The Art of Rest and Recovery

0:00One thing research tells us about high performance is that the top performers typically go through cycles of really, really intense performance and then deep, deep rest. And what I noticed is that a lot of people, a lot of us spend most of our lives living in a pretty constant state of doing. And it's really hard for a lot of people to rest. It's a really, truly rest. And I want to talk about that today. So I would call, I would, for the sake of what we're talking about, rest is a form of recovery. Rest is the recovery that you need for a certain kind of exhaustion. So that's how I would define it. So it's rest, we think of rest probably as inactivity, but that's not true. We've all had like a great weekend and felt better, but our weekend was full of activity, but we feel rested going into the next work week, right? Or we've all had an experience where we've done something completely different, been

1:03completely active, but it refreshes us for a thing that we're doing more regularly. And so rest is just, I would say, the proper form of recovery. What would make somebody not give themselves rest? What would make it become a habit for someone not to rest? How do we talk ourselves out of it? There's so many ways. One is we think it's not productive when it's super productive. One is that we tell ourselves that there's this, that we have to get it done quicker and somehow doing more is going to get it done quicker, which is also not particularly true. Another one is that we have serrogate forms of rest. Things that feel like we're resting when we're not actually resting. And then we say to ourselves, well, I've wasted all the time resting already, but I have an actually recovered. And often if we haven't slowed down in a while and we slowed down our neurologically speaking, it feels like a risk, right?

2:04It feels like we're, like, something's bad is going to happen. And there's studies on that that show that that's the case. So that's, those are the basic reasons. Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about what are the different ways one can be exhausted, one with different ways that people can need recovery. How do we need recovery from what are the different facets of that? So I think there's some overlap in all of it, but in general, there's the physical exhaustion right where you physically need to rest. Then there's the emotional need to rest. There is a psychological need to rest. There is a stimulation need to, like overstimulated need to rest, which is very close to the nervous system need to rest. And it's also something there's for some of us. Anyways, there's a social need to rest socially that there's just like, oh, too much social engagement also requires rest. And I think it's very hard to pull them apart, honestly. A lot of people know that they're exhausted.

3:06Some people don't know they're exhausted. Just like, you know, when I was a kid, I didn't know when I was tired and I sure as heck didn't know when I was hungry. And it was like the number one thing my mom would say to me that would annoy me. It was like, are you hungry? I'm not hungry. I just want to get this thing done. And I've seen that with my own girls now. So there's first just the being enough in your body to actually feel the exhaustion and then to know what kind of exhaustion it is and what to do about it. Because typically what happens is we entrain into forms of dealing with our exhaustion that doesn't actually deal with it. It definitely doesn't deal with it efficiently. So it's interesting because a lot of people are like, I want to figure out how to be as productive as possible rather than I want to know how to rest as effectively as possible. And my experience is when you rest really effectively, you are more productive. It also sounds like a lot of the kind of twisting around the axle can happen by misidentifying

4:09the way in which you need to rest, but misidentifying what you're exhausted by. Like I've been running around in my life so much and I feel so physically exhausted by everything I've been doing. But what's actually happening at a deeper level is I'm emotionally exhausted from the standards that I'm holding myself to or the sheds or the expectations and what I really need is an emotional form of recovery. Correct. Or we just have a head trip about it, right? We're like, you shouldn't be exhausted. You just rest it in this way. So why are you exhausted? Just get to it. We think that our head's rationality about why we should or shouldn't be exhausted somehow is accurate. And for no apparent reason, we think it should be accurate, but it's not particularly accurate. So as an example, like to put this all together, as an example, my friend was a computer programmer. Was a computer programmer back when they were such things as computer programmers. Wow. That's a statement.

