Hustle culture is back for good, if you take some overachievers’ word for it. The temporary pandemic slowdown, with its emphasis on well-being and flexible scheduling, seems like a fleeting mirage. These days, many startup workers are expected to pull “9-9-6” shifts (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week), and managers brag about subsisting on four hours of sleep.
With sleep-under-your-desk culture now ascendant, more of us feel compelled to keep pace with people who move at one speed: full throttle. It doesn’t help that we have few role models who are good at incremental retreat. “We don’t learn how to pace ourselves,” one workplace consultant told me. “There’s not a class on that.”
But as elite athletes and endurance experts know, going 110% without respite often sets up a crash that takes months or even years to overcome. It’s far healthier—and smarter in the long run—to manage your energy more deliberately, noticing when you’ve neared the edge of burnout and decelerating before you fall in.
My book The Art of Pacing explores how to pull back thoughtfully and incrementally at work, online, in community service, and more. Pacing yourself in this way doesn’t mean disengaging from what you care about—in fact, just the opposite. By setting a more sustainable rhythm, you can keep making fulfilling contributions to your community and the planet for a lifetime. Here are some everyday pacing strategies to help you do that.
1. Try narrative streamlining
To set an engaged, comfortable pace, it helps to understand just where you are and where you want to end up. By locating the narrative thread that wends through your life, you can get a clearer sense of what’s brought value to your life and what your highest goals are.
“One of the primary ways that we find meaning and make meaning in our lives is the stories that we tell, both to ourselves and to other people,” says the Boston College management professor Ben Rogers.
Rogers has designed what he calls a “restorying” exercise to facilitate this process. Through a sequence of seven questions based on the classic “hero’s journey” story structure, the exercise guides you to reflect on your most significant goals, how you came to pursue them, the obstacles you’ve faced trying to achieve them, and the gift or legacy you’ve been able to leave to your community. (You can try the exercise for free.) In Rogers’s studies, people who completed the restorying exercise saw their lives as more meaningful than they had before.
Restorying guides you to focus more intently on the goals and pursuits that feel most purposeful—and when you do that, each day’s tasks start to feel more energizing than exhausting. The restorying process can also help you pare back on commitments that don’t align with your core goals and values, freeing up more time for rest and recovery.
2. Practice modulation
This science-backed breathing practice allows you to shift your body into a more serene, focused state. Modulation—which researchers call “resonance frequency breathing”—involves breathing at a specific pace unique to you: the speed at which your heart rate accelerates most as you breathe in and slows down most as you breathe out. This pace creates pronounced “heart rate variability,” which promotes a calmer, more resilient nervous system.
To begin your own modulation practice, determine your resonance breathing pace by using an app like Elite HRV, or by breathing along with paced videos on YouTube to see which speed feels most comfortable. (Most people’s resonance pace is between four and six breaths per minute.) Once you’ve figured out your own ideal pace, breathe in time with a paced video or track for a few minutes each day, or whenever you’re feeling anxious or spun-up. After a few days, you’ll learn your resonance pace by heart and will no longer need the track to guide you.
I learned modulation from the psychiatrist and researcher Joseph Arpaia, who’s taught the practice to overwhelmed clients for years. The day we met, Arpaia clipped a heart-rate monitor on me and had me breathe at my own resonant breathing pace, 5.2 breaths per minute, for about five minutes. As I kept breathing, I saw my spiky heart-rate pattern relax into U-shaped waves, a sign that my nervous system was relaxing, as well. When I was done, Arpaia remarked that even an IV sedative would not have calmed me that quickly!
In addition to its benefits in the moment, modulation primes you to make well-thought-out decisions that facilitate smart pacing over the long term. When you’re in a calmer mental and physical state, you’re less apt to fire off a thoughtless remark that torpedoes a relationship or make an impulsive choice you regret—and you spare yourself the repair work you’d need to do in the wake of such snap decisions.
3. Manage your energy
Time management is all the rage in some influencer circles: mapping your entire day into 30-minute or one-hour blocks, for instance. But while this strategy can help you feel in control of your day or week, it’s also highly vulnerable to collapse. One unexpected event—a family crisis, a meeting that runs long—means having to re-jigger the whole intricate calendar, a process that can itself become a time drain and source of frustration.
Energy management, which many top athletes have embraced, is more flexible and accessible than time management. It involves structuring your day around your natural energetic highs and lows. When middle-distance runner Ajée Wilson is preparing for a big meet, she schedules her main workout of the day to coincide with her highest energy peak: from mid-morning until about noon. Afterward—in a variation on the siesta tradition—she takes a long afternoon nap to allow her body to recover from the intense training session.
To take advantage of your own high-energy windows, think about what time of day you tend to be more engaged and focused, whether morning, late afternoon, or night. Then plan to do your most demanding and absorbing work within that general window. (No need to map things out down to the minute; your exact starting time doesn’t matter as much as whether your deep work “pulse” coincides with your energy peak.)
When you hit a natural energy lull, as many people do after lunch, take a break or turn to less demanding work, like filling out forms or replying to messages. By working with your natural energy fluctuations instead of against them, you’ll make meaningful progress on your goals without feeling like you’re pushing a truck uphill.
4. Light “brief candles”
We often assume that “generativity”—the kind of social contribution that strengthens well-being—requires a sustained infusion of time and effort. However, certain white-hot moments of encounter, which I call “brief candles,” last only a few minutes but are profoundly generative all the same. Because their impact far outlasts the time they take, they allow you to contribute in meaningful ways without exhausting your energy reserves.
Brief candles may be dramatic encounters, like an intervention that convinces someone who is fighting mad to stand down. More often, they’re moments of total attention that light up ordinary exchanges: offering crucial words of encouragement to a mentee who’s flailing, or giving timely advice that sets someone on a new life trajectory. The effects of brief encounters like these may go on to reverberate for decades.
Some Zen Buddhists practice “mindful listening”: focusing completely on another person in their vicinity, even if just for a few moments. Lighting brief candles calls for just this kind of listening and responsiveness—and the rewards of such attentive moments compound over time, for receivers as well as for those passing the flame.
When you light a brief candle, pause to reflect on the experience. How does it feel to re-awaken something in someone else that they may have forgotten was there, or to avert a disaster that would otherwise have occurred? By deliberately “taking in the good,” as psychologist Rick Hanson calls it, you can prime yourself to create more such moments on a regular basis.
5. Ask yourself, “What’s the wise choice here?”
When I began pacing myself more deliberately, I considered what thoughtful pacing would look like over various time frames—a day, a month, or a year. I pictured myself devising sophisticated pacing plans like those athletes make to map out their training seasons.
But I’ve learned that when I feel overwhelmed in a daily, ordinary sense, my long-term pacing plans recede into the background. Instead of projecting too far into the future, I ask myself a simple question: “What’s the wise choice here?”
This is a strategy the coach and sports psychologist Amy Baltzell taught me. It’s perfect for overloaded moments because it guides you to focus on two things: what you realistically need in a given moment, and how best to address that need. After an unexpected crisis, do you need a full day off, or do you need to consult with your boss before planning your next move? Identifying the wise choice and carrying it out has a way of leading you to the next wise choice, and the next, which becomes its own form of responsive pacing.