Transcription
Sometimes you just feel a lack of drive, a lack of zest or motivation, and it's really difficult to even begin a task in the first place. What if what you do while you're not working is actually the number one determinant of your success at work? Now, Marian DARS, co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective, and my partner Stephen Cutler, we have taught thousands of professionals how to access flow states at will.
Now picture this: it's 11 A.M., you're getting bombarded from seven different directions—Slack messages, emails, a call from a boss or employee. You're both under-slept and a little over-caffeinated, and feel that frenzied sense of fatigue and alertness leaving you frazzled. This is what some mornings are like. Well, if this sounds familiar, it may seem like fatigue or low motivation or chronic stress, but it's likely something different—what scientists refer to as allostatic load.
Now, allostatic load was coined by two researchers at the Rockefeller University, McEwen and Stellar, and allostatic load describes the physical wear and tear on your body and mind that occurs from constantly adjusting to life's pressures. If not properly managed, this allostatic load increases over time and spills over into subsequent days, accumulating in our nervous system and building up. Unfortunately, most of us never clear the allostatic load that accumulates.
You can think of allostatic load kind of in terms of working out. If you endlessly did bicep curls without giving your bicep adequate time to recover, eventually you'd hit a point where you literally would not be able to lift your water bottle off your desk. However, if you allow your bicep to recover between the workouts, over time your bicep will not just function optimally; it will be stronger than before. You'll be able to lift more weight off your desk than you could before.
Allostatic load works with your nervous system in a similar fashion. So when your allostatic load is high, it implies that your body and brain are in a constant state of adapting to new stress, with your system releasing more stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, altering your body's homeostasis and cognitive functions. In contrast, flow state is associated with a balance of certain neurotransmitters and hormones in the brain, like dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin, which promotes focus, creativity, and problem-solving abilities. This flow cocktail is disrupted under a heavy allostatic load. Your productivity suffers, like trying to drive with a parking brake on.
But long-term, it can be even more severe: health can deteriorate, career lifespans shorten, and big goals become increasingly impossible to reach due to physical limitations. So to perform at your peak and get into flow, clearing your allostatic load regularly—ideally every day—after happens. We're going to cover three ways that you can do this so you can elevate your productivity to new heights week after week and have your bicep grow stronger rather than getting to the point where you can't lift a bottle off the table.
This starts with transforming yourself from what we call an average knowledge worker, whose biology is constantly dragging them down and working against them, impeding their progress, into what we call an executive athlete—someone who uses their biology as a slingshot that propels them toward their boldest professional goals.
Now, a number of years ago, two researchers, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, wrote an amazing article in Harvard Business Review called "Corporate Athlete." I want you to consider this analogy from that article: the average professional athlete spends the majority of their time training and only a small percentage of their time actually competing—several hours a day at most. The typical professional, on the other hand, devotes almost no time to training, yet has to perform on demand 8, 10, 12 hours a day or more. Athletes enjoy several months of off-season; most executives are fortunate to get three or four weeks of vacation a year. The career of the average professional athlete spans seven years; the average executive, though, is expected to work 40 to 50 years.
This is a problem. The failure of professionals to train and recover like athletes ends up being a lid on performance. Conversely, the most elite performers treat themselves and think of themselves as executive athletes because they understand one crucial thing: energy is the lever point for performance. It's not the hours in the day, but the energy in those hours and how it's allocated that shapes our performance. That's because the number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy we have available is variable. Elite performance is grounded in the skillful mobilization of energy and the elegant back and forth between two states, which we're going to talk about: exertion and recovery.
Now let's learn how to channel your energy as an executive athlete. The first step is to raise the ceiling with recovery. Again, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz use this term "oscillation" to refer to a process of rhythmically moving between exertion and recovery. Think about the last time you had a heavy workout. You're grunting, you're sweating, you're feeling the burn; it feels like your muscles are bulging and growing right there on the gym floor. But in fact, the real muscle building happens later during recovery. This process is known as super compensation. When you stress a muscle through training, the muscle breaks down, and then after a recovery period, the capacity or the strength of that muscle increases.
However, if you continue to stress the muscle endlessly without a recovery period, there will be no increase in performance—just chronic damage. The reverse is also true: if you don't stress a muscle at all, your muscles will become increasingly weak over time; they'll atrophy, and you end up with limited capacity or strength. In both cases, though, the enemy is not the stress that you're putting on your muscles; the enemy is what Tony and Jim call "linearity," which is the failure to oscillate between these two states of exertion and recovery.