5:11And he was trying to figure out how many hours and how to work in a way that optimized how much code he can produce. And so he ran just experiment after experiment, totally geeked out. I'm going to try eight hours straight, ten days in a row. I'm going to try five hours straight. And just how he took, and so he kept on testing how many days in a row, how many hours in a row, when he took his breaks and just to optimize best number of lines of code that were good. And it turned out that the best thing for him was, it was like six or seven hours a day, 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off. And he found out that 15 minutes off was best done with physical activity. So but gentle physical activity, not like running, but like stretching yoga, dance, something

6:16that was, that brought up his heart rate a little bit, but didn't make him sweat profusely. Yeah. That's interestingly tracks the Pomodoro technique. I don't know what the exact ratio of time on time off, but that's I used to do some time ago back when I was programming a lot. Yeah. And doing a lot of computer work. And it was really helpful. The hardest thing for me was actually taking the time off. Actually stopping and stopping not just being off the computer, but stopping working because you can take it with you, and you're wrestling with a problem. Right. And that doesn't mean that you have taken the time. And I believe when we talked about this, that was what made him do the physical activity, because that's what took his mind off of the problem for a while. You know, there's a famous Nobel laureate who I think won multiple Nobel prizes in mathematics or something like that, physics or something. And he spoke about how he would think about a problem exhaustively, obsessively.

7:21And if he couldn't come up with a solution, he would refuse to think about the problem until the solution presented itself in whole to him. So he wouldn't have a side thought. Any time the thought happened, he was like, no, I'm not thinking about you. I'm not thinking about you. I'm not thinking about you until the solution, the entire solution presented itself in whole. And it's kind of a silly way to say great ideas come to us in the shower, right, where we're doing nothing more physically in our body, you know, enjoying hot water or something like that, soft and wear these ideas come from not when we're thinking about them. It's actually a very strategic to do that because if you're thinking about any aspect of the problem logically and linearly, you're using the, you know, your left brain, if we want to get into brain split thing. Yeah. And to refuse to do that requires you to churn with more of the right brain thinking, which is holistic, sees things as holes. There's no parts. There's just holes. So if your discipline is to just wait until you see the whole solution, then you are

8:22in the right brain, really allowing that right brain to bubble up to the surface and then give you a solution that you wouldn't have gotten if you kept looking at the pieces. Yeah. But it's important to have the stage where you're going through the pieces. Yeah. To look at every single piece of the puzzle before you let it go and pass it to the subconscious, pass it to the right brain, pass it to the body, however you interpret that. It's the same thing. What I noticed in, you know, I was studying different Tibetan lineages and a lot of them would do like six months of heavy meditation and then gotten the world for six months or a year and then go back and do heavy meditation for them. And for them going out into the world is maybe their rest. Yeah. Yeah. And I think probably both of them are rests from each other. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. The meditation is a rest from the world. The world is a rest. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that, I think that's the other way to think about rest instead of to think about it is I am not doing. I am doing on the other side of thing.

9:25I am oscillating in my doing so that I can be most effective. Yeah. You know, the way it would be like saying a piston and an engine isn't working because it's going down. Right. The only, it's only working when it's going up, but it doesn't work when it's going down. Yeah. And it's baked into us. We wake up. We do activities. We have a daily cycle and then we go to sleep and then there's cycles in sleep, including some deep sleep and some REM sleep. And then you wake up and you do it all over again. Yeah. And then we wake ourselves into our waking life to think that that's not like the whole cycle is not part of it. That's somehow we need to stay in just this range or not good enough. We're going to do anything done. And then we burn out. Yeah. And it was the same. I know that it's a little bit different in some form of sports, but the high achieving sports athletes do heavy rest, physical, heavy physical rest. I remember there's like the de-Cathalon guy from Norway who was, you know, the best de-Cathalon, which is basically ski and shoot, right?

10:26Like they ski and then they cross country ski and then they shoot and they, and this guy just worked out like a madman every day, but then every other moment of his day, he's like just laid out on the couch resting, having his body grow back, I suspect. Yeah. But yeah, it's a fascinating thing. And it reminds me of a kid that I met when I was base jumping in Switzerland years ago. He was really young and he had actually been at the time the youngest person to climb the seven summits, which is the tallest mountain on all the seven continents. And he, we went for a hike together up this, you know, 6,000 foot and for the coldest guy-ish. At the time I was hanging out with him, I think he was in his like late teens, maybe early 20s. Yeah. He had been in his teens when he'd done the seven summits. And so we went on a big hike together and I found myself routinely way ahead of him with everybody else. And I'd look back and see what he was doing. He'd just be resting or he'd be like playing in a waterfall. And so I stopped and waited for him to catch up and just started hiking with him.

