I Don't Have Time for Another Recovery Program: Addressing a Common Objection

It's a Sunday evening in late October. There's a stack of essays on the kitchen table, tomorrow's lesson still needs a closing activity, and the family group text about next weekend has been sitting unanswered since Friday.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, you remember the article a friend sent you about retraining the nervous system to get rid of chronic pain. It sounded promising…it also sounded like a commitment. So you did what any reasonable person with no time to spare would do: you bookmarked it for later.

Later has a way of not showing up.

If there’s something about that scene that feels familiar, this article is for you. The most common objection I hear about this work, from educators especially, is five words long: I just don't have time. I take that objection seriously, and I think it deserves a real answer rather than a pep talk. So let's look at it honestly, starting with where your time is going right now.

A Completely Reasonable Objection

I want to be clear that I'm not going to argue you out of being busy. You've already given lots of time to this problem: PT appointments, specialist visits, MRIs and X-rays, waiting rooms, and follow-ups that turned into more follow-ups.

Some of it helped a little, or for a while, and all of it took hours that you didn't have. The thought of adding one more thing to a schedule that's already stretched from first bell to lights out...I understand the eye roll.

Teaching doesn't leave slack in the day. There's no gap between third period and lunch duty where a recovery practice conveniently fits. So instead of asking how to squeeze more in, I'd like to ask a different question: how much time are your symptoms already taking?

The Hours That Never Show Up on Your Calendar

Chronic symptoms keep two sets of books. The first set is visible: appointments, calls with the insurance company, the occasional personal day for a procedure. Those hours are easy to count, and they're probably the ones you thought of when you read the title of this post.

The second set is where a whole other time expenditure happens. The morning assessment before your feet hit the floor, when you take inventory and predict what kind of day it's going to be. The extra planning before you agree to any kind of plans, like whether the restaurant has decent chairs, whether the field trip involves hours of standing, whether you can leave the reunion early if you need to. Or the adjustments during class, such as shifting your weight, perching on the edge of the desk, or calculating how many minutes until you can sit. And then there's the evening research, one more internet search that starts with a symptom and ends 40 minutes later in a really alarming place.

None of that time appears on your calendar, and all of it costs you.

I know that second set of books intimately. During my own year of symptoms, I was seeing specialists, trying therapies, and enduring diagnostic tests, but the appointments turned out to be the smallest expense. The Google spirals, the monitoring, the constant background question of what is wrong with me... that consumed more of my attention than my job did. Even the better days cost me time, because I spent them bracing for the next flare. Every spare minute was already spoken for, and my symptoms were eating them up.

Let's look at this through an analogy: chronic symptoms run like an app in the background of your phone. Nothing shows on the screen. But the battery drains all day, and by evening you're at 15 percent and can't explain why.

There's a neurological reason I bring up this pattern, beyond the lost hours. Pain science has established that the brain produces pain when it perceives threat, and vigilance is itself a threat signal. When you monitor symptoms all day, your brain reads the monitoring as confirmation that something dangerous is happening. That keeps the alarm system on high alert, which produces more symptoms to monitor, which invites more monitoring.

The time you spend managing the problem becomes part of what maintains it. That loop is hard to see from the inside, and it took me a long time to spot it in myself.

The Math Looks Different From Here

Once you see both sets of books, the time objection starts to shift. The practices involved in this work are small: a few minutes of observation, a brief writing exercise, a short conversation with your own nervous system when symptoms flare. Most of what I teach fits inside the time you're already losing to symptom management, because it gradually replaces the managing rather than stacking on top of it.

The practice replaces the moment you'd otherwise spend bracing, monitoring, or searching. For a teacher, that might be two minutes in the car before you walk into the building, or the passing period you currently spend strategizing how to survive fourth period, or 10 minutes in the evening that would have gone to "Dr. Google." The time already exists in your day. What changes is how you’re spending that time.

Redirecting Time You've Already Committed

A challenging mindset can take hold after enough busy seasons and disappointing treatments. It's a mindset that says: I'll deal with this over the summer, when things calm down.

It sounds sensible, but that app running in the background doesn't wait for summer, and a sense of calm rarely arrives on schedule. The most workable moment to start is inside a normal, imperfect, overloaded week, because that's exactly the kind of week your nervous system needs to learn it can feel safe in.

Recovery from neuroplastic symptoms requires modest amounts of the time and attention your symptoms are already claiming, redirected toward something that closes the pesky background app instead of feeding it.

One Thing to Try This Week

Pick one school day and run a loose audit. Keep a sticky note on your desk or a note open on your phone, and each time your symptoms take a bite of your time or attention, make a tally mark: the morning inventory, a flare you had to manage between classes, a web search you fell into after dinner. Don't worry about specific details, and rough counting is fine.

Give this a try without judging what you find. The total is the time you've already been working with, but you now have a real sense of just how much time that is. Most people are surprised by the number, and it turns out that it's good news: it shows how much time and attention become available as symptoms loosen their grip. That time is yours to reclaim.

A Five-Day Starting Point (Minutes, Not Hours)

I built my free mini-course, One Thing a Day, for exactly the person this post describes.

It's five short emails over five days, each with one practice that takes 10 minutes or less, designed for educators whose schedules have no time to spare. You can read each one in the time it takes your coffee to cool.

You can sign up right here.

The pattern your nervous system has learned took time to build, and unwinding it will take some time too. But the hours it asks for are mostly hours you're already giving up.

Recovery is possible, and it can start inside the life you're living right now, regardless of how high that stack of papers waiting to be graded may be.

And if you're experiencing some skepticism, you're in good company. This whole approach is built for people who need things to make sense before they try them.

Wishing you good health and quick healing.

References

Hashmi JA, Baliki MN, Huang L, Baria AT, Torbey S, Hermann KM, Schnitzer TJ, Apkarian AV. Shape shifting pain: chronification of back pain shifts brain representation from nociceptive to emotional circuits. Brain. 2013 Sep;13 (Pt 9):2751-68. doi: 10.1093/brain/awt211. PMID: 23983029; PMCID: PMC3754458.

Kross E, Berman MG, Mischel W, Smith EE, and Wager TD, Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain, Proc. Natl. Acad.

Sci. U.S.A. 108 (15) 6270-6275, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1102693108 (2011).