Teachers in Transition

Teachers in Transition - Episode 6 - The Importance of Staying Hydrated to Manage Your Stress

May 01, 2019 Kitty Boitnott
Teachers in Transition
Teachers in Transition - Episode 6 - The Importance of Staying Hydrated to Manage Your Stress
Show Notes Transcript

Learn why it is so important to stay hydrated if you want to stay on top of your game at home and at work. When you are mildly to severely dehydrated, your body goes into a stress response. Your brain drains water from your other organs, causing them to slow down and be sluggish. Your decision-making capacity is compromised. You will be more irritable, and your emotions will feel more brittle.

Something as simple as drinking enough watch to be fully hydrated can make all the difference in the world. Just try it for a few weeks (a few days won't be long enough to see the benefits).

For more information about how to stay hydrated and learn other important facts about stress and its proper management, download a free ebook at https://teachersintransition.com/ebook.

Want to learn how stressed out you really are? Take a free Stress Assessment Test! Download your free copy here:  https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/stress-assessment/

Transcript available here.

Kitty Boitnott:

Are you a teacher who is feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout? Or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job, or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? Kitty Boitnott: You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach, and I specialize in helping burned out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Kitty Boitnott: Join me for Teachers in Transition. In some episodes I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day-to-day basis. In other episodes I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? Kitty Boitnott: These are questions that you need answers to, and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to Teachers in Transition. Welcome. This is Kitty Boitnott of Boitnott Coaching and Teachers in Transition, and today we're going to be talking about how important water is to helping you manage proactively and more effectively the stress that you feel on a day-to-day basis. I am an author of an ebook called Stressed, Stretched and Just Plain Overwhelmed. A Guide to Managing Your Stress and Developing a Greater Sense of Work-Life Balance. It is available for free at teachersandtransition.com forward slash ebook(teachersintransition.com/ebook). And in that little ebook I offer what stress is, what it does to your body, your mind, your spirit, how it can detract from your daily enjoyment of life in general, how it can detract from your productivity and your performance at work, how it can damage your personal relationships in a variety of ways that you may not have even thought about. And then I offer seven specific strategies for how to better manage in a proactive way... The stress with the response that you feel. I mean, we're not going to ever get rid of stress. Stress is a fact of life. In fact, we're probably the most stressed society that's ever lived in history. Think about it, we're bombarded with news all day long and it's very rarely good news. You can't even turn the TV off and not watch news to not hear news through Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram and all the other places that we go to socialize with people. Uh, it's everywhere and usually the news is not good. I mean the things that get people's attention are the tragedies that occur that the bad news that we hear about. So we're stressed! On top of that, we're living faster paced lives. We are responsible for more and more things. There are all kinds of strains, including restraints of time, restraints of money, restraints of how much we make compared to how much we want to spend. Many of us are dealing with debt of some sort: mortgage car loans, student loans, credit card debt. And as I share in my workshop that I do on stress management for busy professionals and burnt out teachers, the only people who aren't stressed are the ones who've already died and have moved on everybody else is feeling stressed. Now the difference between those of us who are over stressed and feeling distress and those who are feeling a moderate amount of stress and maybe you're even in that peak, eustress-- e-u-s-t-r-e-s-s--area. Um, there's a vast difference between the use stress, the good stress that you may be feeling that keeps you on top of your game, keeps you competitive, keeps you productive, creative. That's the good kind of stress as opposed to distress, which is the opposite end of the spectrum where you feel overwhelmed and unable to function at your best. And it took that because it takes a toll. So there are things that we can do. They don't cost a lot of money. They, you don't have to do a whole lot out of the ordinary in order to incorporate some of these strategies into your day-to-day routine. But they do require that you be educated and informed as to the importance of why these habits or recommended and that you'd be convinced that they're going to help you in the long run. So today I want to talk about water--the importance of staying hydrated. And I know I can hear my teacher peeps already saying, oh gosh, she's going to talk about water and I can't drink water all day. I can't go to the bathroom all day and I get that. I've been there. Know--know--what that feeling is to need to go and not be able to take a break yet. And for some teachers, you go far longer than you should and it, that takes a toll on your kidneys. But the fact of the matter is, in order to perform at your best, you need to be hydrated. Now, my recommendation to my teacher folks is that everybody's experienced the phenomenon of you start to drink more water and you have to run to the bathroom every, it seems like every five or 10 minutes. The reason for that is your body's not used to being properly hydrated, so it's, it's eliminating as fast as you can bring it in. It's just not used to it. Your, your sales are not used to it. Your tissues and muscles and organs are not used to being fully hydrated, and so the first thing your body does and in the beginning of your efforts to hydrate is to eliminate right away because that's what it's used to. The fact of the matter is that over the course of a few days, your body will begin to acclimate. In fact, it will begin to relax. Ah, finally we have enough hydration to keep us functioning at our peak performance. Finally, and when that happens, that urgent need to go to the restroom, every few minutes will simply go away because now your body will be used to being properly hydrated. It's amazing when you think about the number of people who are walking about either mildly or severely in some cases dehydrated and they think something else is going on. They think they're hungry and so they eat more. They think they're tired, so they take a nap. All sorts of things can happen as a result of your being dehydrated. I have a friend who posted on Facebook a few years ago that he had gone to the emergency room thinking he was having a heart attack and after they checked him out and his heart was fine, they realized he was dehydrated. Part of the reason he was dehydrated was he had been to an aerobics class earlier in the day and he hadn't replenished his body of the fluids that he needed, so they plugged beam in to some fluids and then send him on his way. When my mother was ill a few years ago, she got so severely dehydrated that she landed in the hospital, and as they gave her a fluids, you