The Walk, the Lake, and the Laptop: What I Learned About Rest and Screens for Teachers

Welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World, I’m Leah Cleary, and today we’re doing something just a little bit different. We’ve spent the last few episodes deep in policy and practice, the tech pendulum, AI in schools, five questions for intentional technology use. And all of that has been important and I really hope, useful for you.

But today, I want to slow down because we’re in the middle of summer, and I think we need to talk about something that doesn’t get enough air time in the professional development world, and what gets in the way of that. Specifically, I want to talk about screens. Not in the classroom this time.

In our own lives, because I think a lot of us, me too, have a complicated relationship with our devices that we don’t examine as carefully as we maybe examine our students relationship with them. And I want to start with something that happened to me recently that made me pause.

I walk almost every day. It’s something I’ve done for years, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the day. I almost always have my phone with me, and that’s not because I can’t disconnect. It’s because I’ve learned something about myself. My walks are when I think the best. If I’ve been wrestling with a problem, the answer tends to come on a walk. If I’m planning a podcast episode or trying to figure out a direction for a blog post or thinking through a classroom challenge, the ideas come on a walk. There’s something about moving that frees up my brain in a way that’s sitting at my desk never has.

So I have my phone and I use it to record myself exactly like I’m doing right now. I can talk while I move, I can capture the idea the moment it arrives without stopping to write it down. See, that works really well for me. But here’s the thing. I didn’t fully understand why it worked until very recently. I was listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Hidden Brain. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I really recommend it. Shankar Vedantam, the host, was interviewing a psychologist about creativity and specifically about where creative breakthroughs actually come from.

And this psychologist made a point that I’ve been thinking about ever since. Breakthroughs don’t usually happen when you’re working. They happen when the mind is at rest. When you step back from the problem and let your brain do its quiet work. The research calls this the default mode network. It’s what activates when your mind is wandering, when you’re not focused on a specific task.

And a twenty twenty four study published in the journal Brain confirmed that this network plays a direct causal role in creative thinking. It’s not just correlation. See, when your brain is at rest and allowed to wander, it’s actually doing creative work. I listened to that episode and I thought, well, that’s my walk. Those are my walks. That’s exactly what’s happening when I walk. And that’s why I’ll walk six miles a day in the summer.

I’ve been doing this for years, and I didn’t have the language for it until someone put it into words. And then I thought about everything that can interrupt it. I want to be careful here, because I think the conversation about phones and screens is often really too black and white.

The phone is a tool. I use mine on my walks to record ideas, make calls, text my husband if I’m going to be gone a little bit longer than I said I would. That’s the phone doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The danger, and I know this danger personally, is the rabbit hole, because there’s a very short distance between opening your phone to record a thought and opening Instagram. And once you’re in that feed, you’re not in a default mode network anymore. You’re not letting your brain wander creatively.

You’re consuming. And here’s the thing about what you’re consuming, most of it is not going to make you feel any better. I say this as someone who had no idea that she was in desperate need of face fillers and lip injections until social media informed her of the fact. My wrinkles are apparently a problem. Guys, they’re not a problem. I’ve earned every single one of them. But I have to actively remind myself of that after a few minutes on social media.

The research on this isn’t subtle. A twenty twenty four study of over five hundred teachers found a direct relationship between using social media during non-work hours and burnout. The thing a lot of us are doing to decompress is actively making things worse. And there’s a particularly painful irony in that finding for teachers, specifically.

University of Georgia researchers studying teacher burnout joined teacher groups on Facebook and Instagram to do their research. And what they found in those groups, in the spaces where teachers go to find community and support, was overwhelming negativity about the profession, burnout posts, leaving teaching posts, venting about administration and parents, and impossible workloads.

Nearly seventy percent of the posts they analyzed fell into the burnout or leaving category. I’m going to say that one more time. That is, nearly seventy percent of the posts that they analyzed fell into the burn out or the leaving category. We’re going to social media to recover from a hard year, and we’re finding more evidence that everything is terrible and we should probably just quit.

No, I’m not at all looking to diminish the issue here. The problem that teachers are feeling burnt out, that there are lots of problems right now in this profession systemically. All of this is just to say, if we’re continually going through this on our off time, we’re not resting, we’re not recharging.

You remember that old school advice about the teacher’s lounge, about don’t go to the teachers lounge at lunch and spend your whole time complaining about the students, because that’s just going to make things worse. It’s going to make you feel worse. It’s going to make your overall outlook worse, right?

This is the same thing, but at a national and sometimes international level because of social media and brought right into your own home where you should be resting, where you should be spending time with your family. You know how we used to say, yeah, kids could get bullied at school and that’s terrible, but at least they get to go home from it and they get a reprieve.

We could make an analogy here with teachers and the teacher lounge complaining and griping where we shouldn’t be worried about it at home, but we bring it home when we go into one of those groups on Facebook and we complain and we read other people’s complaints, and it just amplifies the problem. That’s not rest. That’s the very opposite of rest.

Okay, so I told you the phone’s not really my problem. What my problem is, is the laptop. I have a hard time not working when I’m at home. My hands always need to be busy, and the laptop enables that in a way nothing else does. It lets me take my work everywhere. I can be sitting on our back porch. We live on a lake and it is one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been. There are geese and ducks, eagles flying over. Turtles come up on the bank. The water does this thing in the morning where the light hits it and it just well, it just stops you. And I’ll sit there with my nose glued on the screen.