Now here's the key: recovery determines the limits of your exertion, which is why it's as important as the work itself. When exerting to perform optimally, you need to systematically increase your exposure to stress through exertion and then enter these periods of deep recovery, from which you then emerge super compensated, rejuvenated, and charged up with expanded capacity—the equivalent of a stronger bicep after the recovery period.
Now that you know that you should be oscillating between exertion and recovery, and that 50% of what is most important to your professional success is the recovery side of the coin, how do you do it? Because you know what exertion looks like—that's just your work, whatever you've got to do later today or tomorrow, whatever tasks you have on your to-do list. But how do you actually recover, and what even is it?
That brings us to step two, which is recovery over relaxation. Most of us fall into the trap of equating relaxation and recovery. You know, after a strenuous day at work, you recline on your couch and catch up on your favorite Netflix series. You might even pop open a beer or two. This kind of feels like recovery, but unfortunately, it's not; it's merely relaxation. At best, it's like putting a Band-Aid on a leaky pipe. It might stop the drip for a while, but it does nothing to fix the real underlying problem.
Relaxation feels good subjectively; it feels like we're recovering. But relaxation doesn't flush out the stress toxins that build up in your system, contributing to your allostatic load. It's not kick-starting your parasympathetic rest-and-digest system into action, and it's certainly not replenishing the precious neurochemicals you've used up during the day while exerting and hopefully being in a flow state.
Active recovery, on the other hand, involves some activity that actively promotes healing and rejuvenation, both mental and physical. Now, when under stress, our bodies trigger the sympathetic nervous system—fight or flight—releasing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones help us focus and perform but can cause damage when levels are consistently high. So recovery methods activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which counteracts the stress response, promoting rest, digestion, and recovery. It clears out allostatic load and allows us to recharge.
This balance or oscillation between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity is key to preventing burnout and optimizing performance. Active recovery is kind of like the on-off switch, the interface to our nervous system that most professionals dream of but never find. They never learn how to click that switch. Active recovery is so important for flow that it's, in fact, non-negotiable. The final stage of the flow cycle, which includes struggle, release, flow, is recovery.
So how do you actually do this? How do you start to put active recovery into practice? Well, here's a list of active recovery protocols that we recommend, and let's walk through a few of these to give you some examples.
Breath work is one. Practices like the four-seven-eight breathing method and box breathing can help stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the body's relaxation response, which can decrease heart rate, lower blood pressure, and enhance cognitive function. One of the nice things about breath work is that a lot of people don't succeed with meditation because meditation is simple but not easy; it's complex. Whereas breath work involves running a certain breathing pattern, and if you do so, you will get the result. It's more bottom-up, a nervous system-based approach, and works great for that reason.
Now the next one is cold therapy. Cold exposure stimulates the production of norepinephrine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that can improve mood, alertness, and focus. It triggers vasoconstriction and vasodilation, which enhance circulation and recovery. Jumping in an ice bath after work, rather than relaxing in front of the TV, is going to do tremendous things.
A critical point: relaxation and recovery are distinct things. What actually results in really effective recovery can be not relaxing at all, like sitting in an ice bath, but high in recovery. You get out of that ice bath an hour later, and your nervous system, your allostatic load, is going to be lower, even though sitting in that ice bath was the least relaxing thing you could possibly imagine doing.
Now, heat therapy—regular sauna sessions or hot baths, massage, structural integration therapy, myofascial release, using tools like foam rollers or lacrosse balls to help alleviate muscle tension—again, something that results in recovery but doesn't necessarily feel relaxing as we're doing it. Meditation, which we talked about, is more challenging for most but can be a tremendous form of active recovery.
Exercise, in the form of the endorphin rush you get post-exercise, can be phenomenal for regulating the nervous system. Hiking and spending time in nature are amazing forms of active recovery. Dr. Andrew Huberman, a friend of the Flow Research Collective, and his research out of Stanford has shown that literally just looking at wide horizon lines in nature has a calming, soothing effect on the nervous system.
And then sleep. Sleep seems passive, but sleep's actually a highly active state. You're consolidating information that's been newly acquired, activation in your amygdala is being reduced, your glymphatic system is getting cleared out, and your muscles are being repaired. So even though sleep feels passive, it's very active.
But how do you know if one of these active recovery protocols is actually working for you? Maybe you're thinking, "Well, what about this other thing that I like to do? Is that active recovery? Does that count?" Well, there are two litmus tests to tell whether something is counting for your nervous system as active recovery.
