If you want limitless energy, you have to change the way you think about rest and recovery.

For as long as I can remember, rest and recovery were rewards for hard work.

If you didn’t do any work today, why should you get to rest?

If you weren't drop-dead tired, what are you recovering from?

The problem with this is that there will always be a gap. A gap between what you’ve done and what you should have done.

The goal post has already moved once you reach it.

And that’s a recipe for burnout.

You’ll think you didn’t work hard enough, and if you think you didn't work hard enough, you won’t rest. If you don’t rest, you’re never giving yourself a chance to recharge.

And you’ll have less and less in the tank until you finally give out and are forced to rest, i.e. burnout.

So if you want to become someone who works hard and rests hard. Someone who strikes a balance that actually leads you to perform better.

Who better to learn from than the pros of resting for performance?

Elite athletes.

Here’s a belief most driven people hold, even if they never say it out loud:

Rest is for people who deserve it. Rest is for people who worked hard.

Other common beliefs:

Sleep is optional.

Relaxing is laziness.

If I slow down, I’ll fall behind.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

These beliefs are invisible and unconscious.

They run quietly in the background. And they absolutely wreck you.

They lead to some painful results:

There’s a concept in physiology called allostatic load. Allostatic load is the cumulative toll that stress takes on the body and brain over time.

Think of it like a stress bank account.

Every demand on your system — work, deadlines, sleep deprivation, emotional strain, poor nutrition, high-intensity training — makes a withdrawal.

The more withdrawals you make, the more stress builds up in the body and brain.

Stress itself isn’t the enemy.

Unrecovered stress is.

When you stay in constant “fight or flight,” cortisol remains elevated.

Your nervous system stays on high alert.

Digestion suffers.

Sleep fragments.

Hormones shift.

Focus declines.

Mood dips.

You can function like this for months. Maybe years.

But the longer you stay like this, the more you start going into the negatives. Then one day, you go to the bank, and they tell you, "Insufficient funds."

And unlike money, when your biological resources run out, and you 'borrow', the interest comes at a hefty price.

The problem isn’t your work ethic.

The problem is that you’ve been spending without replenishing.

Recovery is how you make deposits back into the stress bank account.

If you want to avoid paying that brutal interest, you have to start depositing back into the account.

And where better to learn about proper recovery than from those who do it the best:

Athletes.

Going into 2025, I found myself juggling responsibilities that each required a lot from me:

(If you’re asking yourself why I like to do things in 3’s, I’m asking myself the same thing. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for you yet.)

My main goal for the year was to do all three to the best of my abilities without burning out.

Though I had recovered from burnout in 2022, this time was different.

This was more about preventing burnout.

Admittedly, I didn’t know where to start.

So I did what I knew: I looked at who was solving it at the highest level.

And that led me to elite athletes.

In these early stages, I saw burnout prevention as primarily an energy management process. So, by my understanding, if I managed my energy throughout the year, I wouldn’t burn out.

This is one piece of the puzzle.

One part of the burnout prevention equation is recovery.

Elite athletes don’t treat recovery as optional.

They treat it as a non-negotiable part of their performance equation.

For them, the training and the recovery are equally important.

You can’t have one without the other.

That shifted everything for me:

As a knowledge worker, creator, or solopreneur, you are an athlete. A cognitive one.

Your work is your arena or field.

Your mind is your tool, like the body is to an athlete.

I also learned you can’t separate cognitive performance from physical health.

They’re one system.

What depletes the body depletes the mind.

What restores the body restores the mind.

The foundations are the same.

If you’re interested, you can read about my burnout-free game plan for 2025 here.

Getting into learning about recovery, I had overcomplicated it.

I thought:

With more research, I learned that they only make up 10% of recovery strategies. Sure, most of the athletes you read about use them, but if you want a simple approach to recovery, focus on the 90%.

The fundamentals.

Elite athletes obsess over fundamentals.

Let’s break them down.

There are 6 key pillars of recovery (5 fundamental and 1 extra):

If sleep were a drug, it would be banned in professional sports.

It’s the single most effective performance tool we have, and it is severely underutilised.

We sacrifice sleep for Netflix.

For scrolling.

For “just one more task.”

Fun fact: The CEO of Netflix stated in 2017 that sleep is their biggest competition.

That should tell you something.

Sleep is beneficial for several things, but most of the magic happens during two stages of sleep:

During deep non-REM sleep, your body releases growth hormone. Tissue repair happens. Energy stores replenish. Your immune system strengthens.

During REM sleep, your brain consolidates learning, regulates mood, sharpens reaction time, and enhances creativity.

If you don't get enough deep sleep?

You could struggle with slower physical recovery, hormonal disruption and fatigue.

If you don't get enough REM?

You could experience slower thinking, less emotional impulse control and impaired learning.

If you want elite recovery:

Bonus: Morning sunlight.

Get outside within the first hour of waking.

5–10 minutes on a clear day.

Longer if overcast.

It anchors your circadian rhythm, boosts daytime alertness, and improves nighttime sleep.

If you want to learn more about sleep, I highly recommend reading Dr Matthew Walker’s book, Why We Sleep.

Dr Andrew Huberman’s YouTube channel is great too. He talks about the importance of morning sunlight and more on mental and physical performance.

Sleep isn’t a luxury.

It’s foundational to your well-being.

