The Art of Rest and Recovery

Brett: One thing research tells us about high performance is that the top performers typically go through cycles of really, really intense performance and then deep rest. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And what I notice is that 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, to really, truly rest.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And I wanna talk about that today. 

Joe: So for the sake of what we're talking about, rest is a form of recovery. Rest is the recovery that you need from 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 a, 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 completely active, but it refreshes us for the thing that we're doing more regularly. And so rest is just, I would say, the proper form of recovery. 

Brett: 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? 

Joe: Oh, man. 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 we have to get it done quicker, and somehow doing more is gonna get it done quicker, which is also not particularly true. Another one is that we have surrogate 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 that time resting already," but I haven't actually recovered.

And often, if we haven't slowed down in a while and we slow down, our... neurologically speaking, it, feels like a risk. Right? It feels like we're, like something bad is gonna happen, and there's studies on that that show that that's the case. So that's, those are the basic reasons.

Brett: Yeah. Okay, so I wanna talk about what are the different ways one can be exhausted, different ways that people can need recovery. What do we need recovery from? 

Joe: Right. 

Brett: What are the different facets of that? 

Joe: So I think there's some overlap in all of it, but in general, there's the physical exhaustion where you physically need to rest. Then there's the emotional need to rest. There's 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. I also think there's, for some of us anyways, there's a social, a 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. Some people don't know they're exhausted. Just like, you know, I remember 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 was like, "Are you hungry?"

" Uh, I'm not hungry. I just wanna 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, right? So it's interesting because a lot of people are like, "I wanna figure out how to be as productive as possible," rather than, "I wanna know how to rest as effectively as possible." In my experience is when you rest really effectively, you are more productive.

Brett: It also sounds like a lot of the kind of twisting around the axle can happen by misidentifying the way in which you need to rest, by misidentifying what you're exhausted by. 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 shoulds, or the expectations, and what I really need is an emotional form of recovery.

Joe: Correct. Or we just have a head trip about it, right? We're like, "You shouldn't be exhausted. You just rested 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 back when there were such things as computer programmers.

Brett: Wow, that's a statement. 

Joe: Yeah. And he was trying to figure out how many hours and how to work in a way that would optimize how much code he could produce. And so he ran just experiment after experiment, totally geeked out. I'm going to try eight hours straight, 10 days in a row. I'm gonna try five hours straight. 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 light stretching, yoga, dance, something that was, that brought up his heart rate a little bit but didn't make him sweat profusely.

Brett: Yeah. That's interestingly tracks the Pomodoro Technique. I don't know what the exact ratio of time on, time off, but that's something that I used to do some time ago back when I was programming a lot. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And doing a lot of computer work, and it was really helpful. The hardest thing for me was actually taking the time off. 

Joe: Actually stopping. 

Brett: 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. And that doesn't mean that you have taken the time off. 

Joe: And I believe when we talked about this, that was what made him do the physical activity. 'Cause 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, and 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. Anytime 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 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, we're physically in our body, enjoying hot water or something like that. It's often where these ideas come from, not when we're thinking about them. 

Brett: It's actually 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 wanna get in the brain split thing.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And to refuse to do that requires you to churn with more of the right brain thinking, which is holistic. Sees things as wholes. There's no parts, there's just wholes. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: So if your discipline is to just wait until you see the whole solution then you are 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.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: But it's important to have had the stage where you're going through the pieces. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: 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. 

Joe: It's the same thing, what I notice in... you know, I was studying different Tibetan lineages, and a lot of them would do, like, six months of heavy meditation and then go out into the world for six months or a year, and then go back and do heavy meditation for six months. 

Brett: And for them, going out into the world is maybe their rest. 

Joe: Yeah. And, well, I think probably both of them are rests from each other.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Right? Yeah. Like, the meditation is a rest from the world. The world is a rest, and I think that... I think that's the other way to think about rest. Instead of to think about it as, "I am not doing-" ... I am doing on the other side of thing. I'm oscillating in my doing so that I can be most effective.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: You know, the way... It would be like saying a piston in an engine isn't working because it's going down. Like, the only, it's only working when it's going up, but it doesn't work when it's going down. 