11:26I was like, what is going on? I'm like, you're the one of the theoretically best hikers of our age of your age. And you're going so slow. He's like, I'm actually going faster than you. If we were going up another 20,000 feet, you'd be toast in like the next 5,000 feet, you'd be done. And what I noticed is that he was taking small steps, not big steps, small steps slowly. And then he was taking relatively frequent but short breaks. He wasn't letting his entire system freeze back up and go into some sort of like lactic acid release situation. Yeah. And he stopped. He was having a lot of fun. Like he was just having fun with the entire thing. So there's a whole bunch of different ways he was resting. He was resting by in each step, taking it relatively slowly. He was resting by pacing it in a way where he could really manage his heart rate and be connected to his body. He was resting by taking breaks and then also enjoying it deeply.

12:29Whereas the rest of us had this like, we're going to go get it in an mentality. Tended to work for the size hike we did, but it would have broken us if we were trying to do a 14,000 or 10,000 meter mountain or something. Yeah. So I mean, the cool thing about that is there are lots of ways to rest. And we've talked, we alluded to this in ways that we think we're resting when we're not. But let's talk about like what are the different ways that you can rest from the different ways that we just talked about? Yeah, for exhaustion. Yeah. So physical rest is obviously doing nothing. Physically is one way to rest. The other way to rest is to down regulate. So like very gentle yoga or very gentle movement can also be very restful for the body. And what's interesting is that it's almost a correlate of all the rest of them is that there's a more of an active form and a more of a passive form of the rest. So like emotional rest, one thing you can do is cry.

13:32Get angry. Have the expression. You notice like at the retreats where somebody has a big anger movement and they feel energized or fear movement and they feel energized. So that's one way the other way emotionally is to just get out of the emotionally toxic circumstance for a while, right? If there's something that's constantly emotionally taxing you, okay, well then just get out of that for a bit, recombobulate yourself, come back into it. Yeah. And so that's the, so there's usually an active and a passive or many active, many passive forms too. Yeah, I think that's why I like the word recovery here. Yeah. Because recovery for your physical joints, your muscles, your physical body can be sleeping and allowing your body to do all the recovery process that does when you sleep. And it can be doing physical therapy. Right. And recovery, recovery includes active movement or you're not going to be recovering. Yeah. So that's a really good thing to notice is that for each of these, I bet it's true that for every single form of recovery, to recover from every single form of exhaustion, there's

14:36an active and passive form. Yes. I love to explore that in more detail. So you've got the emotional. Yeah, yeah. Emotional can be remove yourself from the thing that is causing additional emotional spin that you haven't been able to process. Right. And it can also mean process. Taking and screaming at a pillow or really allowing yourself to have that cry that really invites the down regulation. Right. And other things you can do is you can explore the trauma that created, if you have enough resources to explore the trauma that created the situation that put you into the emotionally toxic situation. Just like the physical you could be eating protein, you could make sure you have enough amino acids. There's a lot of things that you can do. And generally, there's the passive form and there's the active form. The thing you know you're doing when you recover is that in a short period of time, you are going to feel more energy. Yeah. If it's the right recovery for you. If you don't feel more energy, like, oh, I'm emotionally exhausted, I'm going to go play

15:39TikTok or beyond TikTok. I just sounded really old there. Play TikTok. And at the end of it, you're still exhausted. That means you weren't recovering. So it's not real rest. It's also interesting that one form of recovery is work in another way. So you have a big fear release and you're like, wow, I can feel so much more in my body. But I also need to recover from that. And I need to stay kind of lay low for a little while before I go overstimulate in some other way. So a lot of these forms of recovery are actually their own forms of effort that require so you have to oscillate between many different forms of recovery. That's why I like the oscillation thing. And I think it's in a weird way you could say that all you're ever doing is recovering from the other stuff, but that can be an incredibly productive life. And it's like, if I think about my own life, for instance, I am out in the world teaching at companies.

