The recovery habits you need to build

A quick note before we get into the detail: at the end, I'm asking a small favour. It will take you less than two minutes and it will directly shape what I write about over the coming months. More on that below.

Not long ago, a coaching client told me she had taken a long weekend to recharge after a tough period at work. But when came back on the Tuesday she felt just as depleted as she had been when she finished work on Thursday.

I asked her how she had spent the weekend. She said she had spent most of Saturday running her children around to different activities while her husband was working. On Sunday, she managed to go out for a long walk but spent the whole to time worrying about a difficult conversation she needed to have with a team member. And then on the Monday, she logged in to check her inbox to see what ‘nightmares’ (her word) might be waiting for her on Tuesday morning.

Can you see the pattern? No wonder she had not recovered. She had barely even stopped.You might even recognise this. I know I do, and it is probably more common than most managers admit.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Here are four practices that can help change it.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, writing in the Harvard Business Review, drew the comparison between high performers in the sporting world and those who are expected to be high performers in the corporate world. Elite athletes train hard for four to five hours a day and spend the rest of their time in deliberate recovery. Executives and leaders are expected to perform at high intensity for ten to twelve hours a day, often with no formal recovery structure at all.

"The real enemy of high performance," Loehr and Schwartz write, "is not stress. It is the absence of disciplined, intermittent recovery." For them, high performance is (and is sustained by) a disciplined rhythm of stress followed by deliberate recovery. They call this oscillation, and it is why elite performers structure their days around recovery, not just output.

Research suggests the brain and body cycle between higher and lower arousal states approximately every 90 to 120 minutes. The standard response to those dips is another coffee and a push through. The more effective one is a brief break that takes you genuinely out of task mode. This does not mean switching to a different task but into a something genuinely restorative.

When we purposefully carry out any activity, we direct our attention on the task at hand. It is this kind of ‘directed attention’ that contributes to our work performance. It enables us to focus on what we are doing and also on the real time feedback we receive as we’re doing it. This in turn allows us to adjust our performance as necessary and to stay on track. Unsurprisingly, though, prolonged directed attention leads to attention fatigue and prolonged periods of attention fatigue lead to diminished levels of work performance, productivity and ultimately burnout.

According to research by Stephen Kaplan, to genuinely restore directed attention capacity, the environment during a break needs four qualities: a sense of being away (psychological separation from what is depleting you), fascination (effortless, involuntary attention that requires no effort to sustain), extent (enough scope to constitute a genuinely different world for a moment), and compatibility (the environment supports what you actually want to do in it).

Natural environments reliably provide all four. The research on how natural environments restore cognitive performance is worth reading if you want to redesign your break habits. A phone-free walk through a park at lunch restores directed attention more effectively than scrolling news on a screen. A view of trees is measurably better for cognitive recovery than a blank wall.

What you do in your break matters as much as whether you take one.

Loehr and Schwartz describe a performance pyramid (above) that comprises four distinct energy capacities that together support sustainable leadership performance: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Each layer depends on the one below it. If your physical foundation is weakened, for example, everything above it weakens too.

This matters practically because recovery requires addressing all four layers, not just the most visible one. The physical foundation (sleep, nutrition, exercise, and recovery rhythms) is drained by the whole of your life, not just the demands of your role. The reserve drawn on by a difficult team conversation is the same one drawn on by a sleepless night worrying about a personal situation.

Recovery is not just about what happens at the end of the working day. It is a whole-system question. This is an important topic that requires separate consideration. So, I will revisit this in more detail in the next part of this series.

But, for now, the good news is that effective periods of recovery built into your daily activities can help restore your capacities across all four energy domains.

Prevention is easier than recovery. But burnout is often something you become aware of only in retrospect, once you are already dealing with it.

If that is true for you, start with the knowledge that you are ‘under-recovered’, but that you can gradually restore yourself. The research on how to confront burnout, explained below, can guide us.

But please be aware that I am focusing on what we can manage ourselves here, not on situations involving extended pathologies like depression or anxiety. If you have any suicidal thoughts when facing difficult circumstances, or you think you have an underlying mental health condition, you must seek help from your doctor or local support services.

Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory describes a resource loss spiral: once resources begin to deplete, exposure to further loss accelerates. The corollary is that resource-building works in the same compounding way.

Small, consistent investments begin to reverse the spiral. For example, you might focus on restoring a regular sleep routine, protecting one meaningful personal connection each week, or deliberately sparing time for one area of your role that stretches and energises you.

These do not need to be dramatic efforts; they just need to be genuinely helpful and repeated. This post on four practical actions to take when you feel overwhelmed is a good starting point if you are not sure where to begin.

In the research by Ladegard (2011), coaching has been shown to support recovery from occupational stress through two distinct pathways. First, it helps you build planning skills, which reduce how threatening the demands on you feel. Second, it builds self-awareness, enabling leaders to seek and accept support more effectively. Many burned-out leaders believe they should be coping alone. Coaching helps dispel that assumption.

Baker and Berenbaum (2007) add a useful refinement. The effectiveness of coping strategies depends on the individual's emotional clarity; their ability to identify and distinguish the different emotions they are experiencing.

For those with lower emotional clarity, working through what you are feeling (in writing, or in conversation with a trusted person like a coach) creates the internal space from which problem-solving can operate. For those with higher emotional clarity, moving directly to planning and structured problem-solving tends to be more effective. Knowing which approach fits you is itself a useful form of self-knowledge.

The leaders who sustain healthy high performance over years understand their own energy as a system. They know what drains it, what restores it, and how the whole of their life feeds into both. Designing your days with that understanding is what sustainable leadership requires.

You now have a framework some ideas for burnout prevention and restoration. The next step is being deliberative in your practice and intentional in protecting your investments in recovery from everything that will get in the way. We’ll look further at this next time.

I've been writing Self Determined Leaders for a while now, and I genuinely don't always know whether what I'm covering is what you most need.

So I've put together a few quick questions — about where you are as a leader, what challenges you're dealing with, and the topics you'd find most useful. It will only take a couple of minutes to complete.

Your answers will go directly into how I plan future issues. If there's a topic you've been waiting for me to cover, this is the place to say so.