Why Touching Base With What You Love Keeps You Truly Alive
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that teachers know well. It's not just tiredness — it's the feeling of having given so much of yourself across a day that by the time you reach the car park, you're not entirely sure who you are outside of the role.
You drove to work as a person with interests, relationships, and a inner life. You return home as someone who marked thirty essays, managed a meltdown in period three, attended a staff meeting, and fielded emails that probably could have been a memo.
Over time, this kind of depletion doesn't just feel heavy. According to the science of the nervous system, it is heavy — physiologically, measurably so.
And one of the most powerful antidotes is also one of the most overlooked: deliberately returning your attention to the things you genuinely love.
What Happens to Your Nervous System Under Chronic Stress
To understand why this matters, it helps to understand what chronic stress actually does — not just psychologically, but physically.
Psychiatrist and researcher Stephen Porges developed what's known as Polyvagal Theory — a framework for understanding how our autonomic nervous system responds to threat, safety, and connection. In simple terms, the theory describes a hierarchy of three states:
Ventral vagal — safety and connection. This is the state we're in when we feel genuinely at ease. We're socially engaged, emotionally present, curious, and regulated. Our heart rate variability is high, our voice is expressive, and we're capable of nuanced thinking and warm connection.
Sympathetic activation — fight or flight. When threat is perceived — real or imagined — the nervous system mobilises. Heart rate rises, attention narrows, and the body prepares for action. This state is useful in genuine emergencies. In a classroom, it becomes a chronic background hum.
Dorsal vagal — shutdown and collapse. When stress is prolonged and overwhelming, the nervous system can slip into a kind of protective numbness. Energy drops. Motivation fades. Meaning drains away. This is the state that looks like burnout.
Many teachers, particularly those who have been in the profession for years without adequate support, cycle between sympathetic activation and dorsal shutdown without ever spending enough time in the ventral vagal state — the one that actually allows them to feel like themselves.
The Biology of "What You Love"
Here's what's remarkable: positive emotional states aren't just nice to have. They are, in the language of the nervous system, signals of safety.
When you genuinely experience appreciation, love, joy, curiosity, or connection — not as a performance, but as an authentic felt sense — your nervous system registers something important: you are not in danger right now. And in response, the ventral vagal system activates. Heart rate variability rises. The body softens. Cognitive flexibility increases.
This is why the HeartMath Institute builds positive emotional cultivation directly into its coherence training. Their research has found that deliberately evoking feelings of appreciation or care — not just thinking about them, but feelingthem in the body — can shift heart rhythm patterns toward coherence within minutes.
In a large-scale study of nearly 1.8 million HeartMath Inner Balance sessions, positive emotional states like peacefulness and happiness were consistently associated with higher, more stable coherence scores. Negative states — anxiety, frustration, anger — corresponded with disordered, incoherent rhythm patterns.
Your emotional state and your physiology are not separate things. They are continuously shaping each other.
What "Touching Base" Actually Means
This isn't about toxic positivity — pretending everything is fine when it isn't. It isn't about suppressing the hard parts of the job. Teachers deserve to have the difficulty of their work acknowledged, not glossed over.
What it is about is building a deliberate practice of returning — regularly and intentionally — to what genuinely animates you.
That might be:
The student who finally understood something today
The walk you take at the weekend along a particular stretch of coast
A piece of music that has always moved you
The people who know you well
A creative pursuit that exists entirely outside of your role
A moment of stillness first thing in the morning before the day begins
These aren't indulgences. They are, in the most literal neurological sense, regulation tools. They bring the nervous system back to the ventral vagal state — the place from which genuine teaching, genuine connection, and genuine presence become possible.
The Research Behind Coming Alive
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build Theory offers another lens on this. Positive emotions, she found, don't just feel good in the moment — they literally broaden our thinking and build lasting psychological resources. Joy expands the range of actions we consider. Curiosity opens us to new information. Love strengthens social bonds. And these resources accumulate over time, creating what she describes as an "upward spiral" of wellbeing.
Crucially, this isn't just psychological. Fredrickson and her colleagues have found that positive emotions are associated with improved vagal tone over time — meaning that regular experiences of genuine positive feeling appear to strengthen the very autonomic pathways that support regulation, resilience, and health.
You don't stay alive by grinding harder. You stay alive by tending to what makes you feel alive.
A Small Practice to Try
If you'd like to bring this into your week, try this brief practice — it takes less than five minutes and can be done anywhere:
Find a quiet moment — morning coffee, a lunch break, the car before you walk inside.
Bring to mind something or someone you genuinely appreciate. Not something you should appreciate — something that actually lands in your chest when you think of it.
Breathe slowly — in for about 5 seconds, out for about 5 seconds. Keep your attention on that feeling of appreciation as you breathe.
Stay with it for three to five minutes. Let the feeling be real, not performed.
This is, in essence, the core HeartMath coherence practice. It sounds simple because it is. But the physiological effects — on heart rhythm, on autonomic balance, on how you move into the rest of your day — are measurable and meaningful.
In My Research
One of the things I observe in my sessions with teachers is how quickly this shift can happen. Within minutes of beginning a guided breathwork or heart-focus practice, the HeartMath Inner Balance sensor shows a measurable move toward coherence. Participants often report feeling "lighter," "more like themselves," or simply "able to breathe again."
That last phrase is telling. For many of us under sustained stress, breathing — really breathing — becomes something we have to consciously return to. It shouldn't be that way. But the good news is that the return is always available.
Touching base with what you love is not a luxury saved for weekends or holidays. It is a daily act of nervous system maintenance. And it may be one of the most important things you do.
A Gentle Reminder
Life isn’t about waiting for the big moments.
It’s about touching base—again and again—with the things that make you feel whole.
For me, that’s love, nature, music, movement, laughter, and stillness.
For you, it might be something completely different.
But whatever it is—don’t forget it.
✍️ Reflective Journaling Prompt
Take 10 quiet minutes for yourself and explore these questions:
What are the small moments that make me feel most alive?
When was the last time I felt truly joyful and at ease? What was I doing?
Which activities or people leave me feeling nourished rather than drained?
What is one thing I can do this week—just for me—that would bring me joy?
Write freely. No pressure. Just let your heart answer.
✅ Your Free “What Makes Me Happy” Worksheet
I’ve created a simple printable worksheet to help you:
Reflect on the things that truly light you up
Map out small, doable ways to include them in your week
Keep your “happiness touchstones” visible and easy to return to
✨ Click here to download your free worksheet.
Print it out, keep it on your fridge, in your journal, or on your desk as a gentle reminder to always return to what matters most.
This Week’s Invitation
Write your own “What Makes Me Happy” list.
Choose one thing and make time for it this week—even if it’s just 10 minutes.
Notice how it shifts the way you feel.
Because your happiness isn’t a luxury.
It’s a necessity.
👉 Next Week on the Blog
In the next post, I'll be exploring micro-moments of joy — the small, often overlooked experiences that research suggests can have an outsized impact on teacher wellbeing. Because sometimes it isn't the grand gestures that restore us. Sometimes it's the tiny ones.
Steve Carter is a Teacher Wellbeing Officer and PhD researcher based on the Gold Coast, Australia. His research examines the impact of heart coherence practices on stress and nervous system regulation in teachers.
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