during a stressful school day, why you feel the way you feel, and how to send the all-clear signal so you can calm down again. And no worries about being tied to a screen: these are designed to be listened to while you're walking, going for a bike ride, gardening, or whatever you like to do! 
If you're thinking, "I don't know if I can actually take a real break if I'm at home with all these distractions," I've planned for that.
Everything is on-demand and completely optional. 
There's no Zoom call you have to show up to, no message forums to keep up with, no schedule to follow.
I'll release videos of guided experiences each day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the retreat portal. Pick and choose whatever you'd like to do, in any order you want.
You basically get to design your weekend retreat, with my resources there to guide you through activities and spark inspiration.
Here's how it works:
Sign up for FREE to join The Reset At-Home retreat from June 26-28. All the content releases over that weekend, and is removed on Sunday night at midnight PT. I want you to actually prioritize your own wellbeing: mark your calendar, and carve out time for YOU.
If you want to keep all the resources permanently, opt in for the $29 Anytime Access pass. You can take your own retreat whenever it's convenient, and do mini resets during the school year. Additional bonus practices and resources will drop on Monday for those who get the Forever Access Pass.
One more thing. If you have a teacher friend who's running on fumes right now, send this this ep, or the link to sign up: https://courses.truthforteachers.com/courses/reset
Better yet, plan to do The Reset together! Hang out at your friend's house in your comfiest loungewear, pick some of the activities to experience, have a healthy lunch, maybe even take a nap on the couch before diving back in for a final restorative session before dinner. You can make this at-home retreat anything you want it to be!
Join us for The Reset HERE
If you'd also like an in-person retreat, I've got two of them happening this summer (June 12-14 in eastern PA, and 24-26 July in the Asheville/Charlotte NC area). And, there's a Labor Day weekend retreat and fall restorative retreat I'm holding for everyone (not specifically teachers, so you can bring a non-teacher friend or partner). ​Get all the details about in-person retreats HERE.

Most of us are walking around in a low-grade state of fight-or-flight all the time, and we don't even realize it. It looks like the tight jaw in the morning, the exhaustion that doesn't lead to sleep, or the feeling of being on edge even on a good day. 
These are signs of a nervous system that never got the signal that it's safe to come down.
In this episode, I'm sharing a lesson from my new free video course called Everything is Terrible: An Anxiety Toolkit for the Age of Doomscrolling. It's a five-lesson toolkit for people who care deeply about the world and are quietly exhausted by the weight of it. Each lesson is a standalone tool you can use when you need it.
This episode shares an excerpt from one of these lessons, covering:
-What's actually happening in your body when you're stuck in fight-or-flight
-How to manually activate your parasympathetic nervous system even when the external world is still chaotic
-Two specific breathing techniques you can use anywhere to send your body the "all clear" signal
-Grounding phrases for when your body has settled but your brain is still spinning.
Check out the full Everything is Terrible toolkit FREE on my Substack.
You can also:
Read the blog post for this episode
Learn about upcoming teacher retreats
Join The Reset, a free at-home nervous system reset retreat June 26-28

When the world feels this heavy, this broken, it can feel almost frivolous to make space for art. And in the classroom with so much content to cover, can we really slow down enough to create and take an artful approach to learning with students? Who has time to write poems or pause over a beautiful image when we're al barely keeping our heads above water?
But think about what we're left with if we don't. If we strip away beauty and creativity and connection, all we have left is the grind. The compliance. The systems that are exhausting us in the first place.
I recently talked to Rebecca Bellingham and Veronica Scott about this. They're educators, writers, artists, and the co-founders of Artful Belonging Studio. They're also the authors of the new book, "The Artful Approach to Exploring Identity and Fostering Belonging." Listen as we discuss: What does an artful lesson look like when you have content standards to cover and no time? How do you do cultural heritage months in ways that invite all students in instead of making them feel obligated? And where should teachers start if they want to try this work?
Rebecca and Veronica brought so much warmth and wisdom to this conversation. Listen in. Or read the transcription here.

