Turning 30

One of the hardest things about finishing the third decade of your life is your body’s physical recovery. The thing I could get away with at 25, has a way higher tax today. Dancing for 6 hours straight will be paid for with at least 4 days, a split in my wrist would set me back more than a month, and ironically enough, a “bit too much” workout, will be a negative return investment. This longer recovery has resulted in a much lower ceiling for my physical fitness. I can’t be as fit as 7 years ago, because two weeks of no training, could set you back 2 months.

Work as a professional athlete

At work, just like in fitness, having an efficient recovery scheme is invaluable. Your skills, your performance, and, hell, your legacy (!) are built over years not months. It is a compounding effect that needs consistency, and a break from that consistency can wipe away a lot of effort. That break, commonly known as “burnout” is not a binary state as some like to use it, but more like an inflammation that builds up and prevents you from performing at your best. Though it is true that if you don’t treat it for long enough, you’ll find yourself on the bench.

You don’t recover by lying on the beach

The problem is that all the “best practices” for recovery from work don’t work well enough. Those practices generally include getting away from work. Whether it’s an offsite at a winery with the team or a 5-days resort vacation with your partner, It always disappoints by the amount of battery it recoups. Sure, the Mai-Tai is great, and it feels good in the moment, but after 3 days you are already dreading the “coming back to the office”. And for a good reason, once you’re back, by noon, you forget all about the white sand.

I believe that, just like athletes don’t recover by staying in bed and avoiding physical activity, you can’t really recover from work by avoiding it altogether. Recovery is needed because you are doing something that is not natural for your body or mind (not that physical effort or “social problem solving”, aka “work”, are not natural for us, but their intensity is). To recover you need to go back to your natural movement.

Get back on the horse

I propose a different kind of recovery. Don’t avoid work, replace it with the equivalence of physical therapy. Recover by doing the work that gives you energy, and avoid only the type of work that takes energy away from you. Whatever those are to you. For me, it’s the meetings that take away energy – the human interactions. What gives me energy is thinking, planning, and being strategic. Thinking about what my team needs right now, and building a talk about it or writing it up. Ideating and planning research projects can also light me up. Come to think of it, the feeling of being active and entrepreneurial in my job is a major source of meaning and energy. A reactive state wipes me clean of it real fucking fast.

As we’ve established, burnout is like an injury. But it’s also like trauma, like falling off of a horse. You don’t need a sun-bed to enjoy riding again, you need to feel safe riding. You need to get back on the horse.

-Nivge

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