This popular HBR article ‘Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure‘ takes an interesting angle on the issue of personal resilience.
According to the authors speaking about the resilience of corporate employees, “the problem comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to be resilient, and the resulting impact of overworking.” While we tend to see resilience in a militaristic manner of a tough super-hero, research apparently shows that “there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity.”
Thus, “the key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. This conclusion is based on biology.” And, “When the body is out of alignment from overworking, we waste a vast amount of mental and physical resources trying to return to balance before we can move forward.”
This is definitely an area where I need to improve: finding ways to really stop and most importantly, stop thinking about work-related issues.
Resilience – playing the long term game – requires recuperation and recharging between periods of intense work, on a daily, monthly and annual frequency. Quite an important lesson!
