“Rest is not work’s adversary. Rest is work’s partner.” — Alex Pang
Hi Friends,
For the past few months, I’ve been berating myself for failing to post this blog as planned.
I promised myself earlier in the year to make consistency my tip-top priority. I would stick to writing my blog twice monthly at minimum.
Sure, I was regaining my footing after spending two months in Mexico, then taking on more client work, but is there really an excuse? I made a note on my phone to reflect on this unresolved friction playing in the background:
“What’s up with the blog?! Last one sent on Feb 21. 🤔 What’s that about? Can I intentionally take breaks or re-pace instead of falling off completely?”
Which prompted me to take the advice I often give to high performing executives and entrepreneurs, we need to think about breaks the way that athletes think about breaks, which is that they’re part of our performance, not a deviation from the performance.
So often we say, “Oh, I’m taking a break. But, I’m kind of wimping out here,” when in fact breaks and recovery are foundational to our performance.
Aha! My failure was in not planning a blog break, thinking I could just power through week after week as people I admire do, even when my inspiration well is dry.
Which inspired me to do a little research on what makes for an effective break:
- Breaks in motion are more restorative than sedentary breaks
- Outside is better than being inside, bonus if you’re in nature
- Breaks with others are more restorative than solo ones
- The best breaks are fully detached from devices
Me and the dogs enjoying a break during the Fourth of July holiday.
Turns out, I’m in good company
I went down a rabbit hole after seeing that list above, and it turns out the research backs up something I tell my clients constantly. It’s just that I forgot to apply it to myself.
Researchers studying elite violinists (yes, the original “10,000 hours” study, the one everybody misquotes at dinner parties) found something that surprised even them.
The best performers weren’t the ones grinding the longest hours. They were the ones who napped more, slept closer to eight hours a night, and treated recovery as seriously as they treated their practice.
Not because they were soft. Because they knew rest was part of the skill, not a break from it.
There’s a flip side to that story too, and it’s the one that stung a little when I read it.
Athletes who train hard without building in real recovery don’t just plateau. They regress. There’s a name for it: overtraining syndrome. Performance keeps sliding even after they finally do rest, sometimes for weeks, because the debt had built up quietly while they were busy being “disciplined.” Up to 10% of elite endurance athletes deal with it at some point.
I read that and thought, huh, that’s exactly what a missed blog feels like. It’s not that I skipped one issue. It’s that I was quietly running a deficit for months, and pretending discipline was the same thing as sustainability.
It isn’t.
Your brain isn’t off, it’s just working differently
Here’s the part I find genuinely fascinating. When you stop focusing on a task, your brain doesn’t go quiet. A whole network lights up, the one responsible for daydreaming, wandering thoughts, and the loose associations that eventually become your best ideas.
Neuroscientists recently proved this isn’t just a coincidence. In one study, they temporarily interrupted that network in people’s brains and watched their creative output get measurably worse in real time.
Translation: the walk you take when you’re stuck isn’t procrastination. It’s the path to sustainable performance.
I can’t tell you how many of my best coaching insights, creative ideas, or “wait, that’s the real issue” moments with clients have shown up on a walk with the dogs or somewhere on a weekend adventure. Jill will tell you the same thing happens to her on a Tuesday afternoon hike to the river, right before a new retreat idea hits her.
We often treat this as luck. It’s not luck. It’s biology doing its job while we finally shut down and let it.
The break itself matters more than I thought
This is where the four bullets above came from, and it turns out they’re not just suggestions.
Not all breaks pull their weight equally. A short walk beats scrolling your phone at your desk. Studies on workday microbreaks found that low-effort work recovers with ten minutes off, but anything that actually taxed your brain needs more than a quick breather to bounce back.
And the “save it all up for one big trip” thinking is backwards. Newer research on break frequency found that people who take shorter breaks more often report better well-being and performance than people who hoard it all for one big annual trip.
Which, if you ask Jill and me, is basically the argument for weekend adventures and a couple of retreats per year instead of one big blowout vacation two years from now.
So here’s what I’m actually changing
I’m not going to pretend I’ve got some elegant new system, perfectly mapped out on a color-coded calendar. That’s just not how I roll.
What I am doing is giving myself permission for a more organic pace. Not a rigid twice-a-month cadence I have to hit or explain myself out of, but a rhythm that flexes with the season I’m in.
That might mean two issues a month. Or it might mean a longer gap. The work, and this blog, will be better with the breathing room.
If you’re a person who prides yourself on never missing a day, never taking a vacation, never stepping away from the thing you built, I’d gently ask you to consider that you might not be as disciplined as you think. You might just be quietly accumulating a debt that will eventually have to be paid.
The elite performers already figured this out. They just don’t post about their naps.
Live bravely,
Michael
What is your favorite way to take a break? How do you plan for them, and how do you know when you’re overdue?