16:39If I do too much of that, I will get exhausted. So I also have times where I get to just sit around and have conversations for a couple of days through podcasting. But if I do that too much, I get pretty exhausted. And I really want a contemplative time. So what do I do? I go and write chapters in the book that's coming up. So that's where my contemplative time is where I'm by myself in silence writing and doing hot colds and I'm relatively silent. But if I don't get enough, if I'm just spending too much time thinking about work all the time, then I feel exhausted. So I go out and I exercise by being in nature or exercise or be with my family. So in a weird way, it's really not about recovery or rest though it is. It's about do you have a portfolio of activities and non activities that feed each other? And I think most people, when they think about productivity, they're thinking, how do I

17:40get the most done by doing? Not. How do I get the most done in a year by balancing my activities in such a way that I'm constantly energized? I get to use different creative parts of my brain. I get to use different modalities and actions both in passive and active forms that just feed each other. They're constantly feeding each other. So I think that's more effective way to be thinking about rest and recovery than I need to rest. No, I shouldn't rest. Right. So I go back to what are some of the specific forms of recovery and rest that we've talked about, the physical and the emotional. And there's a number of others. There was the nervous system. There was a sensory. There was a social. Yeah. So let's do the social one is what the passive one is. Can I get time alone? Can I be out in nature by myself? Can I be in a situation where I don't have to contend with other people's wants and needs?

18:47The active one is, oh, where's the most nourishing relationship? I have, how do I make this moment with somebody super nourishing? Because you can feel socially relaxed if you're with somebody and you feel deeply supported and loved. And you don't feel like you have to be a different way for them. And you can feel deeply relaxed socially by going away. Like just, oh, I'm going to go off into the woods for three days by myself. Yeah. So that's social. How about sensory? Sensory. And nervous system. There's a huge amount of overlap. So I'm just going to combine them. I think literally not being stimulated. You know, dark retreats, meditation retreats. You can even do this in moments in the way of staring off into space. Being quiet, closing your eyes and doing nothing for 30 seconds. Those are all ways to do it. And I think they're called dopamine resets. I think there's some evidence I've heard people talk about stopping everything for a minute

19:51that that can totally reset your system. So those are all possibilities. Nervous system and sensory deep breaths is obviously a very active way to do it. They're kind of breathing like box breathing or coherent breathing. So there's breath techniques that can help with the stimulation and with the nervous system. Hot cold. Getting really hot, getting really cold can really calm the nervous system and can help us be less stimulated. So yeah. And then there's the psychological exhaustion too. Yeah. I want to super triple click on the psychological and mental exhaustion just because of how in our society, how prevalent that is and how it is largely the water we're swimming in. It's something we don't often see. And you know, there's a. You can make an argument that our society is addicted to thinking and just doesn't know how to stop. How many times have you seen somebody who's like, I'm going to take a rest and then they're

20:52in their phone, rolling and thinking or messaging. And this is something that I just don't think we're very good at. I might break it into psychological and mental exhaustion. Psychological exhaustion I think really comes from beating yourself up constantly telling yourself what to do, telling yourself that you have a lot not enough time to do it. Like that that just constant onslaught. You know, if I am doing a task and I'm enjoying the task like we talk about in our enjoyment episode, it does not take as much energy as if I'm, okay, I got to get this done and why haven't I gotten it done yet and okay, where I've got this next thing to do and now I have another thing to do and I'm still finishing this thing, but hurry up. All of that kind of stuff is psychologically deeply exhausting. And I guess there's overlap with the mental exhaustion, but there's also a mental exhaustion of just trying to solve problems all the time, just thinking all the time. Just, okay, and what am I going to do next? What am I going to do next or thinking about the same problem that you're having over

21:56and over and over again? You know, that kind of thing can require a lot of mental, like fatigue, it creates a lot of mental fatigue. So then what is recovery from that? So the recovery from just the overthinking part is to stop thinking. So being in nature is probably a good one. I really love meditation as a form. You know, we talked about just silencing the mind for 30 seconds. The active form is I'm going to jump off a cliff and not be able to think or I'm going to go ride horses and not going to be able to think or I'm going to. So engaging. So physically engaging. I'm going to go get one of my favorites. I'm going to go get 114 degree water, 112 degree water and then get in really, really cold water and I'm not thinking when I'm there, I'm just right in it. So anything that's so physically consuming that you can't think is a very active way to do that. Psychologically, I think the active way is like pleasure.

