Managing Burnout? Try Oscillation

High Performance Requires Breaks

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to Mature Content, a newsletter about lifelong learning, where I offer tools, insights, and resources for personal growth and discovery. This is the monthly installment of Good Tools, where I feature a strategy for learning something about yourself or the world around you.

I sat down at my desk on Monday feeling completely refreshed. After a fairly gruelling autumn, I really leaned into the festive season in December. I saw three plays, two films, (and a partridge in a pear tree!) I also attended numerous drinks and dinner parties. And I ended the month with ten solid days of holiday.

This is unusual for me. I’m someone who’s always struggled with vacations. If, like me, your work mantra is “more” rather than “enough,” taking time off is unsettling.

But for the last year or so, I’ve been teaching a workshop on burnout. Slowly but surely, some of the lessons from that workshop are beginning to take hold.

Exhibit A is Oscillation.

The Importance of Oscillation

The concept of oscillation comes from two sports psychologists, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. Their key insight is that the key to high performance—whether in real athletes or “corporate athletes” (as they call them)—isn’t time management. Instead, as they argue in their book, The Power of Full Engagement, the key to high performance is energy management.

Most of us believe (falsely) that maximum productivity is gained when we push ourselves as hard as we can with lazer-like focus. That’s true…but also draining. I like the way behavioral psychologist Zelana Montminy puts it in her new book, Finding Focus. She writes: “We treat focus like a muscle—push harder, power through, tune out—but attention doesn’t work that way. It’s more like breath. The more we grip it, the more it slips away.”

“We treat focus like a muscle—push harder, power through, tune out—but attention doesn’t work that way. It’s more like breath. The more we grip it, the more it slips away.”

Zelana Montminy

Drawing on their extensive research, Lohr and Schwartz argue that if you spend too much time in the “high performance zone,” you will eventually burnout. So continued high performance requires you to periodically step away and move into a “recovery zone”: a space where you proactively relax and replenish your energy. Once you spend some time there, so the logic goes, you return to your high performance zone focused and in a state of flow.

Oscillation Techniques

Lohr and Schwartz argue that the way to build this oscillation into your life is to cultivate what they call “rituals.” Again drawing on the sports analogy, they point out that real athletes don’t exercise constantly. Instead, athletes build in recovery rituals across four main spheres: mental (e.g., puzzles), physical (e.g., sleep), spiritual (e.g., prayer or meditation), and emotional (e.g. family and social ties). And so, too, should we.

Real athletes don’t exercise constantly. Instead, athletes build in recovery rituals across four main spheres: mental (e.g., puzzles), physical (e.g., sleep), spiritual (e.g., prayer or meditation), and emotional (e.g. family and social ties). And so, too, should we.

-Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

What’s important is not just the diversity of the recovery rituals, however, but how regularly we return to them. At the day-to-day level, we’re meant to halt our work roughly every 90 minutes to two hours to engage in one of our rituals. You may not have time to do a full Sudoku or go for a run. You might just manage a glimmer: taking five minutes to brew an espresso, walk around the block, or wander into a gift shop.

At the weekly level, you want to avoid working too many hours. How many is too many? One recent study found that 37 hours is the optimal length of a working week. Productivity expert Cal Newport swears by what he calls fixed-schedule productivity, in which you set rigid work hours every week and make them sacred. He claims that he works 9-5 Monday-Friday plus Sunday mornings. That’s it!

Vacations

Finally, if you wish to maintain high performance across the year, it’s also really vital that you take vacations.

Despite all the research telling us how good vacations are for our physical and mental health, many of us still fail to take them. Americans, in particular, struggle to use up their vacation days.

Which brings us back to December. If you’d asked me a few weeks ago—mid-Christmas party season—if I was engaging in oscillation, I would have laughed. And yet, that’s precisely what I was doing. I had consciously slowed down both the amount and intensity of my work, while simultaneously increasing the pace of my leisure time. I came back to work in early January raring to go.

It’s always fortuitous when something I teach in one of my workshops ends up helping me in my own life. Hmmm…maybe my next workshop needs to be on how to work remotely from the Bahamas?

Do you oscillate every day/week/year? What are your best tips for recovering your energy?