The first one is an objective one, and this is actually using a metric called heart rate variability (HRV), which is a key indicator of stress and recovery balance in the body. If you're doing a certain active recovery protocol and your HRV is increasing over time, this is likely functioning as recovery for you.
Now the second litmus test is a subjective one, and this is that it gives you such a dramatic neurophysiological reset that it feels like you've had a mini vacation. One thing I always like to do is, in a long evening or a full day off, I stack a lot of these active recovery protocols together in one go, and then I come back into work on Monday with that "just back from holidays" feeling, where your nervous system is all smoothed out, you've kind of forgotten about the details of work and the intricacies of the day-to-day, and you're ready to hit it again.
So you want to be able to get that two-week vacation feel in hours with the right active recovery protocol. Now, if you're someone who loves the grind and you take pride in your ability to outwork others, I want you to know this: recovery is part of the work. Recovery gives you the optimal state within which you'll be able to perform your highest quality work.
If you're working late in the office on a Sunday, thinking you're getting ahead of the competition, the irony is that the exact opposite is likely happening. You'll be beaten by the person who is letting their nervous system level up on the Sunday with recovery protocols because they'll hit Monday morning with a superior nervous system to yours.
Peak performance comes down to out-oscillating others rather than outworking others. It's fast and deep recovery, fast and deep exertion, deep recovery, deep exertion again and again. That rapid oscillation is what signifies the winners. It may even be the case that the more hard-charging you are, the more you need active recovery because you are more likely to have an increased sympathetic nervous system.
If this sounds like you, the key is to overcompensate recovery. That means as you become more swamped, sleep more and recover more. The intuitive thing to do is to ditch recovery when things get really demanding and stressful so you can cram in more work, but this is completely backwards and counterproductive. Instead, as work piles up and deadlines loom, lean into the active recovery.
Schedule your active recovery routines similarly to how you would schedule work tasks. Bake them in every day. Take an hour. You might have daily practices that you do in the morning or in the evening for recovery, like breath work, sauna sessions, or taking an ice bath, or walking in nature.
Every week, you want to take a day where you stack these sorts of active recovery protocols. Maybe on that day, you go for a swim in the ocean, then do a workout, then go for a hike in nature, then have a nap, and then get a massage—something like that. Stack the day with active recovery protocols.
Every month, we want to do a three-day period fully dedicated to recovery, which ideally also includes a digital detox during this period, where each day we're filling our day with these active recovery protocols. Then, every quarter, you want to take a full 10 days—one week plus two weekends—to reset and have active recovery be the number one priority.
Finally, every year, you want to take that full two-week vacation for a complete reboot to clear all that allostatic load that's built up over the previous year.
Now, there's still one more piece to the puzzle for becoming the executive athlete, and this final piece is even more difficult than recovery—especially for ambitious professionals: live like a lion.
When you understand these first two pieces—that you need to be oscillating from exertion to recovery and that active recovery is the form of recovery you want, not passive recovery—then you start to be able to live like a lion. Because a lion is either sleeping with the pack or sprinting to kill its prey. When it's time to kill, they do it fast, then they return to recover.
You can work in the same way. View it as a ferocious sprint followed by exorbitant recovery. When you make work binary like this, you allow your nervous system to recalibrate so your output can reach previously unattainable levels.
It seems counter to what you often hear. You've been told to do more, faster—that the key to elite performance is about being able to fit more tasks into your day. But that doesn't work; that causes busyness without progress, and the result is reaching the end of a workday feeling drained, looking back, and realizing you only did a couple of hours of real work in the first place, with the rest of it just being low-value distraction, reactive work fracturing your attention and sapping your energy.
It's a terrible feeling, wasting away hours of our life in this mode of half-working, this gray zone, but not enjoying our lives either. So many people's careers get swallowed by this. Instead, executive athletes work in a binary fashion. They are more or less always in one of two states: either they're working with 100% intensity in sixth gear, or they're 100% switched off, unplugged, recovering deeply, and enjoying life.
They ruthlessly eliminate everything in between—fully on, fully off. That's it. That way, the next time you come back to push, you can push even harder than before. Until you integrate active recovery into your life, your limits remain unknown. The ceiling can go up and up and up.
If you want a cheat code for mastering this process so you can achieve peak performance daily, watch this video on the flow cycle, which talks about all the other elements beyond recovery and how to master them.