Most of What You're Worried About Is Temporary

Think back to last November. What were you worried about?

I tried that this week. I came up mostly empty.

The word of the day is temporary.

This one is also a short pep talk video, about four minutes, if you'd rather listen on the drive home.

Why this week feels permanent

Whatever's sitting on your chest this week. The parent email. The lesson that fell apart in third hour. The stack you haven't touched, or the meeting tomorrow that you're already rehearsing in your head.

Most of it is temporary.

It feels permanent because it's right in front of you, and that's just how brains work. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert at Harvard and Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia have a name for it: the impact bias. When we picture how a bad thing is going to feel, we usually get the direction right (yes, this will feel bad) and then overshoot on how hard it will hit and how long it will hang around. In one of their lab studies, people who were turned down for a job felt much better 10 minutes later than they had predicted.

Ten minutes. Not ten weeks.

Our minds are better at bouncing back than we give them credit for. We just don't see the bounce coming, so we plan our whole evening around a feeling that's already on its way out.

One question, tonight

Pick the heaviest thing you're carrying this week. Only one.

Ask yourself: will I remember this next November?

If the answer is no, set it down. Just for tonight. You can pick it back up tomorrow if you really want to. (Most of the time, you won't want to.)

If the answer is yes, good. That's one of the real ones, and now you know where your energy goes. Put it there.

That's the whole practice. It takes less time than finding your keys, and you can do it in the parking lot before you start the car.

Where this falls apart

Not everything is temporary, and I'd be lying if I told you it was. A kid you're worried about. A colleague who's going through something hard. Those stay with you, and they should. The question isn't there to talk you out of caring about them.

It's for the other stuff. The replays. The thing you said in the hallway that nobody else even noticed.

And if you run the question and the answer keeps coming back "yes, I'll remember this" for everything on your plate, pay attention to that. It may not mean you're bad at letting go. It may mean you're carrying too much, and that's worth saying out loud to someone you trust.

This sits in the Time, Energy & Emotional Regulation part of my STRONG framework: calm strength, and putting your attention where you can actually do something. The Stoics were writing about that idea a couple thousand years before anyone ran a study on it. It's still worth practicing today.

The good stuff is temporary too

Something 28 years in the classroom has taught me. The good moments don't last either. The kid who finally gets it. The class that laughs at exactly the right moment (for once, at a joke I meant to make).

They pass just as fast as the bad ones. Which is the whole reason to catch them when they show up.

I just had a student volunteer to teach the class about the Law of Conservation of Energy, unprompted. She prepared some slides and ran the show. That's easily in my "top ten good moments" for this school year.

So let the heavy stuff pass. Catch the good stuff on its way by.

If the drive home is where your replays get loudest, I wrote about that in Teachers Beware - The Drive Home. And if the whole week feels like too much, The Deload Week is about taking something out of the pack on purpose.

If you want more of this, The STRONG Teacher 4H Reflection is free on my site: https://www.jeremyajorgensen.com/the-strong-teacher-4h-reflection/. Four questions, five minutes, and you stop replaying the day. It comes with the Wednesday newsletter.

Temporary. That's the word.

What's one thing you worried about at school this week that turned out fine? Tell me in the comments.