Want to improve your performance? Focus on this

There was a time where being a high performer meant putting every other aspect of your life on the back burner and devoting all of your time and energy to your work. Family, hobbies, and other obligations were cast aside. Rest and sleep in particular were a luxury the high performer could not afford.

That thinking is changing in several ways. For one thing, being a high performer at work for the long term does not necessarily require sacrifice of the rest of your entire life. Maintaining a family and some hobbies can be healthy and can provide interesting insights into your work from other perspectives. It turns out productive rest and getting a good night’s sleep can help your performance. Here’s how.

Productive rest

The concept of rest involves two distinct elements. Having some specific times in which you are explicitly reducing your stress during the day is one form of rest. The other is having stretches in which you step away from your work and focus your mind on other topics.

Let’s start with calming rest. Being a high performer is often stressful. You take on challenges that others shy away from. Those challenges come with risk. You may fail to achieve your goals, create tension with other people, or lose money. The physiological stress reaction is not suited to business stress. You release hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that affect your long-term and short-term physiology. Those reactions are great for dealing with physical stressors, but not so good for handling the conceptual stress of the modern workplace.

On top of that, long-term stress is bad for your health. It may lead you to engage in bad habits like stress eating, or the use of drugs and alcohol to numb the stress. Even if the stress doesn’t push you into bad habits, it has long-term health consequences for your blood pressure and heart.

There are many ways to engage in calming rest. A 10-minute controlled breathing exercise can lower your level of energized arousal. Mindfulness meditation exercises can be calming in the moment and may also help you handle intrusive thoughts that create stress. A regular practice of rest like this helps you remain resilient to that work stress.

Stepping away from work for a few hours or over a weekend also has benefits. When you think about work problems continuously, you get locked into a particular way of thinking about the situation. If you ever do a crossword puzzle or other word game, you may be familiar with this. You get stuck on some of the clues on the puzzle, so you put it down. When you come back to it, your mind has reset and you often get the answers to clues that eluded you before.

The same thing happens at work. Banging your head against the same wall is not productive. Sometimes walking away from the problem gives you an opportunity to think about it differently when you return to it later. Even an hour doing something else entirely can be beneficial. High performers know when to walk away from something for a while.

Don’t forget your sleep

Sleep also matters. There are at least three distinct benefits of sleep that support great performance.

First, sleep supports learning. When you encounter new information or practice a new skill, you learn a little in the moment. But, your brain goes through processes during different sleep stages that consolidate memories. A regular sleep schedule supports this learning.

Second, sleep supports emotional resilience. Those stressors I mentioned in the last section can push you to your emotional breaking point. Stress raises your level of arousal. When you get overly aroused, you are more prone to fly off the handle at someone else, dash off an angry email, or do something rash that you will later regret. Sleep helps restore your ability to handle that arousal without lashing out.

In addition, sleep helps to separate the emotional content of situations from the conceptual content. If you’re angry at someone at work, you may have trouble concentrating on charting a path forward because of the emotion. Regular sleep may help you to see the situation more clearly without the raw emotion clouding your judgment.

Third, sleep changes the way you think about situations you’re dealing with. When you struggle with a problem, you often get mired in details. You may miss the forest for the trees. Sleep can lead you to forget some of the specifics of a situation, which gives you a more abstract vision of it that may remind you of analogous experiences you have had. That more general way of thinking about a situation often opens up more avenues for addressing problems.

Ultimately, high performance is not just about time on task. It is also about managing your rest and sleep in ways that support your physical and emotional health and that provide you with an optimal ability to learn and solve problems.

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