The widely held notion of personal resilience centres around soldiering on even when success seems impossible. But in fact, scientific evidence disproves this idea. Perseverance can actually be detrimental to your health and mental capacity - what we really need to produce our best work is periods of recovery.
It’s estimated that around $62 billion in lost productivity can be attributed to employees’ lack of recovery - whether that stems from a bad night's sleep or being unable to step away from work past 5 PM. Naturally, the pervasiveness of technology in our lives plays a pivotal role in this, keeping us constantly connected and preventing our brains from resting.
If you want to build personal resilience, you can start by strategically stopping. Give yourself the resources to endure by creating purposeful recovery periods.
Skipping recovery leads to burnout because when our energy is depleted, trying to work is far harder than when we’re well-rested - all our energy goes into maintaining a baseline rather than helping us solve problems or push through barriers. For true resilience, we need to work hard, take a good break - doing something completely different - then come back to work, and repeat.