23:00It's like how do I enjoy? How do I have as much pleasure in this moment as I possibly can? So anything that gives you pleasure, real pleasure will reduce the psychological tax. And then the other one is to is other forms of not thinking. So again, like being in nature or or being completely still or. So it can be important to recognize what's happening. The mental is like, oh, I'm trying to solve this problem and I've just been trying to solve it so much that I'm exhausting myself and maybe I just need to not think for a little while. Yes. The psychological might be the way that I'm treating myself. Oh, I'm actually just being really hard on myself and what if I allow myself to simply enjoy how it is to be me right now while I'm doing the thing? Yes. And then the emotional would be, oh, I'm emotionally taxed from having just these constantly emotionally revved situations. And there's a backlog of emotions that I haven't felt yet. And so there's an active form of feeling those emotions in an passive form of stepping

24:01away from what is adding to the backlog. Yeah. The problem is, and we talked about this earlier, the problem is that oftentimes when you're really active in any one of those things and you start getting your foot off the gas and you start pulling back, this fear pops up. It's like, right, if I've been doing a whole bunch of stuff and now I've stopped doing it, my brain is like, oops, there's danger. What am I, what do I have to watch out for? I got to make sure. And it makes sense. If you think about as an animal, if you've been really, really engaged, it means there's been some sort of problem. Right. And so I know it's running and I stop. Right. I'm going to look around and see if I'm still being chased. Yeah. And that's what's happening. And it doesn't take very long. What I typically find as far as my recovery goes is if I've been super engaged and working very consistently for an extended period of time, I go for something that is all consuming form of rest before I go for the quiet form of rest. That's been a huge hack for me.

25:02So I'm going to go and be in super hot water, right? Or have a physical experience that I can't not get out of like four-wheel driving. I love four-wheel driving. So I'm going to be someplace where that's all I'm going to do for four or five hours. I can't think. There's no emotion. There's no anybody else. But I'm fully 100% engaged in it. And it requires me to slow down anything that requires me to slow down. You can't move fast in 114 degree water. You can't move fast if you're going over a huge boulder. And then from that point, then it's easier for me to just kick into a lower year and just sit still or just hang out and watch the sky or watch a fire for a evening or something like that. So for anyone listening right now, how do you know when it is time to rest? And how do you know when what you think you're doing as rest is actually truly rest in recovery?

26:03I think about it as we always need to recover. We just, what's the recovery we need? If I have just spent 12 hours watching trashy movies on a Sunday with my daughters who are sick and bad, I need recovery from that. If I've just played pickleball for four hours, I need recovery from that. If I've just slept and I'm waking up, I need oddly to say recovery from my sleep. I need to get my body moving. I need to get blood flowing. If I was 70 years old and I had never exercised, I wouldn't be fully recovered. Exercise is part of the recovery process. So the main thing I think about is not, I need, when do I need to recover? I mean, when do I need to rest? I always do. It's just an active or passive form of it and how. And so there's been a huge amount of experimentation in what's the form of rest that's going to serve me best.

27:04One of the things that I do notice is generally I am more rested, the more rested I am, or the less exhausted I am, the easier it is for me to just not be in any kind of bad habits. So what we call bad habits and I'd so call bad habits, kind of surrogate recovery, right? I'm not having to think about, I don't have to feel my emotions. I'm in TikTok. I don't have to feel I'm getting some sort of emotional recovery, but I'm not actually getting any, I don't feel really recovered when I'm finished with it. I feel exhausted in many ways. So I kind of have a surrogate of recovery. It's not like a real form of recovery. And if I'm hanging out and I'm working on YouTube and all of a sudden I get caught in YouTube for a half an hour, I know that I am exhausted on some level.

