On a Scale of 1–10: How Bad Is Your Teaching Pain Right Now?

Are you a teacher who feels constantly stressed, exhausted, or overwhelmed—but can’t quite explain why it feels so heavy?

In this episode of Teachers in Transition, Vanessa Jackson uses a familiar question—“On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is your pain?”—to explore how teachers slowly normalize burnout, emotional overload, and chronic stress without realizing how much it’s costing them.

Drawing from her own post-surgical experience and decades in education, Vanessa explains why constant strain distorts perception, why “familiar” doesn’t mean “fine,” and how teachers often minimize both their pain and their professional value.

This episode gives language to what teachers are experiencing to help them think clearly, reclaim energy, and make informed decisions about what comes next.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why chronic stress and burnout are hard to quantify—especially for teachers
• How constant emotional and cognitive load shifts your internal “pain scale”
• The Energy Tax Check: a simple question to identify what’s draining you now and later
• Why teachers unconsciously subtract from their own experience and accomplishments
• How to “add the two points back” when describing your work on a resume or in interviews
• What it really means to seek a role with sustainable workload and room for growth

Whether you’re actively job searching, quietly exploring career options outside the classroom, or simply trying to survive another semester, this episode will help you stop second-guessing yourself and start trusting your internal data again.

Because living with something every day doesn’t make it small; it makes it familiar. And familiarity is not the same thing as fit.

🔑 Keywords & Topics

Teacher burnout • career change for teachers • leaving teaching • teacher stress • education burnout • teacher career transition • transferable skills for teachers • job search for educators • emotional exhaustion • work-life balance in teaching

CONNECT WITH VANESSA

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
• 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
• 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
• 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
• 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy

 The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout

Transcript

Hi and welcome back to the Teachers in Transition podcast with me - Vanessa Jackson.  I taught the performing arts on the middle school level for 25 years, left teaching to work in corporate America in the world of contingent staffing.  And now I work for teachers – I help teachers find a way out of toxic educational environments so they can have the life they deserve. I’m really glad you’re here. I want to start by saying thank you to everyone who continued tuning in while I was out for a few weeks. I appreciate all the well-wishes and prayers and good thoughts while I recover. It feels good to be back at the mic with a new episode and a topic that’s been very present in my life for a long time – pain. Today on the podcast I am going to talk about my experiences with the pain scale and how it applies to the life of a teacher. Then we have a hack to help you assess what you’re paying in energy taxes and a question to help you get some of that back, and we’ll finish up in our career transition and job search segment talking about how to use that pain scale math and rework it into your favor onto a resume.  

On a scale of one to ten, how bad is your pain?

Not the polite answer.
 Not the answer that won’t make anyone else uncomfortable.
 Not the answer that you’ve learned will get quietly rounded down at the other end.

The real number—before you start doing math.

Because if you’ve ever lived with chronic pain, you know this: constancy messes with perception. And once you realize that, you start to notice how often you’ve been subtracting in other areas of your life, too.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I had surgery on January 12 where I had a full hysterectomy. The pathology on all that found (among other small things) something called adenomyosis.  If you haven’t heard of that, it’s the endometrial lining invading the muscles comprising the uterine wall. It’s rather painful.  
 
 And the funny thing is that I’d lived with this pain for decades and as it progressed, I can only liken it to that old story of boiling a frog by degrees.  In the last year I’d lost the ability to even walk my dogs around the block (or walk MYSELF around the block) or wait in line at the grocery store because of severe back pain. I’d had spinal procedures that went nowhere because it turns out that uterus and the lower back share the nerve network. And, as often happens, a woman’s pain is minimized. 
 
 So, surgery happened. And as I was awakening in the post-op recovery space, I was simply wanting to reposition, but felt like I was tied down by lots of little tubes and wires – which I was.  My tongue wasn’t fully working yet, but the lovely nurse immediately starting by asking where my pain level was. So I started doing the math on how badly I hurt, but I held my hand up indicating I needed a moment.  And she immediately took that for a response “OK!  A 4-5. That’s great!”  And I was back out.  Really, thinking back, it was probably a 7, but meh.  It hardly matters now. 

