Sometimes you just feel flat, a lack of drive, a lack of zest or motivation, and it's really difficult to even begin a task in the first place. What if what you do while you're not working is actually the number one determinant of your success at work? I'm Rian D'Arras, co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective, and along with my partner, Stephen Kotler, we have taught thousands of professionals how to access flow states at will. Now, picture this. It's 11 a.m.
You're getting bombarded from seven different directions, slack messages, emails, a call from a boss or employee. You're both underslept and a little over-caffeinated and feel that frenzied sense of fatigue and alertness, leaving you frazzled. This is what some mornings are like. Well, if this sounds familiar, it may seem like fatigue or low motivation or chronic stress, but it's likely something different which scientists refer to as allostatic anxiety. load.
Now, allostatic load was coined by two researchers at the Rockefeller University, McEwen and Steller. An allostatic load describes the physical wear and tear on your body and mind that occurs from constantly adjusting to life's pressures. If not properly managed, this allostatic load increases over time and spills over into subsequent days, accumulating in our nervous system and building up. Unfortunately, most of us never clear the allostatic load that accumulates. So you can think of allostatic load kind of in terms of working out.
If you endlessly did bicep curls without giving your bicep adequate time to recover, eventually you'd hit a point where you literally would not be able to lift your water bottle. off your desk. However, if you allow your bicep to recover between the workouts, over time your bicep will not just function optimally, it will be stronger than before.
You'll be able to lift more weight off your desk than you could before. An allostatic load works with your nervous system in a similar fashion. So when your allostatic load is high, it implies that your body and brain are in a constant state of adapting to new stress, with your system releasing more stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. altering your body's homeostasis and cognitive functions.
Whereas in contrast, flow state is associated with a balance of certain neurotransmitters and hormones in the brain, like dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin, which promotes focus, creativity, and problem-solving abilities. And this flow cocktail is disrupted under a heavy allostatic load. Your productivity suffers, like trying to drive with a parking brake on. But long-term, it can be even more severe. Our health can deteriorate.
Career lifespans shorten and big goals become increasingly impossible to reach due to physical limitations. So to perform at your peak and get into flow, clearing your allostatic load regularly, ideally every day, has to happen. And what we're going to cover are three ways that you can do this.
You can elevate your productivity to new heights week after week and have your bicep go stronger rather than getting to the point where you can't lift a bottle off the table. And this starts with transforming yourself from what we call an average knowledge worker whose biology is constantly dragging them down and working against them, impeding their progress into what we call an executive athlete, someone who uses their biology as a slingshot that propels them toward their boldest professional goals. Now, a number of years ago, two researchers, Jim Lohr and Tony Schwartz, wrote an amazing article in Harvard Business Review called corporate athlete. And I want you to consider this analogy from that article. The average professional athlete spends the majority of their time training and only a small percentage of their time actually competing, several hours a day at most.
The typical professional, on the other hand, devotes almost no time to training, yet you have to perform on demand 8, 10, 12 hours a day or more. Athletes enjoy several months of off-season. Most executives are not able to do this.
are fortunate to get three or four weeks of vacation a year. The career of the average professional athlete spans seven years. The average executive, though, is expected to work 40 to 50 years. And this is a problem.
The failure of professionals to train and recover like athletes ends up being a lid on performance. Conversely, the most elite performers treat themselves and think of themselves as executive athletes because they understand one crucial thing. Which is that energy is the lever point for performance.
It's not the hours in the day, but the energy in those hours and how it's allocated that shapes our performance. That's because the number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy we have available is variable. So elite performance is grounded in the skillful mobilization of energy and the elegant back and forth. Fourth, between two states, which we're going to talk about, exertion and recovery.
Now, let's learn how to channel your energy as an executive athlete. The first step is to raise the ceiling with recovery. Now, again, Jim Lohr and Tony Schwartz use this term oscillation to refer to a process of rhythm moving between exertion and recovery. Think about the last time you had a heavy workout.
You're grunting, you're sweating, you're feeling the burn. It feels like your muscles are bulging and growing right there on the gym floor. But in fact, the real muscle building happens later during recovery. This process is known as super compensation. When you stress a muscle through training, the muscle breaks down and then after a recovery period, the capacity or the strength of that muscle increases.
