Avoid burnout and master the art of pacing yourself

There’s a scene in the movie Operation Grandma, a classic Israeli comedy about three brothers navigating bureaucratic hurdles to honor their grandmother's final wishes, where one of the brothers, a brash swimming champ, is asked for advice about how to win a medal in swimming. He replies, “You start as fast as you can, then slowly and surely you increase speed.”

Easily done, right?

We know that few rewards in life can be attained without pushing beyond our comfort zones, but starting at 100% and trying to turn up the dial even further is a good recipe for burnout. The swimmer’s quip did came up to my mind as I was thinking about this question: “What can sports science teach us about how to reach peak performance in work and life without collapsing before the finishing line?”

Quite a lot, I think.

Our brains protect us from burning out

Sports scientists have suggested that our brains have intrinsic processes designed to limit our pace and prevent us from burning out.

The German physiologist Hans-Volkhart Ulmer studied pacing strategies in endurance activities and coined the term teleoanticipation to describe a phenomenon where our brain subconsciously estimates the remaining distance or time required to complete a task and modulates our pace to prevent a catastrophic failure before reaching the endpoint.

The influential South African sports scientist Tim Noakes further proposed that a complex system in our brains, which he calls the central governor, keeps us within the limits of safe exertion. Noakes suggested that when our brains engage in teleoanticipation, they only activate part of our muscle fibers.

Interestingly, this reduction in muscle fiber activation causes us to feel fatigued relative to the length of the race rather than the pace of our run. For example, a serious runner may find that a 4-minute-per-km pace feels much harder at the outset of a 10k run than at the start of a 2k run. ?

The central governor is also at work when our brain knows we are close to the end of the race. This is why we may discover new energy reserves during the last part of the run compared with how we felt mid-way through the race, even though we should be more fatigued by then. ?

Here’s the data. In a 2006 study, Noakes and his colleagues analyzed men’s world-record performances for 800, 5000, and 10000-metre races from about 1912 to 2004 to discover the optimal pacing strategy. This figure from the study includes the mile data and shows the average running speed by interval.

?Among sixty-six 5k and 10K records, they found that the last kilometer was the fastest or second fastest in every record-breaking race but one. For Noakes, this shows how the central governor releases some of its controls when the endpoint is near. ?

Applying this principle to our working lives, we should be realistic about our limited capacity to increase the speed and intensity at which we operate endlessly. While famous tag lines from the most prominent sports brands implore us to ‘Just do it’ because ‘Impossible is nothing,’ we’d be better served strategically pacing ourselves for the long run.

Sometimes, we want to override the brain’s controls

While our brains protect us from burning out, they also hold us back. Being aware of this is essential because it allows us to acknowledge that fatigue is grounded in a thought process that we can strategically manipulate and override.

One of the best ways to do this is to shorten our perception of how far we are from the endpoint. Anyone who’s told themselves during a challenging exercise routine to “Keep going at least a bit more” knows how this works.

Endurance sports journalist Alex Hutchinson investigates this phenomenon in his excellent book Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. ?He points out that the costs and benefits involved in giving in to fatigue or persevering and trying to deceive our brains are not symmetrical, and they are probably unique to each individual and the context in which they compete. The lesson is that we may never realize our full potential if we pace ourselves conservatively. Still, pushing ourselves slightly beyond what we can endure could result in burnout or a disastrous breakdown. Finding the balance is the key.

Beyond sports – pacing in our other endeavors

Whatever I’ve discovered about pacing myself and managing my energy in work and life has primarily come from trial and error. I’m still learning to find the balance in these things, but in that spirit, let me share a few reflections from my experience:

• 100% effort when it matters – As sports scientists have shown us, no one can give 100% or near 100% effort for long periods. It’s essential to identify when to push ourselves further and remind ourselves that we only need to push for short periods. This might mean you push hard to prepare for an important interview, presentation, or exam. It’s best to be well-rested ahead of this effort and to take the time to recover afterward. Sometimes, it is about tapping into every reserve to get to our best performance for a very short but valuable period.
• Be consistent – You don’t need anywhere near 100% effort for most daily tasks, but you do need to get most of them done. There is a profound difference between eliminating or delegating a task and ignoring it. If someone relies on you to do something or if it is simply a necessary but more tedious part of the job, get it done. Ayelet Fishbach ’s book is full of useful advice on how to find enough motivation.
• Managing your energy, not your time – A classic HBR article was written to help seemingly successful executives with fairly miserable lives constantly on the verge of burnout. This advice is needed today more than ever. The world has become ever more complex, with us managing too many things through the small screens of our smartphones with constant distractions around us. We can’t find more working hours, but we can renew our energy levels with behaviors and rituals that become habits over time. Ultimately, we will still run out of time, but how we plan our schedule around energy management can significantly improve the quality of our output over fewer working hours. This will also increase our peak performance effectiveness.
• Manage the insecure overachiever in you - You can’t always know how valuable certain activities are. Maya Angelou captured this beautifully: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better”. ?When starting something new, you are not likely to know what to prioritize. And when you are taking on anything ambitious, it’s normal to experience the impostor syndrome and feel that you are not up to the job. Your brain may not have a reference experience to regulate your efforts and is overprotecting you with thoughts about what can go wrong. You should pace yourself and avoid overdrive while staying the course.

The art of pacing yourself

Knowing when we are working too hard or not hard enough is challenging. It’s even more difficult to judge whether we are working hard on the right things at the right intervals. What’s easier to spot is when we’re heading for burnout. The signs are unmistakable. Your work may start to negatively affect a relationship you care deeply about. You may begin to sleep poorly and eat badly. You may notice that you are running out of energy for the things you enjoy outside your work.

When this happens, remember that you are in a long race, listen to what your body is telling you, pace yourself, and prepare to surge again. ?

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