Brett: 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 somehow we trick ourselves into our waking life to think that that's not... the whole cycle is not part of it. That somehow we need to stay in just this range or we're not good enough we're never gonna get anything done, and then we burn out. 

Joe: 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 decathlon guy from Norway who was, you know, the best decathlon, which is basically ski and shoot, right?

Like, it's 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. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: But yeah. It's a fascinating thing.

Brett: 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. Yeah.

Joe: Wow.

Brett: We went for a hike together up this, 6,000-foot vertical ascent.

Joe: How old is this guy-ish? 

Brett: At the time I was hanging out with him, I think he was in his, like, late teens, maybe early 20s. Yeah. And he had been in his teens when he'd done the Seven Summits. 

Joe: Wow. 

Brett: 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, like, stopped and waited for him to catch up and just started hiking with him. I was like, "What is going on?" I'm like, "You're one of the theoretically best hikers of your age, and you're going so slow." And he's like, "I'm actually going faster than you. If we were going up another 20,000 feet, you'd be toast, in 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.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And then when he stopped, he was having a lot of fun. Like, he was just having fun with the entire thing. So there's the enjoyment thing ... 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. Whereas the rest of us had this like, "We're gonna go get it," mentality.

Joe: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett: Which tended to work for the size hike we did, but it would have broken us if we were trying to do a, like 14,000 or 10,000 meter mountain or something.

Joe: That is fascinating. Yeah. So I mean, the cool thing about that is there are lots of ways to rest and we've alluded to this in ways that we think we're resting when we're not, but let's talk about like what are the- 

Brett: Yeah. What are the different ways that you can rest from the different ways that we just talked about?

Joe: Yeah, for exhaustion. Yeah. So physical rest is obviously doing nothing physically is one way to rest. The other way to rest is to downregulate, 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 an 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, eh, get angry, have the expression. You know what it's 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. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. And so there's usually an active and a passive, or many active and many passive forms to rest. 

Brett: I think that's why I like the word recovery here.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Because recovery for your physical joints, your muscles, your physical body can be sleeping and allowing your body to do all the recovery process it does when you sleep. 

Joe: Mm-hmm. 

Brett: And it can be doing physical therapy. 

Joe: Right. 

Brett: But when you're recovering from surgery, recovery includes active movement or you're not gonna be recovering.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And 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 an active and passive form. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: I'd love to explore that in more detail. So you've got the emotional.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. 

Brett: Emotional can be remove yourself from the thing that is causing additional emotional spin that you haven't been able to process. And it can also mean kicking and screaming at a pillow. 

Joe: Yeah. Exactly. 

Brett: Or really allowing yourself to have that cry that really invites the downregulation.

Joe: 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 making sure you have enough amino acids.

There's a lot of things that you can do and generally it's, 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. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: If it's the right recovery for you. If you don't feel more energy, like, "Oh, I'm emotionally exhausted. I'm gonna go play TikTok or be on TikTok." I just sounded really old there. Play TikTok. And you, at the end of it, you're not, you're still exhausted, it means you weren't recovering, so it's not real rest.

Brett: 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. I'm, but I also need to recover from that, and I need to, like, stay kind of, lay low for a little while before I go over-stimulate in some other way.”

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: So a lot of these forms of recovery are actually their own forms of effort that require their... So you have to oscillate between many different forms of recovery.

Joe: That's why I like the oscillation thing. And I think it's, in a weird way, you could say that you're, 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.

If 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 days through podcasting. But if I do that too much, I get pretty exhausted, and I really want 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 get 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. And so I think that's a more effective way to be thinking about rest and recovery than I need to rest. No, I shouldn't rest. 

Brett: Well, I wanna circle us back to what are some of the specific forms of recovery and rest that we've talked about the physical and the emotional. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And there's a number of others. There was the nervous system, there was a sensory, there was a social. 

