Four Recovery Practices to Show Up at Your Peak
- Frederic Etiemble
- Apr 1
- 5 min read
If you’re a leader in an organisation or are interacting with one regularly, you know about the energy drain that comes with the role. Back-to-back meetings for 12 hours, strategic objectives to reach, budget constraints to meet, all the human dramas that come from managing large teams... Add to that geopolitical tensions, economic volatility and technological disruption, and it becomes easy to see how pressure and stress keep coming from every direction.
In that context, how can they show up at their best and be available every day? Part of the solution could be found in one of the practices of elite athletes. If you've read the title of this article, you already know what practice I'm talking about: recovery.
As an aging tennis player with declining athletic abilities, I explored many different recovery practices for tennis, but in this article I want to highlight the key insights from recent research on successful recovery practices not for tennis enthusiasts, but for leaders who want to show up at their peak every day.
Let’s start with a question: Who is Sabine Sonnentag?
I'm glad you asked. Sonnentag is a professor at the University of Mannheim whose research has been foundational in understanding workplace well-being. She began thinking about recovery in the late 1990s, motivated by a deceptively simple question: What do people actually do to alleviate the impact of job stress so they can stay healthy despite daily demands?
Her research established four distinct and critical recovery experiences:
Psychological detachment refers to mentally disengaging from your job while away from work, refraining from job-related activities and thoughts during non-work time.
Relaxation involves low activation activities that require little physical or intellectual effort.
Mastery covers learning and challenge that lead to feelings of achievement and competence.
Control means being able to decide on your own leisure schedule and activities.
Let’s zoom in on each, one by one, so you can assess how you could use these practices to boost your recovery, well-being and vitality at work.
Detachment
Of the four, detachment is the most consistently associated with positive well-being outcomes.
According to Sonnentag’s research, people who experience more detachment during off-hours are more satisfied with their lives and experience fewer symptoms of psychological strain. Crucially, they are not any less engaged while at work. Detachment doesn't cost performance, which should matter to anyone worried that switching off will somehow compromise their effectiveness.
Sonnentag also found that it's mainly negative thinking about work that accounts for the harmful effects of not detaching. Thinking about work in a positive way, reflecting on what went well for instance, can actually have a beneficial effect on mood. So what we need to detach ourselves from isn't all work-related thought; it's specifically rumination and worry.
Relaxation
Relaxation is the recovery experience most leaders would think they understand, and probably practice already in some shape or form.
Sonnentag defines relaxation as activities involving low physical or intellectual effort. The key word is low. It's about genuine downshifting.
The research shows relaxation contributes to recovery by reducing physiological activation and strain symptoms. At that physiological level, when you properly relax, your cortisol levels drop, your heart rate variability improves, and your nervous system shifts from sympathetic (fight-or-flight) to parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) dominance.
But be mindful of typical relaxation activities in our modern world that are not so relaxing. Scrolling social media feels passive but keeps your mind activated. Watching an intense thriller on your favourite streaming platform might be entertaining but maintains high arousal. True relaxation is genuinely low-activation.
Examples of genuine relaxation that work for me:
A slow walk in the park
Reading a book in the hammock
A warm bath
A massage
Engaging in spiritual practice
Don’t make the mistake of turning relaxation into another optimisation project. Instead, embrace that downshifting your nervous system is a legitimate recovery mechanism.
Mastery
Mastery is about embracing the challenge of learning and mastering new activities. It sits at the opposite end of the activation spectrum from relaxation, yet it's equally essential for good recovery.
This might seem paradoxical. How can engaging in challenging activities that require effort be restorative? Sonnentag's research reveals that mastery experiences (e.g. learning new skills, pursuing hobbies, tackling challenges outside of work) generate feelings of competence and achievement that buffer against work stress.
The critical distinction is voluntary difficulty versus obligatory difficulty. Work demands feel depleting because they're imposed. Mastery activities feel restorative because you chose them. You are building something, learning something, accomplishing something, on your own terms.
Mastery also provides what psychologist Csikszentmihalyi famously called flow, those moments of deep absorption where time disappears and self-consciousness fades. These states are intrinsically rewarding and create a sense of efficacy that carries over into work life.
For me, “mastery activities” include:
Playing tennis
Writing
Learning Spanish
For my Vibrance colleagues, it also involves playing music, coding personal projects, managing the career of a talented young artist, or leading a hockey club.
The key is that mastery activities involve skill development and challenge, but they exist entirely separate from work performance metrics.
Control
Control refers to autonomy over your own leisure time, the experience of choosing what you do, when you do it, and how, during your off-work hours.
It’s critical because of the contrast with the work, where most of what leaders do is shaped by external demands: other people's schedules, deadlines, role obligations, the needs of the organisation. Even high-autonomy leaders still spend much of their day responding rather than self-directing. The experience of being pulled and responsive is itself depleting.
So control, in Sonnentag's model, is the subjective experience of self-determination during non-work time, the felt sense that I am choosing this.
For me, it might look like:
Deciding on a whim to go for a walk rather than sticking to a plan
Saying no to a social obligation I didn't want
Spending an hour doing something entirely for myself with no output or purpose
Structuring an evening exactly as I want rather than around others' needs
Don’t fall into the recovery paradox
When recovery is most needed, it is most difficult to actually pursue recovery activities. The more depleted and stressed someone is, the harder it is to do the very things that would help them recover.
For leaders, this insight is structurally important because it reframes burnout not as a personal failing but as a design problem inherent in high-demand roles. So, for every leader, the question becomes: how can I be intentional about creating the conditions for recovery when my workload naturally works against it?
It’s time you embed recovery practices into your routine. A good starting point is awareness and intention, which is the humble objective of this article. With the ever-growing uncertainty and complexity weighing on leaders’ shoulders, the ones who will show up at their peak every day are the ones that are fully aware of their recovery needs and have designed the system to meet those needs.
What’s been your most effective recovery practice?
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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