Why Rest and Recovery is Essential
Hormesis, hypertrophy and nature’s need for growth and rest
The Power of Rest
“Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers.”
Seneca’s “On Tranquility of Mind” essays aren’t quoted as much as other writings, but they are essential reading for leaders who often equate rest and recovery with laziness. Seneca believed a strong mind came as a result of rest, and called time in nature essential fuel.
I was on a call this week with a friend/client who is always-on, trying to run teams and care for their family, walk the dog, volunteer on the side, go to the basketball game., be there for their aging parents–
…and somewhere along the way he forgot about his needs.
When I was working on the Johnson & Johnson Caregiving initiative we used to always say “If you’re in a room running out of oxygen, you have to put your mask on first, before putting anyone else’s mask on.”
If you pass out you can’t help yourself or anyone else.
What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger
Our bodies, and nature itself, is built to have cycles of growth and rest. The term hormesis describes how living things adapt and thrive after meeting a stressor and given enough time to recover.
In other words our bodies are MEANT to have stress, but we require recovery time in order to become stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for the next demand. The dose of stress matters, and so does the recovery as described in this study.
In January 2024, Dr. Mark Mattson and Dr. Rehana Leak published a review in *Cell Metabolism* on what they call the hormesis principle of neuroplasticity, describing how exercise acts a primordial conditioning factor, and strengthens the brain through the same arc of stress and repair. Hypertrophy, which refers to how we build muscle, happens after we produce small tears in the muscle…and then give the muscle time to repair.
The catch with all of this, is balance. If you push too hard or have constant stress without recovery, the body starts breaking down. As the Swiss-German physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) said: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous” (“Sola dosis facit venenum”)1
With my prior startup, we saw many high performing men and women who were in a constant state of inflammation, had developer auto-immune responses (where the body literally attacks healthy cells), couldn’t sleep, couldn’t digest properly–basically, getting sicker despite having access to incredible medical care.
All of them had this in common: very little to no downtime.
Good Things Come in Small Doses
We have learned to treat cortisol as something to be feared and stress as something to be eliminated, but a 2023 study on Understanding the relationships between physiological and psychosocial stress, cortisol and cognition found that,
“Small doses of cortisol release in healthy individuals can improve memory and motivation.”
Hans Selye, a physician scientist known as the father of stress research and the “Einstein of medicine” researched the line between distress, which wears us down, and eustress, stress that helps us achieve a goal.
Cortisol is the body’s principal stress hormone, released by the adrenal glands the moment we have to rise to something. A short burst is what gets you through the board presentation with quick thinking and responses, and it is the same surge that moves your legs if a bear came out of the trees while hiking.
Exercise is a way to, as I like to think of it, train your cortisol response. As Stanford Lifestyle Medicine explains, “a tough workout spikes cortisol as part of your body’s physiological challenge response.” When you train regularly, your body learns to raise cortisol for the effort and then brings it back down. Over time this balances your cortisol. Our bodies are designed to create homeostasis, or balance at all times
To be Everywhere is to be Nowhere
Seneca also said, “Nusquam est qui ubique est,” or to be everywhere is to be nowhere. I tend to visualize a butterfly flitting about the flowers in a random way (even though they are actually quite methodical) when I think of someone who is trying to be all things to all people and never slowing down. While Seneca was referring to mastering something deeply vs. multi-tasking, I also associate the wisdom with deep reflection.
What makes work possible at the level leaders require is the ability to contemplate, and this typically requires rest and no distractions.
The leader who is everywhere, always on, always available, perpetually overextended, is standing at the peak of her depleted state, and she has been there so long it reads as normal.
Your body does not care about your intention to rest later. It is keeping score right now.
Recalibrating through Recovery
Making time for recovery requires prioritizing it as if it is just as important as building (because it is). Some tips to get started include:
Walking Meditation
Twenty to thirty minutes of moderate effort delivers real cognitive benefit, and the gain compounds when the movement doubles as a way to empty your mind. A walk taken as walking meditation, attention on your breath and your steps rather than your inbox, gives you the physical adaptation and the mental reset together. Three protected sessions a week will do more for your thinking than one heroic Saturday meant to repay a week of nothing.
Protect Sleep
Not sleeping results in poor judgment slips, risk assessment, and pattern recognition–not unlike intoxication. No one would schedule a consequential decision for the morning after three drinks, and yet plenty of leaders do the equivalent most weeks.
Unplug in Nature
Seneca called time outdoors essential fuel, and the research agrees with him. Time among trees and open ground lowers cortisol, restores the attention that screens deplete, and returns you to a problem with a clarity that effort alone keeps out of reach. An hour on a trail with your phone in your car or at home is one of the highest-yield things a leader can put on the calendar, so put it there with the same weight as a client call.
Building a Better You
You would never skip a board meeting because you were slammed, or cancel a client call because you had other calls.
Your rest, a full night of sleep, and the true day away belong in that same category of commitment.
The leaders who hold the longest arcs and are still building something meaningful a decade after their peers plateaued or burned out, share one habit that has nothing to do with strategy or network: they guard their recovery with the same ferocity they guard a closing call.
For them, rest lives on the calendar because it is part of the work.
The most capable you is built in the time you aren’t building.
