In college, on the truly exhausting days, I learned to escape to the locker room during gymnastics practice. I'd pop a 200mg caffeine pill from my locker, flip off the lights, and lie on the cold floor with my eyes closed for 2, 3, maybe even 5 minutes.
My microrest would end when I heard another guy coming down the long hallway that led into the locker room. I'd flip on the light and pretend I was just heading out. Later on we got a nicer locker room directly adjacent to the gym, which made sneaking such naps impossible. But for those first few years, this was how I survived on days when the problem sets, student club responsibilities, and sleep deprivation had really gotten to me.
It sounds crazy, but those stolen minutes of rest, lying completely still with my eyes closed, was the difference between making through a tough workout - a little wobbly but still intact - and wiping out on a tricky skill and injuring myself.
Most people understand the importance of rest and recovery in athletics. The NCAA forbids athletes from having more than 22 hours of mandatory training per week. The NBA and other pro sports leagues prevent teams from playing too many games in a row. Most coaches rest star players after tough stretches to keep them fresh and healthy throughout the season.
But when it comes to professional productivity, rest and recovery often get short shrift. I work with founders and executives in Silicon Valley and New York City, and the pattern I see is striking.
The grind is back. Startups led by twenty-somethings are advocating 996, a protocol first popularized by Chinese companies that expected workers to come in from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Long days, late nights, sleeping in the office is becoming normalized. And even bigger companies are requiring more RTO, more face time, and raising the bar on team output, causing workers to frantically put in more hours to avoid getting cut in the next mass layoff.
Yes, people will complain about losing productivity at the end of a 12-hour day, and department heads will give lip service to increased workloads and taking time off when needed. But almost nobody approaches rest with the same intentionality they bring to their work. And that's a huge missed opportunity.
Performance is the product of productive stress times high-quality recovery. Yes, you don't get output without intense effort. But you also cannot perform at your best when you are not well-rested.
The High-Capacity Trap
Look, some people are genuinely built different. Some can indeed sustain what most would consider unreasonable hours. Research shows that conscientiousness - the personality trait most predictive of job performance - enables exactly this kind of sustained drive. And yes, training matters too: the more you work long hours in an environment where everyone else does the same, the more natural it becomes.
I saw this at a wedding with my former gymnastics teammates - spine surgeons, law firm partners, late-stage venture-backed founders who all trained brutally hard and carried that capacity into demanding careers. One became a senior finance leader at SpaceX, working directly with Elon. When I asked about how he recovered, he laughed and said he'd "white-knuckled" 80+ hour weeks for twelve years straight.
Then he burned out. Not just from the hours themselves, but from a toxic work culture combined with that relentless overload and no real time to recover. After he quit, he spent eighteen months running a small brewery before he could return to high-stakes work.
Here's what the research shows: conscientiousness enables extraordinary work capacity, but it's also positively associated with emotional exhaustion and burnout. The very trait that lets you push harder makes you more vulnerable when you ignore recovery.
This isn't about work-life balance or self-care in the typical sense. I'm not here to tell you to work less or that long hours are morally wrong. There are many ways to build successful companies, and some of them involve intense periods of sustained effort.
I'm saying that if you're going to work hard, you need to rest hard. And resting hard requires understanding what actually restores your capacity to perform.
The Science of Recovery
You might say that my experience with rest and recovery as an athlete is incidental to work performance. That you don't need as much rest if you're just sitting in front of a laptop typing. But you'd be wrong.
The research on rest and recovery is extensive, spanning sleep science, exercise physiology, and work-recovery psychology. The short version: your brain is an organ that relies on oxygen, blood glucose, and the same physiological systems as the rest of your body. When you deplete those systems through sustained cognitive work, you need specific interventions to restore them. Not all rest is created equal.
Let's start with the most obvious one that everyone gets wrong anyway.
Sleep is not a luxury, it is central to our brain health. Like food, water, and air, if we are deprived of sleep long enough we can suffer enormous bodily harm. Both slow-wave and REM sleep contribute to memory consolidation and reorganization of knowledge, which underpins learning and problem-solving. High quality sleep (uninterrupted sessions of 6+ hours with consistent bedtime and wake times) are crucial for getting the most out of our sleep. The advice to "sleep on it" and the stories of people waking up with solutions to problems don't come from nowhere - your brain actively consolidates memories and forms new associations between disparate pieces of information, a process that enhances problem-solving and creativity in ways that can't happen while you're awake.
The problem: revenge bedtime procrastination. After a hard day of work it's tough to go to bed without any sense of "me time". So you stay up. You scroll feeds, binge watch junk content, and play puzzle or video games. Not only do you go to bed later, but your exposure to light and stimulation make it harder for you to fall asleep, a double hit on recovery. If you really are committed to maximizing your performance, you'd block off time for these activities earlier in your day and commit to an earlier bedtime following a bedtime wind down routine.
Naps are not just for kids. When possible, even short naps can help your brain recover, especially when sleep deprived. One study of night-shift workers found that a 10-minute nap improved objective performance without grogginess. Another showed that a 30-minute nap helped with encoding new information, though with different tradeoffs in terms of post-nap alertness. The sweet spot for most people is 10 to 20 minutes in the early afternoon.
