Performance Principle: The Stress to Recovery ratio

Which are the two (2) of the most principal factors to reach our best performance?

Well, definitely we need the deliberate practice where we intentionally are making efforts on getting better at our craft. Being writing, sports, business, public speaking, or any other endeavor or pursuit in which we are engaged.

We must “lose” ourselves in the practice and stay focused on getting great at whatever it is that we are doing. With the word lose I mean the fact that everything else must wait at that moment.

There is almost nothing in the world that cannot wait for two to three hours… If you are getting interrupted from your work and getting pulled aside often, then two things are missing: Your internal commitment and priorities are not solid enough AND the external boundaries with others are not set firmly!

So pretty much everyone, even if you are a Jack of all trades knows that getting good at anything requires us to Do.The.Work. And not just the fun stuff, but most often it is the unpleasant, stressful, and harder things in life that get us to where we want to go and let us evolve into who we truly want to become.

As I often like to say:

?“Most of the rocky roads and painful paths leads us to beautiful destinations”

Now then, the second and possibly most often forgotten or neglected aspect of Performance is the ability to dedicate sufficient amounts of active and intentional Recovery to our calendar!

Everyone can swing to the fences once or twice. High Performance for a few days or weeks is not the hard part. We can sometimes even keep levels of productive Performance high for a season or two.

But what truly separates the ones who are one-hit wonders and the ones who show up consistently is the ability to recover from the stresses of life.

And again, if we look at the facts of being a human and living life, 99% of our waking time we are under some kind of stress factor. Being physical, mental, and/or emotional.

Did you know that digestion is one of the most energetically heavy stressors to our body! Hence the reasons you are often tired and lack sharp focus after you have eaten a big meal.

The quality of sleep is one of the first principles when it comes to rest and recovery. Getting slightly nitty-gritty here, the HRV (heart rate variability) at sleep is the metric that I’m looking and tracking most closely since this has given me the best correlation to my alertness and daily Performance.

The above is the picture of my HRV on the morning of the 9th of February and my 28-day HRV average. 101 is a very high number for me and I must say I felt extremely focused and energized all day! ;)

The important thing to remember about the stress to recovery ratio is the fact that short and intense stressors are often beneficial to us if we let ourselves the time and space to recover.

Whereas the slow, often less intense, and long-term stress is what gets us.

This is also the reason why I like to push a bit harder with my performance. Because when we do that, we almost automatically are having to put more focus and attention on our recovery periods. When we are at low performance, we let ourselves get away with late nights, unhealthy food, and silly entertainment.

High Performance doesn’t allow you to do that. If we want to be at our best, more of the time, recovery is as fundamental as the performance itself!

Reaching Mastery at anything requires high intentionality and dedication to rest. There is an obvious caveat in this too though.

I have often heard people explaining to me that I need my 2-3h of a self-care routine, daily! That is often an excuse for procrastination and a lack of active recovery systems in place.

High-quality sleep is the foundation of high performance, there is little to no debate about that.

The second I would say are the daily short breaks, transition routines, and rituals that I also often encourage people to implement into their daily lifestyle habits.

These micro brakes have a tremendous potential to first get us back on track when we fall off, but also to let our body, mind, and emotional fuel tanks recover so that we can spend high-quality time with our families at the end of the day too!

Because think about it, we work so hard all day just to be completely out of energy and willingness to play with our children and spend the intentional quality time with our loved ones.

That to me is the ultimate failure of one’s energy & focus. I believe that it is possible to Perform at work and at home with the same intensity, passion, and dedication.

For this and many other reasons, the stress to recovery ratio is one of the Performance Principles to Master.

I hope this helps you to rise higher and become better at your craft!

All Green Lights,

Tuomo

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PS. If this sparked interesting thoughts or ideas, I would love to hear about them in the comments below! ;)