The surprising key to peak performance is pausing the performance

Throughout all my years in school, I ran competitively. I was never a star, but I loved the mental challenge of cross country and track. Races start and end in the mind. The brain tells the body it can be faster and when the body protests, the brain must win the argument over what is possible.

One year, during the peak of cross country season, I noticed something strange. I would get winded climbing stairs, and my legs felt heavy and sluggish all day long. At practice, my pace was perceptibly slowing. This was at a time when I was arguably in the best shape of my life.

"Overtraining," diagnosed a coach. "You need recovery time."

Overtraining? How could there be such a thing?

I was running a lot of miles, every day, at an aggressive pace. There wasn't much rest time built into the training schedule to allow my body to repair and adapt. And so the harder I pushed, the weaker I became. My pursuit of peak performance was a descent into mediocrity.

The recommended cure was completely counter-intuitive to me, as it is to most Type A people: Rest would make me stronger and faster. To my surprise, it did.

This memory comes to mind as I reflect on recent research about professional performance. An article by Shawn Acher and Michelle Gielan in the Harvard Business Review noted that overwork - a condition they speculate is well known to HBR's readers - is rooted in a misunderstanding of what it means to be resilient. Grit isn't about grinding through exhaustion, and toughing it out does not mean burning out. The key to resilience is working hard - then resting - then resuming the push forward.

Just as taking days off from running made me a better runner, recovery periods are essential to productivity at work. That doesn't just mean leaving the office. It means truly resting the mind. Acher and Gieland note: "We 'stop' work sometimes at 5 PM, but then we spend the night wrestling with solutions to work problems, talking about our work over dinner, and falling asleep thinking about how much work we’ll do tomorrow... [A] lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity."

They prescribe both internal and external recovery periods. Internal recovery means taking a cognitive break during work - like shifting attention to a different kind of thinking. Even a few deep breaths staring out the window can do some good. External recovery is time spent outside of work, on weekends or vacations.

I think there are at least three mental blocks that get in the way of this kind of adequate recovery. One is a belief that breaks are wasted time or signs of weakness. Another is guilt that recovery is somehow self indulgent. And a third is a fear we'll somehow fall behind if we stop pressing onward. I know I've felt some combination of these sentiments on days I don't exercise or the times when I've paused the professional task at hand. But then I remind myself that it's unequivocally, scientifically proven that recovery accomplishes quite the opposite. It's time smartly invested in becoming stronger, more effective and better able to contribute to a team. When my mind pauses its eternal race, more is possible thereafter.

Unfortunately, our culture is rife with iconic images that glorify overwork and gloss over its tendency to backfire. Think of the Red Bull-chugging, hoodie-sporting programmers in The Social Network, up all night writing code to prove their prowess. What they don't show in the movie is that code written in a state of exhaustion is crap, and engineering burnout is real.

Medical residents are expected to work 100-hour weeks and 26-hour shifts, despite research showing sleep deprivation is as bad as alcohol for performance and long hours lead to serious medical errors.

These are extreme examples. But they show we have real taboos around recovery, and they take a toll on our performance and those around us.

I'm still learning to lean into recovery. It's partly why I wrote this piece - to remind myself of its merits. Because sometimes, no matter how tired I am, it's hard to stop. I have to tell myself that the greatest innovation and insight tends to come not in motion but rather, at rest.

A wise woman (Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron) has described these moments as popping the bubble of our habitual patterns. Resting can cause unease - but it also inspires.

Tegla Lorupe, the great Kenyan marathoner and peace activist, had an awe-inspiring training regimen of 190 kilometers per week. But on Sunday, even she rested.

I try to remember these lessons. If you stop running - literally or metaphorically - you aren't falling behind. You're pausing to refresh. And to gain the strength to resume more of what matters.