Your body is over 70% water.

Even mild dehydration impacts your:

Hydration stabilises temperature, supports blood flow, and keeps your brain functioning optimally.

A simple rule I follow:

2 - 3 litres of water a day.

I drink closer to 3 litres on days I train.

A helpful tip to evaluate if you’re drinking enough water is to monitor the colour of your urine.

The lighter the colour, the more you're in the green zone.

But you don't want it too light. Too light or even clear, and that’s a clear sign you’re drinking too much.

If your urine is dark, drink up.

You can drink electrolytes if you’re training intensely or sweat excessively, but try get your electrolytes from salt and food.

This brings us to nutrition.

Even if you're following a specific diet, you always want to aim for whole, single-ingredient foods.

If it didn’t come from nature, you don’t want it in your body.

General guidelines:

Aim for at least 0.8 - 1.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight.

Protein helps repair tissue and build muscle.

When it comes to carbohydrates, again, it may depend on your diet if you’re following one.

But don’t avoid carbs.

They are your brain and body’s preferred fuel source.

You want a diverse range of vegetables and fruits, as it promotes a diverse gut microbiome. The different micronutrients support different systems in your body.

You also need a decent amount of fat for hormone health.

Give your body the proper fuel it needs if you want to recover well.

Elite performers eat to support performance, not aesthetics alone.

You might think that the best form of recovery is lounging around and being on your backside all day, but there’s a form of recovery that is just as important.

Active recovery.

Active recovery involves low-intensity movement and exercise:

Why?

Because it promotes blood flow, which delivers nutrients faster and removes metabolic waste (like lactate) in the body.

It speeds up repair and reduces soreness without adding stress.

Even 20–30 minutes at 50–60% intensity can accelerate recovery.

As the adage goes:

Movement is medicine.

As much as we have evolved, some of our systems are still old and function the same way as they did thousands of years ago.

One of those systems is the nervous system.

Our nervous system treats the stress of a deadline the same as the stress of surviving a physical threat.

If you don’t intentionally shift from sympathetic (fight-or-flight) to parasympathetic (rest-and-digest), recovery is impaired.

Simple tools you can use include:

The goal:

Signal safety.

Because your body won’t rebuild if it thinks it’s still under threat.

This one is either the first thing addressed or the last thing sacrificed.

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway…

If your workload constantly exceeds your capacity, no recovery protocol will save you.

Recovery follows a cycle:

Stress → Recovery → Adaptation

If stress never drops…

Recovery never steps in…

Adaptation never happens.

In flow research, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a Flow Chart. The Flow Chart demonstrates how one can access the Flow Channel and experience flow.

In the Flow Channel, the challenge of what you’re doing is roughly equal to the skills you have to do that thing.

If the task you’re working on is too difficult and above your skill level, you’ll be anxious.

If it’s too easy and below your skill level, you will be bored.

You want to find that sweet spot where the complexity of the task meets your skill level, promoting flow.

Other than promoting flow, you don’t want to be overwhelmed with the tasks so that you start sacrificing your recovery.

When you can find that balance between your skills and the challenge of the task, you create enough stress that it works in your favour. Then you recover, and in that recovery, you adapt and get better.

So you don’t want to avoid challenge, but you want the challenge to stretch you just enough that you can grow to meet it.

Time management and planning are also crucial when it comes to workload management. The more you can organise and plan your life, the better you can manage your workload and perform at your best.

Elite performers periodize.

You should, too.

Heavy weeks. Lighter weeks.

Intense days. Strategic rest days.

To run a marathon, you don’t sprint the entire thing.

A good way to start implementing periodisation in your work is by building and adopting a deep work protocol.

You can learn how to do that here.

Now the fun stuff.

Ice baths.

Saunas.

Red light therapy.

Compression boots.

Massage guns.

All the gadgets.

Cold exposure can reduce inflammation and soreness.

Sauna improves circulation and relaxation.

Red light may support cellular repair.

These are all incredible tools that help with recovery.

Some are more geared towards physical recovery than mental, but as mentioned earlier, your physical recovery affects your mental recovery and vice versa.

But remember:

They BUILD ON the fundamentals.

They don’t replace sleep.

They don’t replace nutrition.

They don’t replace workload management.

Don’t buy gadgets to compensate for poor fundamentals.

Get the 90% right, and if you want an edge, you can incorporate the 10%.

So… that was a lot, and I hope it didn’t overwhelm you.

Don’t try to implement everything at once.

Instead, follow this tiered approach that helps you build a protocol from the foundations up.

These are non-negotiable and free.

If you’re not doing these consistently, no gadget will make up the difference.

Most people are grinding themselves to dust.

They’re depleting themselves dry.

They’re making withdrawals on a bank account they never deposit into.

You, on the other side, have a different approach.

A better way to do things.

Recovery isn’t something you earn.

It’s a key component of the system.

It’s something you build into the system.

And when you do, everything shifts.

You stop feeling like you’re running on empty.

You stop needing willpower to push through.

You stop needing caffeine to function.

You start showing up fresh.

Focused.

Clear.

Capable of doing your best work consistently, without burning out.

Train hard. Recover harder.

Work hard. Recover harder.

Focus hard. Recover harder.

That’s the game.

Thank you for reading.

I hope it helped.

See you in the next one.

— Shana