28:06If I have a hard time going, I really can't eat this way. I got to eat this way. Or if I just notice, oh, I'm stealing that food that makes me feel like crap and I'm going to eat it, then I know that I'm exhausted. So it's an interesting thing because all these things help me recover on some level, right? Like really overstimulated heavy foods calm me down, but they don't make me feel better overall. I don't feel rested afterwards. I don't feel energized afterwards. In a way, if you're not in the flow with what you're doing, something needs recovery. And the question is what? Exactly. But I love the piece about YouTube or TikTok. If I find myself doom scrolling, there's some sort of recovery that I'm looking for and I might not be finding it here, but I'm finding a part of it. Finding a part of it. And it might be that I'm already exhausted and I don't have the resources to emotionally process what I need to process.

29:09So I'm going to something where I do have the resources for, which is to scroll with my thumb and read stuff. However, that might be creating more and more emotional backlog and become a locked in situation. Right. That's right. Or when you really, really get sucked into something like that. And then when you're finished with that, then it's even harder to, you're even less resource to do the thing that you want to do. It's like, oh, I've just scrolled TikTok now. I'm going to cry. It's not going to happen as easily. Right. Or I just scrolled TikTok for six hours. Now I'm going to go exercise. It's not going to happen as easily. Right. So if you're asking yourself the question, how do I rest? How do I recover? Or how do I know if I need to recover? Yeah. Because you're having that thought. Correct. Rather than just correct. What are you doing? Yeah. So oftentimes, one of the things that I'm thinking about is I've literally spent time going, OK, what are all the ways that I would like to recover? I give this kind of exhausted physically or emotionally.

30:11What are the things that I would think are very constructive ways to recover? So that's going to be different for everybody. But a list of those kinds of things is great. This is the way that I started to really hone in what works for me. And then the second thing is when I am exhausted before I reach for something that is, in a vagina, just notice, oh, I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I'm bone tired or whatever it is. I'll look and I'll say, OK, what are the things on this list that are most appealing or what are the forms of exhaustion that I think this might be? So it's actually an intellectual exercise for me. Knowing, but the answer comes from the body. It doesn't come from the mind, which is weird. I use the mind as a way to be strategic about asking the body for questions, but I use the body for the answers. So surprise, surprise. Just like so many other episodes. It comes down to listening to our body. Right. Yeah.

31:12And our brains, like our brains really, our bodies in this particular case can actually be quite tricky. They'll just say, do the thing that you always do when you do this. They'll just say, oh, this is when you feel this way, go and eat a pizza. This is when you feel this way, go and doom scroll. So our bodies are actually a bit tricky. We're just going to go by kind of the road habit instead of, and that's where the brain comes in and is really useful in this particular one, because it's, oh, let me just stop for a second and think about this. What kind of exhaustion do you think it is? The other thing I've noticed is if the exhaustion is at all sleep, that's the first thing you should do. Right. The number one, not all the other. I'm psychologically exhausted. I'm, I've overstimulated and I'm emotionally exhausted and I'm tired. Sleep. Don't worry about any of the other shit. Like sleep. And if sleep isn't coming because of these other forms of exhaustion, then you've got

32:15something to do. And a moat probably is the one that's worked for me the best. And then hunger is the second one. So if I'm ordering them up, I've also noticed that the kind of recover I need sleep is usually first. Hunger is usually second. Those are my baseline. And from there, then I will move into the other ones. I can't say which ones are most effective after that, but I know those two aren't done. And hunger is its own rhythm as well. Right. Recovering from being hungry by eating and there's recovering from eating by fasting or like really letting the gut rest. I mean, that's a weirdest thing, right? So I do this as you know, every three, every year for three weeks I go and I do this Ayurvedic Pontiacarma thing, which is a form of a cleanse and a fast. And I will consume like generally like a thousand calories a day, never hungry, never hungry.

