---
title: "The Power of Rest and Recovery"
description: "A useful corrective for anyone who still treats sleep as the first thing to cut."
author: "Rahim Rasul"
type: "Podcast episode"
series: "Halftime Talks"
published: "2016-07-28"
duration: "17 min"
theme: "Reps and effort"
tags: "rest, sleep, recovery, performance"
audio: "https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rahimrasul/HTT099_Power_of_Rest_and_Recovery.mp3?dest-id=175061"
url: "https://iloveprocess.com/halftime/the-power-of-rest-and-recovery/"
site: "I Love Process"
---

# The Power of Rest and Recovery

_A useful corrective for anyone who still treats sleep as the first thing to cut._

**The question:** How many of you guys know when you've pushed yourself to the limit, and it's time to rest and recover?

Listen: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rahimrasul/HTT099_Power_of_Rest_and_Recovery.mp3?dest-id=175061

## Before you listen

Do you have an active long-term strategy for rest and recovery? Or are you burning the candle at both ends, hoping to make it through a crisis in one piece? Rest and recovery are as important as nutrition and fitness.

Sleep has a bad reputation: I'll sleep when I'm dead, if you snooze you lose. Cramming with a Red Bull gets you through a night, and it fails as a way of life. The talk borrows from the arts, where the rest in music is the pause that gives the notes meaning. Then the gym, where lifting only creates the stimulus and the muscle grows back stronger during recovery. Behind the refusal to rest, the talk finds a fear of not being in control.

Listen for the phone battery question, and the closing challenge: go to bed an hour earlier and give yourself time to reflect before reaching for productivity. Run it as a two-week experiment and take notes on how you feel.

## From the talk

> It is that pause that gives the actual notes meaning, or else it is just a cacophony of sounds that aren't spaced apart in a way that we can process them.
>
> Rest is essential. Recovery is essential.
>
> Always be on command, always being on guard. That may be a short term tactic. But it is an ultimate failure if it's your long term strategy.

## Sit with this

- What percent battery is on your phone right now? And do you know when it's time to hit recharge and plug it in?

## Transcript

To begin today, I want to ask you if you've ever heard any disparaging quotes around the idea of, of either sleep or rest or recovery. Now to fill in this gap since obviously, I can't hear your responses, I will include some of them. Some of the disparaging remarks that I've heard about sleep, I will sleep when I'm dead. If you snooze, you lose. I'm gonna burn the candle on both ends. These and other phrases These and other little idioms that you hear all the time, do not necessarily put sleep on a pedestal of appreciation that it deserves. Now what happens and also why we can say that sleep is this necessity. It's necessary for us to use it. I also will crash as a system.

You know you have some people in history like Thomas Edison, who says sleep is the number one thing detracting from our humanities productivity. And so over the time, I as I can remember it's gotten a bad rap. There's even some occupation is where they want you on all day, it becomes a badge of courage to go as hard as you can push it. If you push it to the limit, you're perceived as a team player, a hard worker, and somebody who understands division that is needed to win. Now doing this, and we've all done it, we've all been in school, we've all cram, we've all had that Red Bull so that we can stay up. But these are tactics are short term implementations and protocols, not necessarily protocols that we can adopt on a long term, lifestyle basis.

And we all see we see it sometimes in entertainers that push themselves so far to the limit, that their body just breaks down, literally going into seizures passing out, you name it, it's happened. We tend to talk about exercise and nutrition, but the other leg of this pedestal is asleep. Sleep and rest are critical to performance. To take this analogy into the fields of the arts, I want to demonstrate how rest is necessary. So when in music, we've all heard of the rest of music, but to understand the value of rest and music, it is that pause that gives the actual notes, meaning, or else it is just a cacophony of sounds that aren't spaced apart in a way that we can process them. Remember that when I go forward, you also have dance, you have this, this forward and back and this rest and it's the pause between the movement that gives it meaning and painting you have the impression of a kinetic movement, and sometimes in places that are void of paint, or void of subject matter that rest that that pause that respite, shall we say, allows the greater pitcher of perspective to come and focus in the audience mind.