I know I’m missing it. I can feel myself missing it. And I still do it because there’s always something to do. And the laptop is right there. And I’m a person who feels guilty about not being productive. I think a lot of teachers are like me as far as that goes. We’re not wired to sit still. We’re not wired to let things wait. We’ve spent entire careers responding to the urgent, pivoting on the fly, finding something useful to do in every spare minute. That skill keeps our classrooms running, but it also makes it almost impossible to actually rest if we don’t know how to turn that off.

Summer comes and the urgent things slow way down. And instead of sitting with that quiet, a lot of us try to fill it. We plan. We scroll. We open the laptop because the quiet just feels wrong. It feels like falling behind. And I want to say something here to anyone who recognizes themselves in that description. The quiet is not falling behind. The quiet is the work. The default mode network your brain needs to be creative and resilient and genuinely ready for a new school year. It needs that quiet to function.

So I’m going to tell you about something that happened just the other day, because I think it’s more useful than any tip I could give you. I woke up one morning and said to myself, today I’m taking a break from work. No podcast planning, no blog drafts, nothing. Just a day off. So I went on my walk. Ideas came. Of course they did, because that’s what walks do. And I came home energized and ready to work.

But I had to stop myself. I had made a commitment. The work would be there tomorrow. I’d given myself permission to rest. And then I almost didn’t take it. I did end up taking it, though. I made a conscious decision to wait, to give myself a specific time the next day to sit down and do the work that I had planned on my walk. And it was fine. It was actually better than fine. The ideas were still there. They were clearer even.

But here’s what I want you to hear from that. Giving yourself permission to rest isn’t a one time thing. It’s a practice. It’s something you have to choose repeatedly against every instinct that tells you you’re falling behind or wasting time, or should be doing something useful. You’re not wasting time. You’re filling back up. And teachers who are running on empty can’t give their students anything worth having.

I want to give you some real things, not a wellness influencer’s morning routine, because my morning routine is really not a routine at all, and I’m fine with that. These are things that actually work for me. The first thing is jigsaw puzzles. And I know, I know, but hear me out. When my husband and I are watching television in the evening, I used to default to also having my laptop open working while we watched. Now I do a jigsaw puzzle. My hands are busy, which is what they need, and I’m present in the room with him. It sounds small, but it isn’t small and I’ve put together some pretty cool jigsaw puzzles.

And guys, I know technically a television is a screen, but my husband and I are watching a show together. We’re talking about it. We’re laughing. So I don’t feel like that’s the same thing as doom scrolling on social media.

The second thing is games. We love games, trivia games, Monopoly, card games. There’s a Game of Thrones card game that never quite made it big but is really great. When we make a concerted effort to turn off the screens and play a game, I always feel more recharged afterward than I do after a night of scrolling. Every single time. And yet, I still have to make the choice to do it.

The Facebook News Feed Eradicator. Okay, this is a great Chrome extension and I will link to it in the show notes. You install it and if you’re working on your computer and you’re like me and you’re like, oh, I’ll just open this Facebook tab and see what’s going on here, you see a quote. That’s it. Just a quote.

It means you can still use Facebook to message people or check specific pages or answer questions in a group, but you can not accidentally fall into the newsfeed for an hour and a half. I used it for a while and I need to go back to it. I’m telling you about this because I think a lot of us need a structural solution, not just willpower. Willpower only works sometimes, but that newsfeed eradicator is always eliminating my newsfeed.

The walk without the earbuds. This is hard for me because I absolutely, absolutely, absolutely love podcasts. I listen to them constantly. But some of my best thinking happens on the walks where I don’t put anything in my ears, where I just move and let my brain go wherever it goes. Now, I don’t do this enough. Maybe you don’t either, but I do it a few times a week. Two probably, to be honest. And when I do, that’s when I get what I think are really good ideas and I’ll use my phone to record them.

Naming the break in advance. This is the one that’s helped me the most. Saying it out loud to yourself, to your partner, to whoever. I’m not working today. And then when the pull comes, which it will, you already have the answer. You already decided. The decision is made and you don’t have to make it again. In the moment when willpower is the lowest.

Here’s what I want to leave you with. We’ve spent this summer talking about technology, and we still have more episodes to go. What it does in our classrooms. How to use it intentionally. What happens when we don’t carefully think about it. And I think everything we’ve said about our students is also true about us. Technology is a tool. It can be used well, or it can be used in ways that slowly drain us.

The phone on your walk that helps you capture ideas is a completely different thing from the phone in your hand at the lake that keeps you from seeing the eagle. You know which one you’re doing. And if you’re honest with yourself, you probably know when you need to put it down. The new school year is coming. Oh, it is coming way faster than any of us want it to. I cannot believe that, at least, I’m already a month into summer break.

A new group of students is coming. They need a version of you that has actually rested, has actually recharged. Not a version that spent the whole summer productive and exhausted. Close the laptop, sometimes. Look at the eagle. The work will be there when you get back. Until next time. Take care of yourselves. You deserve it.