The Andarta Way
The Challenge: Fear, Friction, and Missing Skills
In my experience, there are three reasons why that pause doesn’t happen for high performers.
The first is fear. A fear of switching off, of stepping back, even briefly. I saw it often in operators, medics and, eventually, I came to recognise it in myself. The internalised belief that if we aren’t pushing, we’re slipping. That same pattern now shows up in meeting rooms and inboxes. The fear isn’t always conscious. But it shapes behaviour.
The second is structural. Their environments and systems simply aren’t set up to support recovery. As soon as they walk in the door to their homes, the next phase of work begins - children, partners, household decisions. When that ends? They get into bed and open the laptop. The work doesn’t pause; it just changes shape. From external performance to internal responsibility.
The third is more basic: They simply don’t know how to recover. Just as emotional intelligence was once seen as something you either had or didn’t, the skills needed for deliberate self-regulation and decompression can seem intangible. Soft and unattainable.
But they’re not. These are skills, and they can be learned.
In my experience, what makes the difference for high performers is, first, learning to recover at the micro level. Not just the longer breaks or off-seasons (though those matter too). But in smaller, deliberate windows that are built into the day.
For athletes, that might be the short space after a match or a high-intensity training block.
In my previous life, it might have been the quiet minutes after a live op, in the aircraft waiting to jump, or after handing off the casualty to the surgical team.
And for one of the groups I work with now -the corporate athletes- the principle is just as relevant.
Before learning how to programme in, and switch off on, planned holidays, we have them focus on the natural rhythm of their days. The space between meetings, the short pause before the commute home. The half-hour after the last call on a Friday.
These are not incidental. They’re strategic opportunities to reset, if we choose to treat them that way.
Which brings us back to the first of our three barriers; the fear of slowing down.
The Case for Conscious Pause
If the fear is that switching off will cost momentum, then let me convince you that it won’t. Not if the pause is short, deliberate, and designed to sharpen output.
I understand the hesitation. For a lot of high performers already working to protect their most valuable resources -time and attention- the idea of pausing can sound like wellness fluff. And without a tangible benefit, it’s hard to take seriously.
But this isn’t theory. There’s growing evidence that small, structured interventions, done deliberately, change how the body and brain respond to relentless load.
Short breathwork practices, for example, have been shown to lower respiratory rate and improve mood, even when compared to mindfulness meditation. One recent trial found that just five minutes of cyclic sighing, a simple double inhale followed by a long exhale, outperformed other techniques in reducing anxiety and increasing calm (Balban et al., 2023).
Microbreaks have also been shown to measurably reduce fatigue and improve our engagement with work (Wendsche & Lohmann-Haislah, 2022; Schnaubelt et al., 2022). These aren’t long sessions. Again, we’re talking about five-minute pauses to stretch, walk, or simply rest, consciously. The kind of moments most people dismiss as too small to matter.
These interventions have an effect not because they’re novel. But because they’re done with intention.
I don’t claim that these studies offer the definitive solution for burnout, decision fatigue, or the measurable cardiovascular and metabolic dysfunctions we see and treat in high performers at Andarta.
But what they do show is that micro-recovery has real, measurable effects on body and mind. Used as one tool among many, these interventions provide a legitimate way to release our cognitive burden and start building recovery back in.
The Space Between
Because that’s really the point. Oscillation isn’t about slowing down for its own sake. It’s about creating the rhythm that health in high performance depends on.
Many of the high performers we work with couldn’t stop if they tried, their schedules are inescapable. But what they can do is build rhythm within the demand. Through conscious, intelligent oscillation, they can create structure, pacing, and above all: space.
Constant, unrelenting effort without conscious recovery isn’t resilience, it’s attrition.
So, in the next piece, we’ll break that down into something practical: the tools we use with clients to structure macro, micro, and ultra-micro recovery. Across the day, the week, and the year.
The pause is part of the process, as vital as the work itself. And just like ma (間), the space is what makes the work visible and the rhythm sustainable.
Read Time: 5 mins
Author:
Dr Jonathan Clark-McKellar
References
Loehr, J., & Schwartz, T. (2001). The making of a corporate athlete. Harvard Business Review, January 2001. https://hbr.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corporate-athlete
Balban, M. Y., et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal compared with mindfulness meditation. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(2). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9873947/
Frueh, B. C., et al. (2020). 'Operator Syndrome': A unique constellation of medical and behavioral health-care needs of military special operations forces personnel. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 55(2), 95–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0091217420906659
Schnaubelt, M., et al. (2022). Acute effects of walking breaks on mental and physical well-being in sedentary office workers. Cogent Psychology, 9(1). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311916.2022.2026206
Wendsche, J., & Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2022). A meta-analysis on micro-breaks at work: Enhancing well-being and performance. Occupational Health Science. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9432722/
Recovery Isn't Rest-It's Oscillation
In Japanese aesthetics, there’s a concept called ma (間): The space between things.
It’s more than the absence of activity. It’s a meaningful pause. The interval that gives rhythm to movement, form to music, and clarity to speech.
To sustain performance, and preserve health, that space is essential. But most high performers have no room for it. We’ve learned to fear stillness, to fill every gap. And so: no pause, no variation, no rhythm. Just unbroken demand.
As I’ve written previously (links here), there’s a clear overlap in how high-performance manifests and what it costs across the athletic, military, and corporate worlds. The intensity of effort is common to all domains. The difference usually lies in whether oscillation - the deliberate variation in intensity of effort - is built in, or ignored (Loehr & Schwartz, 2001).
In sport, oscillation between high-intensity output and recovery is consciously programmed. Athletes train and compete at intensity, with the understanding that pauses - rest, tapering, deload - are essential for growth and resilience. And when they’re ignored, the consequences are immediate, visible, and measurable: fatigue, loss of performance, injury.
In military settings, and particularly among tactical athletes and special operations personnel, that rhythm is often absent, despite best intentions.
Operational tempo overrides recovery, and physical and psychological stress accumulate. For complex reasons, the link between relentless effort and long-term harm is often overlooked. But the pattern was familiar to us across both UK and US operators during the height of global counterterrorist operations. Eventually, the term Operator Syndrome was coined. It described the predictable cluster of psychological and physical effects we were seeing in those of us exposed to prolonged, high-stakes exertion without structured restoration (Frueh et al., 2020).
And in the corporate world - a space I now work in clinically - the absence of rhythm is almost universal.
The executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals we see at Andarta don’t oscillate. The end of the workday rarely brings decompression. Holidays aren’t recovery. If anything, they add another source of cognitive and logistical demand.
There’s no off-season. No deliberate pause. No ma.