I picked up my phone to check the weather the other day, and twenty minutes later I was still standing in my kitchen, having bounced from app to app through a chain of perfectly legitimate tasks that I never actually chose to do in that moment. I wasn't scrolling mindlessly. I was checking my steps, signing up for a yoga class, responding to my husband's text, following up on a bank alert. And I still lost the thread of my own day.
That's what makes our relationship with phones so hard to examine. It's not all mindless scrolling. Our phones are genuinely useful tools, and that's exactly why we never put them down.
We've adapted so completely to being constantly tethered to our devices that we've forgotten what it feels like to have a mind that isn't always being filled with input. We reach for our phones in every spare moment, not because we need to, but because we have two minutes to kill and our brains have been trained to say "phone" before we've made a conscious decision.
Something interesting has shifted in recent years, too. A lot of us have pulled back from posting on social media, but we haven't pulled back from our phones. We've just become passive consumers instead of active participants, and the tethering hasn't loosened at all. I've explored this on my YouTube channel, So What Are We Doing Here, in two video essays I'll link in the show notes.
In this episode, I walk through three simple habits that have helped me reclaim my time and attention, habits I still have to practice every day. I'll share the most recent data on phone usage from the 2026 Reviews.org report, explain how our apps are engineered to keep us engaged through intermittent rewards, personalization, and instant gratification, and talk about why mindfulness, which just means paying attention to how you feel, is the foundation for lasting change.
I also share why I believe doing this work alongside our students is far more powerful than just enforcing phone policies at them. When students see that their teacher is honest about struggling with the same thing they do, it stops being about compliance and becomes about awareness and choice. I reference high school teacher Ashly Hilst's approach from Episode 306, where her message "Phones don't make good moments, people do" stuck with students in a way that traditional policies never had.
Whether you want to start with your own habits or bring this conversation into your classroom, this episode will give you a framework for helping yourself and your students take back control of how you spend your time and attention.
If you want to put these three habits into practice for yourself, I have a free 21-day Intentional Connectivity Challenge. It's one email per week for three weeks, each one focused on building one of these habits, with a follow-up check-in to help you stay on track.
If you want something more personalized, Motivation Lab is my coaching app that helps you understand how your brain works and build strategies that fit your natural tendencies. There's a module called Take Control of Your Phone Habits that walks you through exactly what I'm describing here, and it also covers motivation, focus, and procrastination, because our phone habits are tangled up with all of those things.
And if you want to bring this work into your classroom, my Finding Flow Solutions curriculum has a full unit on healthy phone habits with student journals, slideshows, and discussion activities that are no-prep for you. There are versions for elementary, middle, and high school.
Get the shareable article/transcript for this episode here.

We've been taught to think of the brain as the control center, the part of us that really matters for learning. But the body isn't just along for the ride, carrying our brains from place to place.
Caroline Williams, science journalist and three-time author (including of the book Inner Sense) has spent years digging into the research on how our brains and bodies actually work together. Turns out they're in constant conversation, sending signals back and forth in ways that shape how we think, feel, learn, and remember.
And that means the brain isn't calling all the shots from up there in your head: your body has a lot more to say than we've been giving it credit for.
Caroline and I talk about why we've been trained to override our body's signals, what happens when kids learn to tune in instead of push through, and how this changes what it means to teach the whole child.
This conversation might shift how you see everything from behavior issues to why certain kids struggle to focus. You'll learn:
Why emotions don't actually start in your brain
How body awareness connects to emotional intelligence and self-regulation
What's really happening when we say "trust your gut"
Why teaching kids to tune into their bodies might be one of the most important things we can do
How understanding this changes the way we think about learning
If our bodies are constantly feeding information to our brains, then a lot of what we do in classrooms starts to make less sense...and there are easy, small shifts that can help.
Article/Transcript for this episode: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/the-brain-isnt-separate-from-the-body-heres-what-that-means-for-learning/