33:18I could have 1500 calories for breakfast and I'll be hungry by 11, depending on my psychological emotional stimulation, how overstimulated I am, how much psychological stress is happening or exhaustion is happening. So it's really a fascinating thing how interconnected all of these things are. I mean, that's something that fascinates me and it's why it's been very hard to pick them apart is that, oh, right, if I'm actually very, very rested in all other areas, I can not eat and feel great. If I am in a morning where I've got five things to do and a two meetings to have and I'm switching context, I'm going to be a complete asshole by 10 o'clock if I haven't eaten. Yeah, one thing I noticed is that most of what we've been talking about is actually doing something different in order to recover. I have to do a different thing. Yes. And I'm curious to also drill into if you're actually still doing the same thing you're

34:19doing, how do you do it in a more restful way? Right. So yeah, sometimes resting doesn't actually have a chain. You don't have to actually change anything except for the way that you're doing it. So that's like your friend, the mountain climber. He was climbing a mountain, but he did it in a restful way. You can just literally sit down and do nowadays people don't do emails as much, but say, you're going to do your what's that messages or you're going to do your slack messages or your emails and you're going to sit down for an hour. The question is, how do you do that in the most restful way possible? You type a little bit slower. You don't push yourself to be done. You don't say, oh my God, I got to get this finished by five o'clock or enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself. You do. So you take your 10 minutes, you take or one minute to stare off into space every once in a while, let yourself make mistakes. Exactly.

35:19And that's going to be far, you're going to feel far more energized at the end of it than at the end, then you did at the beginning of it. So that's the other thing that I've noticed, not putting pressure on yourself to have some sort of being very impartial, I would say, like in the view framework, being very impartial with how you're getting things done is really important. And the interesting thing is you think that that would like kill quality, but it usually helps quality of the output, right? That if you're really stressed in trying to get it perfectly, it's obviously has a lot harder of a time. Yeah, I remember from the coaching session that you did with somebody that was released about procrastination, you can build a website where you're trying to get it right, or you can build a website where you're enjoying yourself building it, which one's going to be the best website and which one's going to lead to you feeling the most rested and recovered. Yeah. Yeah, I thought you were going to say, you can build a website where you get everything

36:22ready or you can build a website. That is what you're going to say. Yeah. And so that's a commitment, but I got it. Yeah. So that's the, that's the interesting pieces. There is how do you do anything in a more restful way. And I think that's like an incredibly important experiment. I remember running it and highly recommend running it. If you say, okay, I'm going to do everything that I normally do in a week, but I'm going to do it in a way that is as restful as possible, which makes you think you will not get as much done. And check it, check if you actually don't get as much done. Also check, are you going to get done more next week? What I've noticed is my capacity grows my number of times they say it in in carbon tree.

37:22It's like measure twice cut once. There's so much less walking down the ladder to get another pair of pliers instead of walking up with the pair of pliers in the first place. There's so much stuff that happens in my world where it just all comes together because I'm in a more restful way doing the things that I'm doing or I'm taking rest. The other thing that's interesting is that that doesn't substitute for just absolute downtime, especially high performers. So we have a test we use called the Harrison. And it's this X, Y axis of things that apparently are paradoxes, but they're not really. So it's like how open can you be in certain? Right. Right. And this diplomacy. Exactly. So once your X, once your Y and most people think you're one or the other, you're either certain or you're open, but you can be both. You can both have certainty and openness. You can have nurturing and forcing. Exactly. You can do.

38:23And so one of them is about how people rest. And one of the things that you get from almost every high performer that I've ever tested is that their stress management, it goes to tranquil inertia, which basically means they work so hard that they need some time to just do shit all. They just need to like just check out. And so and they call it, they call it lots of different things. You know, I need contemplation time or I need like thinking time, build gates apparently three quarter would go off into the woods by himself for a week and like stop running the company. So he would have time to think. Some people check out to Netflix or play video games, which is not the best way to do it obviously. The guy who ran Greenspan who ran the Fed for so many years, he would just spend 30 minutes

39:29sitting silently, he caught a contemplation at the beginning of every day. But that tranquil inertia is just really important, especially if you're a high achiever. And so I would just put that warning out there, and where people think, okay, well now I'm going to just constantly be doing all the time. I'm just going to be a balanced set of doing. There's actually the need for the non-doing. There's a need for just the inertia, there's just deep tranquility. However you get to it. And for me, it's going off into the woods or going into hot springs and being by myself, that's what I need for it. I think it's different for different people. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you. There's been a lot of talking. Let's go get some of our tranquility. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for listening to the Art of Accomplishment. You can learn more about our programs or join our newsletter at artofacompishment.com. If you liked this episode, leave us a review or share the show with a friend. See you next week.