A More Restorative School Holiday: OT Tips for Educators
As the school holidays get closer, it’s important to take time to unwind so you can return feeling refreshed and ready once the new term rolls around.
You don’t need to become a brand-new person by the new term. But it is worth recharging intentionally, because teaching places a load on the body and brain.
The OT Lens
Occupational therapists often use the Person-Environment-Occupation (PEO) model. In simple terms, it means how someone functions isn’t only about them as a person. It’s also about the environments they navigate each day, and the demands placed on them.
Teaching environments are very demanding. The day is full of constant transitions, interpersonal interaction, noise, visual clutter, fluorescent lighting, competing priorities, playground duty, and behavioural regulation.
They spend their entire days processing information and responding to everyone without meaningful pauses.
So when the holidays arrive, the body doesn't always just relax. Sometimes all the stress of the year catches up at once, and functioning becomes hard. That's what happens when a system that's been running at capacity finally gets the signal to stop.
And restoration works better when it helps counterbalance those demands, rather than recreate them.
Rest isn’t one thing
When you think about rest, you often picture passive rest like sleeping in, lying on the couch, watching TV, or scrolling.
Sometimes that’s what your body needs.
But teaching drains more than physical energy. Over a term, educators carry sensory load, cognitive load, emotional load, and constant social demand. That’s why you can spend several days “doing nothing” and still feel tired.
Your holidays don’t have to look a certain way
They might mean travelling with family, heading somewhere quieter for a few days, protecting slow mornings, cancelling unnecessary plans, getting through a personal to-do list, or taking some long overdue “me” time.
Teachers’ lives outside the classroom are different, and so are their needs for rest. The most restorative holidays are less about doing what rest is “supposed” to look like, and more about noticing what you need more of and what you’ve already had enough of.
After a long school term, it’s easy to default to the kinds of rest you’re already overloaded with, while missing the kinds your body needs. So whatever these holidays look like for you, here are a few simple tips to help you slow down, reset, and make the most of your time away from the classroom.
The Categories of Rest
Sensory Rest
Schools are sensory-heavy spaces.
Even calm classrooms are full of layered sensory input: overlapping conversations, chairs scraping across the floor, fluorescent lights, bells, air-conditioning noise, crowded visual spaces, and the unpredictability that comes with working around children all day.
After a busy term, that sensory load accumulates whether you notice it or not.
Sensory rest means reducing incoming stimulation long enough for your nervous system to calm down. That might look like:
- sitting in silence instead of automatically putting on a podcast
- choosing low lighting at home
- taking an early walk along Linear Park without headphones
- spending a quiet weekday morning at the Botanic Garden
- grabbing coffee before the morning rush
- reducing background noise where you can
An OT tip here: if silence initially feels uncomfortable or “too quiet,” that doesn’t mean it isn’t helping. It may simply mean your body has become used to constant input. The goal is to give your system less to process.
Cognitive rest
Teachers make hundreds of micro-decisions every day under pressure and time constraints.
Who needs support first. Whether to change the lesson plan on the spot. Which parent email needs responding to immediately. Whether the class has enough focus left for the activity you planned.
When the mental load has been constant, your brain stays in decision-making mode by default. So the same pattern continues on breaks:
“What should I cook?”
“What should I watch?”
“Should I reorganise the house?”
“Should I make this break productive?”
While sensory rest is about reducing input, cognitive rest is about reducing decisions. That’s why familiar, low-pressure activities can feel strangely restorative. Things like gardening, walking the same route, baking a recipe you know well, rewatching a comfort series, enjoying family rituals, watching films, reading for enjoyment, or doing simple hobbies.
These activities help because they give your decision-making system a break. The brain needs fewer choices, not more.
Social rest
Teaching is profoundly social work.
Even if you enjoy being around people, spending the day constantly responding, supporting, explaining, supervising, and adapting takes energy. Teachers spend most of the day "on" for students, parents, and colleagues.
During the holidays, you don't need more connection right away. You need temporary relief from social performance.
Social rest doesn’t always mean isolation. It can mean being alone, and it can also mean being around people who don’t require anything from you. People you can be quiet around.
Social rest can be:
- having a solo coffee before everyone wakes up
- sitting by the beach with one close friend
- declining one more “catch up before school goes back”
The OT-informed approach is to notice whether your social plans feel restorative or performative. Your body usually knows the difference.
Active rest
Active rest is different from exercise.
After the intensity of the school term, it can be tempting to launch into “reset mode”: intense workouts, full calendars, and pressure to make every day count.
But that push tends to add another demand onto a system that's already depleted.
Active rest is gentler than that. It’s movement that helps the body process stress instead of perform through it. It might be walking, swimming, stretching, slow bike rides, pottering in the garden, or wandering a weekend market. These are casual movements without metrics attached.
Think of this as restoration before replenishment. First, the body slows down. Then energy has a chance to return.
Movement can help you feel more regulated, but only if it still feels like rest.
Passive rest
This is often the category of rest teachers think of first; the sleep-in, the couch time, the TV, and the physical stillness. And it’s fine. Teachers are physically exhausted, and there's no shame in being a couch potato over break. That rest is earned.
But once the body has had some physical rest, more couch time may not address sensory overload, cognitive fatigue, or social depletion. You might rest for days and still feel foggy, especially if that rest comes with endless scrolling.
Passive rest still matters. But it helps to notice when it starts becoming more input in disguise.
Why “doing nothing” can backfire
Scrolling feels like rest because you’re physically still. But your brain may still be working hard.
It’s still processing rapid visual input, constant novelty, emotional information, decision-making, background noise, and interruption. So your sensory and cognitive systems may never fully slow down.
The nervous system doesn’t always interpret “inactive” as restorative.
This is why an hour lying quietly in the backyard can feel more refreshing than three hours online. It’s also why teachers feel better after a simple walk than after an entire afternoon on the couch with their phone.
Notice what helps you feel calmer, clearer, or more rested afterwards, and consider making more room for that during your break.
Before you add anything else to your break, ask yourself: What kind of load have I been carrying most, and what kind of rest would help offset it?
Teachers deserve more than survival mode between terms.
And while no school holiday can fully erase the demands educators carry across the year, genuine restoration can make returning feel less like bracing for impact and more like coming back with some reserve left in the tank.
At MAOT, this thinking shapes how we approach occupational therapy every day. We look at the relationship between people, environments, and the demands placed on them. It’s the same lens we bring to our work with NDIS participants, families, and school communities across Adelaide.
With clinics in Prospect, Mawson Lakes, and Morphettville, we’re here when your students need us. And we hope these holidays give you what you actually need, too.
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