Rest is essential. Recovery is essential. If we don't have in our own personal plan, rest and recovery, designated scheduled, systematized as a part of our daily routine, as part of our long term strategy. There'll be a point when the whole system breaks down. A lot of people don't put the health the rest in a recovery. In the whole lifestyle conversation. Lifestyle is typically about how much am I consuming? How much am I buying, where am I going, but rest, recovery, health, nutrition, are all part of lifestyle. As I closely examine some of the individuals who may not necessarily hold a high value, a high priority on sleep, what is going on in their head, clearly, they've bought into the mythology that if they're sleeping and you're not working, you think you have to push it to the limit and control every single piece and variable in the equation.

I would say the opposite is true. Obviously, you have the opposite end, which is lazy, but there's also a type A mentality going on. And behind that what will happen if I don't do this mentality is a fear is a fear of not being in control of not feeling that you've done everything in your power to yield the results that you prefer. Now, a lot of times we are self critical. A lot of times we look at our effort and know that it could be better once we finished. But sometimes you know, you know each time you step up to the plate and try to produce whatever output it is, how hard you went, how much effort you went, how much of the knowledge that you held that you actually utilized in a moment.

And if you've given your all then you've given excellence An excellence can give you a sense of pride knowing that you've given it your all. And knowing that you can step back and understand when it's time to rest and recover. So you can bring that level of performance again to your next the bed. And speaking of analogies, I want to like in this need for rest and recovery to exercise. Years ago, I was in a gym on a weekly basis four times a week pushing my body to its absolute physical limit. And each time in there, my body continue to evolve. And it makes me ask you if you know what exercise especially weight training, is there to do? Does the weight training make your muscles bigger?

That's a trick question. Actually, it creates the stimulus that sets it in motion for your muscles to get bigger or for you to get fit. Weight training especially creates deep muscular skeletal fatigue, that thus creates a stimulus that your body responds in kind to, as you're lifting the weights are exercising, what you're really doing is breaking down the muscle and offering a stimulus enough to say, hey, next time we built muscle, let's build a little extra, because we weren't capable of necessarily achieving that last rep and I want to get stronger. What's necessary after that, after pushing it to the limit, is rest and recovery. And without rest and recovery, the muscle needs to be given time to allow all the new muscle to fill up in its place to be stronger, to be more durable.

And also to to find that ounce of strength to push beyond that previous attempt and the previous week. So as we look at this analogy, and cross contextualize it to our own life, hey, if you've went hard, and you've pushed it into paint, all that you can do, then you've afforded yourself, the luxury of rest, allow that respite that rest and recovery, recharge and refuel you, I'll ask you a question. Most likely, you'll have the answer right now without looking what percent battery is on your phone right now. And do you know when it's time to hit recharge and plug it in. And also some of you guys out there are walking around with portable chargers. But how many of you guys know when you've pushed yourself to the limit, and it's time to rest and recover?

Luckily for us that rest and recovery is within our hands. For that long term strategy for the life strategy, the life lifestyle strategy for rested recovery, it can begin with adding an extra hour of sleep. That extra bit of rest can be a small session where you're sitting with your thoughts, otherwise called reflection, some call it meditation, some call it a 30 minute prayer, who knows. These are the elements to add clarity, to your day. They also produce hormones that combat stress and anxiety. It's a balancing of your cortisol levels, right? And the more that we do that, the more that we're able to bring our best to the equation. Because like exercise, if you over exercise, there's a point when your performance begins to diminish.

There's a point when you exercise and you overtrain that the response needed or even desired is not going to happen. And so we must find that right balance of how hard we go in life and when it's time to rest and recover. So I challenge you go to bed an hour earlier, wake up and before you reach towards trying to be productive, give yourself a bit of time to reflect on your day to reflect on things that you could be appreciative for. And I am certain that you will find a greater level of performance at play in your life. At the very least, let this be a two week experiment. Take notes on how you feel with a little bit more time resting and recovering.

Remove some of the distractions that have taken away your mind share. Because when you perform under stress, it diminishes your performance. Always be on command always being on guard. That may be a short term tactic. But it is an ultimate failure if it's your long term strategy.