Joe: Yeah, so let's do the social one is, the passive one is can I get time alone? You know, 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? The 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 gonna go off into the woods for three days by myself."

Brett: Yeah, so that's social. how about sensory? Let's talk a little bit about sensory. 

Joe: Sensory and nervous system, there's a huge amount of overlap, so I'm just gonna 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, just 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, 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.

Particular 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. 

Brett: I wanna really like, s- 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.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And, you know, 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 gonna take a rest," and then they're in their phone scrolling and thinking or messaging? And this is something that I just don't think we're very good at.

Joe: 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 gotta get this done, and why haven't I gotten it done yet? And okay, where, where I've got this next thing to do, and now I have another thing to do, and I'm, but 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, what am I gonna do next? What am I gonna do next?" Or thinking about the same problem that you're having over and over and over again. You know, that kind of thing can require a lot of mental, like, fatigue, creates a lot of mental fatigue. Yeah. 

Brett: So then what is recovery from that?

Joe: So the recovery from the 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 gonna go jump off a cliff and not be able to think, or I'm gonna go ride horses and not gonna be able to think, or I'm gonna- 

Brett: Something that's so engaging that thinking just can't happen.

Joe: So physically engaging. Yeah. I'm gonna go get in 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. It'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. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And then the other one is other forms of not thinking. So again, like being in nature or being completely still.

Brett: So it can be important to recognize what's happening. Like the, 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.

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: 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? 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: 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. Yeah. And so there's an active form of feeling those emotions, and then a passive form of stepping away from what is adding to the backlog. 

Joe: 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.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: It's like 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, what do I have to watch out for? I gotta 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.

Brett: If all I know is running and I stop. 

Joe: I'm gonna look around and see if I'm still being chased. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And that's what's happening. And it doesn't take very long. And 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.

And that's been a huge hack for me. Say more on that. So 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 be someplace where that's all I'm 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 gear and just sit still or just hang out and watch the sky or watch a fire for an evening or something like that. 

Brett: Yeah. 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 and recovery?

Joe: I think about it as we always need to recover. We just, what's the recovery we need, right? If I have just spent 12 hours watching trashy movies on a Sunday with my daughters who are sick in bed, 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 when do I need to recover? When do I need to rest? I always do. It's just an active or a 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 gonna serve me best.

One 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 call bad habits kind of surrogate recovery, right? Like TikTok, it gives me something, like I'm not having to think about, like I don't have to feel my emotions. I'm in TikTok, I don't have to feel them. So 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 kinda have a surrogate of recovery. It's not like a real form of recovery. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: 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.

If I have a hard time going, "Oh, I really can't eat this way, I gotta eat this way," or if I just notice, oh, I'm stealing that food that makes me feel like crap and I'm gonna 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? So if I'm 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. 

Brett: In a way, if you're not in the flow with what you're doing, something needs recovery. And the question is, what? 

Joe: Exactly. 

Brett: I love the piece about YouTube or TikTok. If I find myself doomscrolling, there's some sort of recovery that I'm looking for, and I might not be finding it here, but I'm… 

Joe: Finding a part of it.

Brett: Finding a part of it. Yeah, and it might be that I'm already exhausted, and I don't have the resources to emotionally process what I need to process.

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: So 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 and more emotional backlog and become a locked-in situation. 

Joe: That's right. 

Brett: Which is why it can take up 12 hours when you really, really get sucked into something like that. 

Joe: And then when you're finished with that, then you're even less resourced to do the thing that you wanna do. It's like, "Oh, I've just scrolled TikTok, now I'm gonna cry?" It's not gonna happen as easily. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Right? Or I just scrolled TikTok for six hours, now I'm gonna go exercise. Not gonna happen as easily. 

Brett: And 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 you probably do, 'cause you're having that thought rather than just doing what you're doing. 

Joe: Correct. Yeah, so oftentimes one of the things that I'm thinking about is I've literally spent time going, "Okay, what are all the ways that I would like to recover?"