If you’ve ever had surgery, or honestly if you’ve ever sat in a doctor’s office explaining something that doesn’t show up cleanly on a chart, you know the question. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is your pain?” And you start doing the math. Every time I get asked that question, my brain does complex algebra. Because I know it’s not a neutral question. I know that number is going to be interpreted and filtered. I know there’s an invisible subtraction happening on the other end. A seven might get treated like a five. A five might get treated like “you’re fine.” So instead of answering honestly, I start calculating. “It’s worse than yesterday, but not as bad as that one time. I can still function, so maybe it’s a four. But if I say four, they won’t listen. So maybe I say it’s a six. But if I say six, are they going to think I’m exaggerating?” And suddenly I’m doing calculus just to pick a number. Which is absurd. This should not require a spreadsheet.  And when I have in the past refused to answer, they just keep asking. 

Here’s what surgery has made very clear to me: when pain is constant, you stop knowing how bad it actually is. You adapt. You normalize. You forget. Chronic pain becomes background noise, and your baseline quietly shifts without you noticing. You build a relationship with pain where it’s always present, but never fully acknowledged.

What’s been genuinely surprising to me is this: post-op, with my body having gone through very real physical trauma, my pain is lower than it was before surgery. Right out of the gate. That’s been a moment of reckoning. Because it means what I was living with before wasn’t fine. It wasn’t manageable. It was just familiar. And familiarity is a very convincing liar.

I want to pause here and say this, especially for anyone who feels nervous when conversations like this start heading toward career decisions. This episode is not about pushing you out the door. It’s not about telling you what choice to make. It’s about giving some language to experiences that are often minimized, dismissed, or quietly endured. Because once you can name something accurately, you can think about it. And once you can think about it, you have options.

This applies directly to what most teachers live with. Because the pain scale problem isn’t just a medical problem. It’s a human one, and it shows up constantly in education. Teachers don’t wake up one day  with their frustrations and burnout at a ten. Most teachers live at a five or six for so long that it feels normal. The Sunday dread becomes routine. The constant vigilance becomes professionalism. The emotional labor becomes “just caring.” The overload becomes “just part of the job.” And all the times that they just added that one little thing that only takes five minutes.  And over time, the question stops being “Is this sustainable?” and becomes “Why am I so tired if everyone else seems to be managing?”  Spoiler alert: other people aren’t really managing either. I wasn’t.  Sometimes I thought I was, but once I found myself working for job in corporate America, I realized I had just been barely hanging on by my fingernails in educational America.  I was using my breaks and summer months to catch up on Doctor’s Appointments and then to unclutter and deep clean what I hadn’t really been able to get to for the previous nine or ten months. There was no vacationing, and there wasn’t really a lot of joy, just survival.  I told myself that my schedule gave me more time with my kids, but my now-grown-up kids dispute that idea. 

Just like physical pain, constant emotional and cognitive strain distorts perception. It makes you second-guess yourself. It makes you compare your experience to someone else’s. It makes you minimize because you don’t want to be dramatic, difficult, or ungrateful. And eventually, it can make you lose your internal calibration and equilibrium entirely. You don’t know whether you’re overreacting or underreacting. You don’t know whether your exhaustion is reasonable or a personal failing. You don’t know whether what you’re feeling is a sign or just life.

Once you notice that you’ve ALSO been doing this pain-scale algebra for your levels of frustration and burnout  for your job, once you realize you’ve been subtracting before anyone asks because you don’t want to be dramatic, you start to see where else that habit shows up. And that’s where today’s quick hack comes in.

I like to offer quick hacks that save time and brain space so you can spend more of it on your exit strategy—or, honestly, just your wellbeing. These hacks can apply in the classroom, at home, or in the job search. Today’s hack is one I’ve been using a lot post-op, and it maps perfectly onto teaching and career transition. I call it the Energy Tax Check.

Here’s the question: is this costing me energy now, or is it compounding interest for later?