could see her skin plump up like a flower that had been let to go too dry for too long and suddenly you give it a little bit of water and it just perks up right away. That's what she looked like. She went from feeling completely bum to, feeling like, oh yeah, that's better now. It was because she was finally hydrated. So how can you avoid going to the emergency room, uh, and, and needing to be hooked up to the artificial fluids in order to feel fully hydrated and at your peak in performance? Well, there are several things you can do, but the first thing you need to remember is why this is so important. Because just doing it without understanding the benefits of it may not stick for as long. So part of the reason you want to stay hydrated is that when you are only partially hydrated, the first thing that happens is your brain starts to take precedence over all of the other organs. The brain needs water to function; and when it starts to feel mildly dehydrated, it will call up the troops and have your, your bloodstream carry extra fluid to the brain so that it can continue to function and operate automatically and help you make the decisions that you make day-to-day. When that happens, it puts up a tension, a strain on the rest of your body because if your brain is taking all of the extra fluid in your in your body, that leaves your heart working harder, your bloodstream thicker, making the heart work harder, it makes your lungs less elastic and working harder. It of it eliminates the ability of the liver to flush out the toxins that build up in your system every single day. I mean your, your bladder, your digestive system, everything. There's an extra strain that is put on those organs because your brain has taken precedence over all of them in order to be hydrated. So avoid that problem by keeping your body properly hydrated throughout the day. I promise, you'll feel more grounded, you will feel less irritable, you'll feel more in control, your brain will feel sharper, you will feel less hungry. All sorts of studies show that when people finally start to drink the amount of water they need, they eat less and that leads to weight loss. And almost all of us want to lose a couple pounds. So just think about all the benefits and then as you start to think about the practicality of how are you going to manage to get extra water into your routine? Well, it should start first thing in the morning. In fact, when you wake up, your body is at its most dehydrated because you've been sleeping all night. You haven't been drinking. You may have even been up to go to the restroom in the middle of the night and so your body is dehydrated. You should drink as much water as you can manage it. Lease a full glass first thing in the morning before your coffee, before anything else, drank a glass of water to begin to replenish what you've lost from overnight. And then from that point you need to be drinking regularly, moderately throughout the rest of the day. Now when I talk about drinking water, I'm not talking about including coffee as a substitute. It's not a substitute. Sodas are not a substitute. Um, you could substitute black tea, green tea, certain kinds of decaffeinated non caloric teas if you want and treat them as a substitute but still waters, waters your best bet. Leave off the fruit juices, fruit juices, just full of sugar and not a lot of nutrients compared to the whole fruit. So eliminate sugar, fruit juices from your diet if you can't, and certainly you want to limit your alcohol intake because alcohol, will also dehydrate you. You want to drink two ounces of water per pound or about half of your body weight or one general rule of thumb that we've heard for years. That's not a terrible rule of rule of thumb is eight eight ounce glasses of water per day and they should be spaced out. Don't drink them all at once. If you do that, you really will be water- logged and headed to the bathroom the whole time. Sip throughout the day. So one strategy, excuse me, one strategy is to get a water bottle, something that's nondisposable that you can refill so that you're not tossing plastic bottles into the landfill every single day. Get something of metal bottle, a recyclable bottle, something that you can drink from that you will carry with you throughout the day and sip on it. Steadily haul through the day even when you're not necessarily feeling thirsty. In fact, if you've waited until you feel thirsty, you've waited too long. You're already starting to feel dehydrated. If you've gotten to the point of feeling thirst. So don't do that. So carry the water bottle with you and fill it from the water fountain from a water dispenser. Even good old tap water as long as you know for sure that your area has clean, uncontaminated water coming from the tap. If you don't like the taste of plain water, uh, go ahead and get a little packet of the non-caloric taste crystals that you can put in your water. You can find just about any flavor you want. Um, don't add sugar, just get the, the non--sugar free, but add some taste to the water if you don't like the taste of water. Actually I've learned to like the taste of water. It's refreshing to me. But I also balance out water with green tea throughout the day. Non-calorie, green tea. If you're going to be exercising, drink extra before the workout, have a bottle handy during the workout, and drink extra after the workout because the workout, if it's strenuous enough and causes you to sweat, will be uh, causing you to become more dehydrated. So take care of yourself during your workouts. In the afternoon. If you start to feel hungry and you have this urge to go to the vending machine for a sweet or salty snack, drink water first and see if that doesn't take away that urge for something to eat. It's very likely that that hunger feeling is really triggered by your being thirsty. And finally, as I've already indicated, you need to drink at equal intervals throughout the day. And in order to avoid going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which interrupts your sleep, which I will talk about it, and another episode, you might want to stop your intake an hour or an hour and a half before you go to bed. So those are my best tips, strategies, suggestions for how to stay hydrated through the day to help you to feel more resilient, more in control of your emotions, and better able to handle the day-to-day stress that's going to be coming at you full force every day simply because you've got the privilege of living in the world at this particular point in time in history. That's it for now. Do please subscribe to the channel if you found this episode useful, check out the previous episodes or check out the podcast, uh, at Teachers In Transition. Uh, subscribe to that. Comment on that. Share it with your friends. I would love to have you join my group and let me know what questions you may have that you'd like for me to answer in future episodes regarding either job transition and career change or stress management and managing your stress more proactively. I'm kitty boy, not with Teachers in Transition, and I hope you'll come back next week for today though. That's it. Have a wonderful rest of your week. So there you have it; an episode of Teachers in Transition. I hope you enjoyed the information, and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to Teachers in Transition so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions, as well, so email me at kittyboitnott@boitnottcoaching.com. Kitty Boitnott: If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. I'm Kitty Boitnott, and this is Teachers in Transition.