Teaching can be an emotionally exhausting profession, thus mechanisms that protect teachers from feeling emotionally overextended need to be investigated. In two studies, we examined the indirect role teacher-student relationships have on teachers' level of emotional exhaustion through teachers' experiences of enjoyment and anger. In the first, we used a latent path analysis to examine the indirect effect of teacher-perceived (N = 266) teacher-student-relationships on teachers' emotional exhaustion in a cross-sectional design. In the second study, we extended these findings to a longitudinal design that utilized student perceptions and replicated the indirect effect of teacher-student relationships on teachers' (N = 69) emotional exhaustion using student (N = 1643) perceptions of teacher-student relationships. The results from both studies indicated that high quality teacher-student relationships help protect teachers from being emotionally exhausted through increasing the amount of enjoyment and decreasing the amount of anger they experienced in the classroom.