Like, if I'm this kind of exhausted, physically or emotionally, what are the things that I would think are very constructive ways to recover? And that's gonna 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 inefficient or I just notice, oh, I'm tired, I'm exhausted, I'm bone tired or whatever it is, I'll look and I'll say, "Okay, 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. 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. 

Brett: Yeah. So surprise, surprise, just like so many other episodes, it comes down to listening to our body. 

Joe: Right. Yeah. And our brains. Like, our brains really... Our bodies in this particular case can actually be quite tricky. Mm. 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 gonna go by kind of the rote 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, 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. The number one, like…

Brett: That'll knock all the other.

Joe: I'm psychologically exhausted, I'm overstimulated and I'm emotionally exhausted, and I'm tired. Sleep. Don't worry about any of the other shit, like sleep. 

Brett: Yeah. And if sleep isn't coming because of these other forms of exhaustion? Then what? 

Joe: Then you've got something to do. Then emote 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. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: I can't say which ones are most effective after that, but I know those two aren't done.

Brett: And hunger is its own rhythm as well. There's recovering from being hungry by eating, and there's recovering from eating by fasting or like really letting the gut rest. 

Joe: I mean, that's the weirdest thing, right? So I do this, as you know, every three... every year for three weeks I go and I do this Ayurvedic panchakarma thing- which is a form of a cleanse and a fast. And I will consume, like, generally, like, 1,000 calories a day. Never hungry. I could have 1,500 calories for breakfast, and I'll be hungry by 11:00 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 the thing 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 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 two meetings to have and I'm switching contexts, I'm gonna be a complete asshole, by 10:00 if I haven't eaten. 

Brett: Yeah. One thing I notice 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. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: And I'm curious to also drill into if you're actually still doing the same thing you're doing, how do you do it in a more restful way?

Joe: So yeah, sometimes resting doesn't actually have change. 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 gonna do your WhatsApp messages or you're gonna do your Slack messages or your emails, and you're gonna 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 gotta get this finished by 5:00."

Brett: You enjoy yourself.

Joe: You enjoy yourself.

Brett: You're a little less self-conscious.

Joe: You deep breathe, you take your 10 minutes, you take or one minute to stare off into space every once in a while. 

Brett: Let yourself make mistakes. Be more playful.

Joe: Exactly. Yeah. And you're gonna feel far more energized at the end of it than 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? If you're really stressed and trying to get it perfectly, it's obviously has a lot harder of a time. 

Brett: Yeah. I remember from the coaching session that you did with somebody that was released about procrastination. It's like 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 gonna be the best website. And which one's gonna lead to you feeling the most rested and recovered? 

Joe: Yeah. Uh, yeah. I thought you were gonna say, "You can build a website where you get everything right, or you can build a website." I thought that's what you were gonna say- ... 'cause yeah.

Brett: That took a minute, but I got it. 

Joe: Yeah. So that, that's the interesting piece is 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 gonna do everything that I normally do in a way 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 gonna get done more next week? And what I've noticed is my capacity grows, my number of times... they say it in, in, in carpentry, it's like measure twice, cut once. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Right? 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 rests.

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 and certain, right?

Brett: Frankness and diplomacy. 

Joe: Exactly. So one's your X, one's 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… 

Brett: Nurturing and forcing.

Joe: Exactly, you can do. And 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 they call it lots of different things. You know, I need contemplation time, or I need, like, thinking time. Bill Gates apparently every quarter would go off into the woods by himself for a week and just 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, the Fed for so many years, he would just spend 30 minutes sitting silently contem- he called it 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, where people think, "Okay, well, now I'm gonna just constantly be doing all the time. I'm just gonna 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 that just deep tranquility, however you get to it.

And for me, it's, you know, 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. 

Brett: Awesome. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Well, thank you. This has been a lot of talking. Let's go get some tranquility. 

Joe: Yeah. Awesome. 

Brett: Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. You can learn more about our programs or join our newsletter at artofaccomplishment.com. If you liked this episode, leave us a review or share the show with a friend. See you next week.