Rest: sustaining high performance

My definition of rest is the activity you do to perform indefinitely at your highest level.

Activities for rest vary. Besides my other routines, such as reading, exercising, and playing the guitar, I go on vacation, hang out with family and friends, play video games, and chill with my cats.

But what's the point of resting? And how do you know if it worked?

Without a definition of rest, we can't answer these questions.

Before: A cycle of low, negative energy

This is before: It had been another stressful day at work.

I ended work late and felt too exhausted to do anything. A familiar feeling that happened often.

So I'd go out for dinner and drinks. Sometimes I'd eat a big steak, sometimes a big pizza, and sometimes a fatty burger. I deserved it! Sometimes I'd drink beer, sometimes wine, sometimes whiskey. Take the edge off.

Then I'd get home and watch TV to relax. Sometimes I'd watch Breaking Bad, sometimes Grey's Anatomy, sometimes This is Us.

It'd be hard to stop on that last episode, so I'd sleep late.

Again.

The next day, I'd wake up tired and get right to work.

Another stressful day. Rinse and repeat.

Now: A cycle of high, positive energy

This is today: Work has been challenging and fulfilling.

I end work on time and head to my Jiu-Jitsu gym — 90 minutes of exercise and sparring. I'm pumped after practice.

At home, I warm my plate of vegetables and legumes, throw some soy on top, and read a book while eating. Drink tons of water.

I'll read until my bedtime, assuming nothing pops up at work. It's easy to stop reading and sleep on time.

The next day, I wake up and go for a run. I come back elated after training.

Then I write, often a topic I'm excited to talk about, such as this one.

Then, I start my workday with high energy.

Rinse and repeat.

Rest is about recovery

When we lift weights in a series, we need to rest and recover for the next series.

When we run a sprint on HIIT training, we need to rest and recover for the next sprint.

When we wait a couple days from the exercise, our bodies recover, and we can lift heavier weights and run faster.

These are small cycles in the physical sphere. Still, the same happens on cycles of a day, a week, a month, or a year in all spheres of life: Exertion, Recovery, Exertion, Recovery, ad infinitum leads to high performance.

In the book The Power of Full Engagement, Tony Schwartz talks about the importance of expenditure and renewal to sustain high performance.

We rarely consider how much energy we are spending because we take it for granted that the energy available to us is limitless. In fact, increased demand progressively depletes our energy reserves — especially in the absence of any effort to reverse the progressive loss of capacity that occurs with age.[..]

By contrast, when we live highly linear lives — spending far more energy than we recover or recovering more than we spend — the eventual consequence is that we break down, burn out, atrophy, lose our passion, get sick and even die prematurely. Sadly, the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than as an integral aspect of sustained performance. The result is that we give almost no attention to renewing and expanding our energy reserves, individually or organizationally.

To maintain a powerful pulse in our lives, we must learn how to rhythmically spend and renew energy.

The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal.

Loehr, Jim; Schwartz, Tony. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (pp. 11-12). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Top performance is characterized by the recovery necessary for the next peak, followed by the subsequent recovery.

If you're not recovering, then you may be playing, relaxing, or having fun.

But you're not resting.

High-quality leisure takes work

In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport makes the case that high-quality leisure is often strenuous, and that's a good thing.

He starts by talking about a financially independent couple who chooses very active entertainment activities, like preparing their immense property for hiking or clearing snow:

Pete and Liz emphasize a perhaps surprising observation: when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity. This bias toward action over more traditional ideas of relaxation might strike some as needlessly exhausting, but to Pete and Liz it makes perfect sense.

As Liz told me: “We have property, we want to hike it, we have to clear trails to do this effectively, so we have to get out here with a chainsaw, cutting trees, clearing brush.” This sounds like work, but it offers several different types of value. As Liz explained: “It is mentally freeing, because it is very different than working on a computer . . . it requires problem solving, but in a different way.” In addition, it offers good exercise, and it requires you to learn new skills. “Learning to use a chainsaw is not easy,” Liz told me. Finally, there’s the satisfaction of actually getting to use the trail once cleared.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (p. 174). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

And then later talks about Teddy Roosevelt, and then Arnold Bennet's influential book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, and their judgment of idle leisures:

Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.” Roosevelt practiced what he preached. As president, Roosevelt regularly boxed (until a hard blow detached his left retina), practiced jujitsu, skinny-dipped in the Potomac, and read at the rate of one book per day. He was not one to sit back and relax.

A decade later, Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. [..] Bennett argues that the waking half of these hours could be dedicated to enriching and demanding leisure, but were instead too often wasted by frivolous time-killing pastimes, like smoking, pottering, caressing the piano (but not actually playing), and perhaps deciding to become “acquainted with a genuinely good whiskey.” After an evening of this mindless boredom busting (the Victorian equivalent of idling on your iPad), he notes, you fall exhausted into bed, with all the hours you were granted “gone like magic, unaccountably gone.”

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (p. 174). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

While every person's entertainment and leisure will be different, what is or isn't restful doesn't vary much across people.

When we stop focusing rest on "what feels comfortable" and instead focus on "what recovers me to the highest level," we can start judging which activities are restful by how energized they make us feel.

Whether watching a TV show past bedtime, scrolling TikTok in bed, or needing to rest from our busy social weekend, we mistake relaxation for recovery and don't perform at our peak.

Find restful activities

Rest is an activity you do to perform indefinitely at your highest level. These activities recover your energy so you can spend it again at a new peak.

Restful activities may not necessarily be passive. They can be active, like exercising, reading books, gardening, or playing the piano.

We judge these restful activities not by how they make us feel in the moment but by how energized we feel next time we're trying to perform at the highest level.

So find restful activities. Start by reflecting on your current restful activities:

1) How energized do you feel during your workday? Which activities are you performing the previous day to recover? Are they effective?

2) How energized do you feel after the weekend? Which weekend activities are you performing to recover from the week and be ready to tackle the next week?

3) How energized do you feel after your vacations? Which activities did you take in your past vacations, and how did it feel to return to work after them?

Then think about the activities you do that aren't the most restful.

• Maybe you feel good after evenings when you see friends but not when you watch TV.
• Maybe you feel good after weekends when you go hiking or gardening but not when you go shopping.
• Maybe you feel good after vacations when you visit a new place or distant family but not after a staycation when you stay home doing chores.

Your goal is to find the activities that are actually restful and perform them more often so you're getting more recovery in between your times of demand.

Only by understanding and engaging in your best recovery activities will you be able to sustainably and indefinitely perform at your peak.