Surgery makes this obvious. If I overdo it today, tomorrow is harder. That’s not just a cost. That’s interest. It compounds. And when I started thinking about it this way, I realized how often we accept this compounding energy debt in our daily lives without naming it.

Staying late one more time because you don’t want to let anyone down might feel manageable in the moment, but if it leaves you depleted and resentful tomorrow, that’s interest on your energy debt. Absorbing other people’s emergencies, being the emotional anchor, being the fixer, the one who holds everything together—those things aren’t free. They create debt. And teachers aren’t exhausted because they’re weak. They’re stronger than any pother human in any other jobThey’re exhausted because they’ve been paying interest for years on responsibilities that were never supposed to be theirs on their own anyway!
 
 So write this question on sticky notes that you have in your car and in that little spot on your work laptop: Is this costing me energy now, or will it charge interest later?

This question saves brain space because it doesn’t require immediate action. You’re not fixing your whole life in one day. You’re noticing where energy compounds. You’re identifying what drains tomorrow as well as today. That awareness alone shifts how you make decisions. When you track something, you have the power to change it. 

And here’s where it ties back to the pain scale. If something is charging interest, I am going to propose that it is probably at least two points higher on the pain scale than you’ve been admitting. That’s the phrase I want you to hold onto today: add the two points back.

You might add them back to how tired you are. You might add them back to how hard this has been. You might add them back to how much responsibility you’re actually carrying. And yes, you might add them back to show how your skills show up when you’re job searching.

If you’re actively in the hunt, this matters immediately. One of the most consistent patterns I see at Teachers in Transition is how much they minimize before anyone asks them to. They subtract with pain. They subtract with burnout. And they absolutely subtract with their experience.  So as we roll into the career transition and job search segment, we are going to re-examine our resume bullet points and ADD THE TWO POINTS BACK.

On resumes, it looks like saying “supported” when you actually led. It looks like “helped with” when you actually owned. It looks like downplaying scope because you don’t want to sound dramatic. That’s the resume version of calling a seven a four. And it makes sense.  I mean, teachers are trained to anticipate the audience, soften language, and avoid conflict. We are taught to deflect our accomplishments and be humble.  That skill kept you safe in the classroom. But it can make you invisible in a job search and it’s far past time to stop that and add those points BACK!

Go bullet by bullet on your resume.  Really stop and think about what you are saying you’ve one. Read it and ask, “What have I subtracted here?”  Identify the “two points” that are missing. Then add them back.  Use a stronger verb.  You’re telling the truth at a professional volume. Not dramatic. Not defensive. Just accurate.

This also applies in interviews. You don’t need to trauma-dump or badmouth anyone (whoo!  That’s a WHOLE podcast episode… let me make a note right here to address that in the future…).  But you do need to be honest. You can say the pace became unsustainable. You can say the emotional load was too high. You can say you’re seeking a role where you can do high-quality work without chronic overload. That’s not negativity - that’s clarity.  Because here are some other truths: You are looking for a job where you can grow and advance  your career. Teaching doesn’t allow that. Not really. 

If working on your resume is something you’re in the middle of, make sure not to undersell yourself.  Living with something every day doesn’t make it small. It makes it familiar. And familiarity is not the same thing as fit.  I’ll also refer you to the Teachers in Transition Episode #274 from October 22 of 2025 where I talk in depth about how to write those bullet points. 

Notice where you’ve been paying interest. Notice where you’ve been minimizing. And gently, without judgment, add the two points back. Awareness doesn’t solve everything, but it creates options. And when you’re trying to move forward - even slowly - options matter.

I’m really glad to be back here with you. I’ll see you next time.  If you want to talk, please feel free to reach out – there’s a variety of ways to connect with me and you’ll hear my email and phone number in the outro music.  Bottom of Form

Take care and stop minimizing what hurts. 

👋 CONNECT WITH VANESSA

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
• 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
• 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
• 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
• 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy

That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques.  And I want to hear from you!  Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com  You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099. 

I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!