However, if you continue to stress a muscle endlessly, without a recovery period there will be no increase in performance just chronic damage and the reverse is also true if you don't stress a muscle at all your muscles will become increasingly weak over time they'll atrophy and you end up with limited capacity or strength in both cases though the enemy is not the stress that you're putting on your muscles the enemy is what tony and jim call linearity which is the failure to oscillate between these two states of exertion and of recovery now here's the key Recovery determines the limits of your exertion, which is why it's as important as the work itself that you do when exerting. To perform optimally, you need to systematically increase your exposure to stress through exertion, and then enter these periods of deep recovery, which you then emerge out of super compensated, rejuvenated, charged up with expanded capacity, the equivalent of a stronger bicep after the recovery period. Now that you know that you should be oscillating though, between exertion and recovery and that 50% of what is most important to your professional success is the recovery side of the coin, how do you do it?
Because you know what exertion looks like, that's just your work, that's whatever you've got to do later today or tomorrow, whatever tasks you have in your to-do list. But how do you actually recover and what even is it? And that brings us to step 2 which is recovery over relaxation.
Most of us fall into the trap of equating relaxation and recovery. You know, after a strenuous day at work, you recline on your couch and you catch up on your favorite Netflix series. You might even pop open a beer or two.
This kind of feels like recovery. But unfortunately, it's not. It's merely relaxation. At best, it's like putting a band-aid on a leaky pipe.
It might stop the drip for a while, but it does nothing to fix the real underlying problem. Relaxation feels good subjectively. Feels like we're recovering.
But relaxation doesn't flush out the stress toxins that build up in your system, contributing to your allostatic load. It's not kick-starting your parasympathetic arrest and digest system into action, and it's certainly not replenishing the precious neurochemicals you've used up during the day while exerting and hopefully being in a flow state. Active recovery, on the other hand, involves some activity that actively promotes healing and rejuvenation, both mental and physical.
Now, when under stress, our bodies... trigger the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, releasing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones help us focus and perform, but can cause damage when levels are consistently high. So recovery methods activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which counteracts the stress response, promoting rest, digestion, recovery.
It clears out a static load and allows us to recharge. And this balance or oscillation between sympathetic, parasympathetic activity key to preventing burnout and then optimizing performance. Active recovery is kind of like the on-off switch, the interface to our nervous system that most professionals dream of but never find.
They never learn how to click that switch. Active recovery is so important for flow that it's in fact non-negotiable. And the final last stage of the flow cycle, which includes struggle, release, flow, is recovery.
So how do you actually do this? How do you start to put active recovery into practice? Well, here's a list.
of active recovery protocols that we recommend and let's walk through a few of these to give you some examples. Breathwork is one. Practices like the 4-7-8 breathing method and box breathing can help stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the body's relaxation response, which can decrease heart rate, lower blood pressure and enhance cognitive function.
One of the nice things about breathwork is that a lot of people don't succeed with meditation because meditation is simple but not easy. It's complex. Whereas breathwork involves running a certain breathing pattern and if you do so you will get the result it's more bottoms up and nervous system based and works great for that reason now the next one is cold therapy cold exposure stimulates the production of norepinephrine a hormone and neurotransmitter that can improve mood alertness and focus and it triggers vasoconstriction and vasodilation which enhance circulation and recovery Jumping in an ice bath after work rather than relaxing in front of the TV is going to do tremendous things.
A critical point relaxation and recovery are distinct. Things that actually result in really effective recovery can be not relaxing at all like sitting in an ice bath but high in recovery you get out of that ice bath an hour later your nervous system your allostatic load is going to be lower even though sitting in that ice bath was the least relaxing thing you could possibly imagine doing now heat therapy regular sauna sessions or hot baths massage or structural integration therapy myofascial release using tools like foam rollers or lacrosse balls to help alleviate muscle tension again something that Results in recovery, but it doesn't necessarily feel relaxing as we're doing it. Meditation, which we talked about, it is more challenging for most, but can be a tremendous form of active recovery. Exercise and the anandamide flush you get post-exercise can be phenomenal for regulating the nervous system.
Hiking and spending time in nature, amazing forms of active recovery. Dr. Andrew Huberman, friend of the Flow Research Collective, and his research at Stanford has shown that literally just looking at wide horizon lines, it's a tremendous form of active recovery. in nature has a calming soothing effect on the nervous system and then sleep sleep seems passive but sleep's actually a highly active state you're consolidating information that's been newly acquired activation in your amygdala is being reduced your glymphatic system is getting cleared out your muscles are being repaired so even though sleep feels passive it's very active but how do you know if one of these active recovery protocols is actually working for you and maybe you're thinking well what about this other thing that i like to do is that active recovery does that count well there's two Litmus tests to tell whether something is counting for your nervous system as active recovery. The first one is an objective one, and this is actually using a metric called heart rate variability, which is a key indicator of stress and recovery balance in the body. If you're doing a certain active recovery protocol and your HRV is increasing over time, this is likely functioning as recovery for you.