Naps aren't always possible for people who need to be at their employer's location to work, but most office and knowledge workers have at least some work-from-home time available. Sleeping at work may sound heretical, but there's a strong argument that a brief nap can boost performance. If you're stuck in back-to-back meetings for six hours a day, skipping one 30-minute meeting to catch a few ZZZs could be worth it. The productivity gain from improved cognitive function would more than make up for the lost meeting time.
Micro Breaks and the Power of Doing Nothing
Those locker room floor sessions I mentioned were too short to be considered a nap. Instead they are what researchers call micro breaks: brief periods of 30 seconds to 10 minutes where you disengage from task demands. A systematic review and meta-analysis across 22 studies shows that micro breaks reduce fatigue and increase vigor. The effects on task performance are smaller but trend positive, especially as breaks lengthen toward the 10-minute mark.
What makes micro breaks effective isn't just that you've stopped doing work to scroll Hacker News. It's what you do during the break. Quiet wakeful rest, where you sit or lie down with your eyes closed and let your mind wander, protects new learning from interference and aids memory consolidation, and measurably better than scrolling through your phone or checking email. The latter activities introduce new information that interferes with consolidation. The former allows your brain to process what you just learned.
You've probably heard about the benefits of meditation - actively cultivating a state of calm where your focus is directed to a single source, like your breath or a mantra. Micro breaks are meditation's cousin: perhaps less directly powerful, but a more easily accessible form of recovery.
Practically speaking this means, next time you finish say a difficult strategic planning session, don't use the 10 minutes before your next meeting to dive into your inbox or check Slack. You're may feel like you're taking a break, but you're introducing new cognitive demands that prevent consolidation of what you just discussed. Instead, close your laptop, close your eyes, and sit quietly for five minutes. You might look strange doing it, but the research is clear that this approach better serves learning and retention.
Not All Leisure Is Restorative
Research on leisure and recovery has led to the useful DRAMMA model, which stands for Detachment (from work), Relaxation, Autonomy, Mastery, Meaning, and Affiliation. The best recovery activities provide some combination of these elements. Nature exposure, time with friends you genuinely like, engaging in a craft or hobby, deliberate physical movement that isn't work-adjacent, these activities tend to check multiple DRAMMA boxes.
This is where most people's intuitions about rest break down. You finish work, you're exhausted, so you collapse on the couch and scroll Instagram or binge Netflix. You're not working, so you must be recovering, right? Not quite.
Passive screen time is rarely the best choice for restorative leisure. Randomized trials show that reducing smartphone time improves stress markers and sleep quality. Video games are mixed: fast competitive titles can elevate arousal and may not be restorative, but casual or puzzle games can reduce stress and support mood.
Physical movement supports recovery, even when it feels counterintuitive. Yes, progressive overload strength and cardiovascular exercise is valuable for long-term health, but when you're depleted from cognitive work, grinding through another high-intensity session can add stress rather than relieve it. Low-effort movement like walks, gentle yoga, stretching, even brief dance breaks can give your brain a break while supporting the physical systems that enable mental performance. Save the hard workouts for when you have the reserves to benefit from them. When you're recovering, move your body without punishing it.
"Touch grass" is actually great advice. Nature exposure reliably restores directed attention and improves executive function. Both classic and recent studies show cognitive and neural benefits from nature walks or even just viewing nature scenes. If you can't get out to a local park for a quick stroll, even softly gazing at an Apple TV nature screensaver can help you tap into some of nature's restorative power.
Hanging out with people you like is particularly powerful for recovery. Social connection supports recovery through multiple physiological pathways: oxytocin release, higher vagal tone, faster stress recovery. This is why a dinner with close friends often feels more restorative than hours of phone time on the couch, even though the latter requires less energy. The social connection is actively rebuilding your capacity to perform.
Hobbies can be another restorative activity. Whether it's some kind of craft, making music, joining a rec soccer or kickball league, running a regular board game or DnD campaign, or trying out new baking recipes, activities that require learning, creativity, and skill can be deeply restorative. And you don't need to be good at them - mastery isn't about being the best, it's about intentional growth.
The practical implication of restorative leisure: you need to actively design your leisure time, not just collapse into whatever requires the least effort. If you're serious about performance, ask yourself: are you genuinely detaching from work? Are you engaging in activities that provide mastery, meaning, or connection? Or are you just consuming content until you're tired enough to sleep?
Rest Lets You Play the Long Game
The most dangerous thing about being able to push through exhaustion is that you can. For years, maybe. You can override the signals, pound more coffee, grind harder than everyone else, and watch the wins pile up. You wear those late nights like a badge of honor. You're the one who always comes through.
Until the day you don't. Because you can't. Then it's not just a long weekend or even a few weeks off to get you back on track. It will take months, even years. Plus therapy, a new diet, blood work, prescription meds, and a whole new attitude on your career.
Every high performer I know who made it past a decade learned this eventually. Some of us learned it lying on a locker room floor between sets. Some learned it running a brewery for eighteen months. Some learned it on a hospital bed after a series of panic attacks.
The early learners got something the late learners didn't: more years at the top. Not balance. Not wellness. More years doing the hardest, most interesting work. They figured out that how you rest decides how far you go.
This isn't about whether you should work hard. It's about whether you want to still be working hard a decade or two from now.
