Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From "Stress, Hypervigilance, and Decision Fatigue: Teaching During Omicron" by Katy Farber, Education Week, 2022-01-24, so about halfway through the school year:

As teachers, we heard a lot about self-care, in suggestions to practice mindfulness, yoga, or gratitude. It was our responsibility as teachers to "self-care" our way through this pandemic. But better outcomes happen when we change systems. For example, teachers can't take "care" of ourselves unless we are given daily prep time or enough sick time to care for a family member that has to quarantine.

With the spread of omicron, the first week of the new year felt like a year. [...]

[...]

Before COVID-19, I sometimes struggled with simple decisions at the end of the teaching day, like what to make for dinner, what shampoo to pick. This is called decision fatigue. But now? The decisionmaker part of my brain is currently tapped out.

[...]

The hypervigilance continues well into the night with emails and texts. Close contacts. New cases. Changing plans. Substitute plans and shortages. New protocols. We nervously check our phones for news of cut pensions, wildly increasing COVID-19 cases, crowded hospitals. We try to sleep. But some nights, we can't turn our brains off because from the minute we got up to the minute we hit the bed, our nervous system was on high alert.

Nature helps. Meditation helps. Rest helps. It still feels like holding up a tsunami with our hands and a snorkel mask. We can only do it for so long.

And this is what I am experiencing in a highly vaccinated state in New England with strict mask requirements in schools. I cannot imagine how much worse this sense of dread, doom, and fear is in states where largely unvaccinated students and staff members are not wearing masks.