Connor Beaton tells high-performing men and executives why they're burned out: no scheduled rest. Five minutes of breathing or walking between tasks restores your ability to think and decide. Without it, you deplete yourself and make worse choices by day's end.
One of the things that I think I see a lot of us guys struggle with, especially high performers, right? Especially people that are like, you know, they're executives, they're running their own business, they are professionals in some capacity. I mean, hell, even if they're just like men that are working and have families and they're trying to like juggle all those balls.
Is that they don't carve out specific times for rest. And so many of us will.
12 hours a day, just working nonstop and then expecting ourselves at like 8 or 9 o' clock at night to be able to make really good choices and decisions for ourselves. But the reality is that we know the science and the research shows us that there is decision fatigue. And that at the end of the day, after you've worked 10, 12 hours, you're not going to be making your best choices. And so what I want to challenge everybody to do is to start to integrate intentional rest periods schedule in intentional rest periods. If you don't, what's going to happen is that eventually your brain is just going to, it's going to hit capacity and it might be five hours into your day, it might be three hours into your day, it might be ten hours into your day, but eventually your brain's going to hit capacity and it's going to start to shut down and you're going to be running at like 20% and it's going to be on YouTube or scrolling through Reddit or scrolling through Instagram and then you're going to be pissed off and then you're going to start shaming yourself and you're going to go down the path of like, why am I not working? It's like, well, you're fucking run down, you know, like you're completely run down. So we have to balance this, like, you know, masculine embodying the masculine and doing and going and crushing tasks and doing goals. And we have to balance that with the intentional art of rest, right? Of scheduling in rest. And so what I challenge you all to do is to actually look at your calendar for the rest of the week, week and schedule in little five minute pockets where you just practice this, like practice doing an intentional rest, like whatever your day looks like, whether you're at work or you're working from home or you're working in an office, practice scheduling in this time so that you are breathing or doing some burpees or doing some, doing some breath work or meditation or maybe just going for a walk. But do it in a way that is unencumbered and completely free from technology. Get rid of the technology. What I see a lot of people doing and I like, I've gotten on my friends, I've gotten on my wife for this is like, okay, I've got five minutes. I'm going to scroll through Instagram. That doesn't give your brain any rest. Get the fuck off of social media. Right? Like, tell yourself to stop, put the phone down and just close your eyes and breathe. Right? Because otherwise our neurology is just going, going, going, going, going, and we're actually over taxing and over indexing our brain. All right? So schedule that in. Give yourself rest. Practice. Intentional, intentional rest. All right. I hope that lands for a couple of you guys.
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