Now, the second litmus test is a subjective one, and this is that it gives you such a dramatic neurophysiological reset That it feels like you've had a mini vacation. One thing I always like to do is in a long evening or a full day off, I stack a lot of these active recovery protocols together in one go. And then I come back into work on Monday with that just back from holidays feeling where your nervous system is all smoothed out. You've kind of forgotten about the details of work and the intricacies of the day-to-day and you're ready to hit it again. So you want to be able to get that two-week vacation feel.
in hours with the right active recovery protocol. Now if you're someone who loves the grind and you take pride in your ability to outwork others, I want you to know this. Recovery is part of the work.
Recovery gives you the optimal state within which you'll be able to... perform your highest quality work. If you're working late in the office on a Sunday thinking you're getting ahead of the competition, the irony is that the exact opposite is likely happening.
You'll be beaten by the person who is letting the nervous system level up on the Sunday with recovery protocols because they'll hit Monday morning with a superior nervous system to yours. Peak performance comes down to out oscillating others rather than out working others. It's fast and deep recovery, fast and deep exertion, deep recovery, deep exertion again and again.
That rapid oscillation that is what signifies the winners. It may even be the case that the more hard charging you are the more you need active recovery because you are more likely to have an increased sympathetic nervous system. Now if this sounds like you the key is to overcompensate recovery. That means as you become more swamped, sleep more and recover more. The intuitive thing to do is to ditch recovery when things get really demanding and stressful so you can cram in more work.
But this is completely backwards and counterproductive. Instead, as work piles up and deadlines loom, lean into the act of recovery. So schedule your active recovery routines similarly to how you'd schedule work tasks.
Bake them in every day. Take an hour. You might have daily practices that you do.
in the morning or in the evening for recovery like breath work in the sauna or taking an ice bath or walking in nature and every week you want to take a day where you stack these sorts of active recovery protocols maybe on that day you go for swim in the ocean and then you do a workout and then you go for a hike in nature and then you have a nap and then you get a massage something like that stack the day with active recovery products every month we want to do a three day period fully dedicated to recovery which ideally also includes digital detox during this period where each day we're filling our day with these active recovery protocols and then every quarter you want to take a full 10 days one week plus two weekends to reset and have active recovery be the number one priority and then every year you want to take that full two-week vacation for a complete reboot to clear all that allostatic load that's built up over the previous year now there's still one more Peace to the puzzle for becoming the executive athlete and this final piece is even more difficult than recovery especially for ambitious professionals Live like a lion When you understand these first two pieces that you need to be Oscillating from exertion to recovery and that active recovery is the form of recovery you want not passive recovery Then you start to be able to live like a lion because the lion is either Sleeping with the pack or sprinting to kill its prey When it's time to kill, they do it fast. Then they return to recover. You can work in the same way. View it as a ferocious sprint followed by exorbitant recovery. When you make...
work binary like this you allow your nervous system to recalibrate so your output can reach previously unattainable levels and it seems counter to what you often hear you've been told to do more faster that the key to elite performance is about being able to fit more tasks into your day but that doesn't work that causes busyness not progress and the result is reaching the end of a work day feeling drained looking back and realizing you only did a couple of hours of real work in the first place with the rest of it just being low value distraction reactive work fracturing you your attention and sapping your energy. It's a terrible feeling wasting away hours of our life in this mode of half working, this gray zone, but not enjoying our lives either. So many people's careers get swallowed by this. Instead, executive athletes work in a binary fashion. They are more or less always in one of two states either they're working with 100 intensity in sixth gear or they're 100 switched off unplugged recovering deeply and enjoying life and they ruthlessly eliminate everything in between fully on fully off that's it and that way the next time you come back push, you can push even harder than before.
Until you integrate active recovery into your life, your limits remain unknown. The ceiling can go up and up and up. And if you want a cheat code for mastering this process so you can achieve peak performance daily, watch this video on the flow cycle, which talks about all the other elements beyond recovery and how to master them.