Stress
5 Ways to Recover After a Rough Day
Strategies to help you survive and bounce back better from a depleting day.
Posted January 6, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Recovery has a compounding effect on our success. The better we can recover, the more volume and intensity of work we can take on without injury. Therefore, recovery skills are an elite performance skill—and these strategies can help you improve yours.
1. Recover 1 percent better than you did yesterday.
We often think about the benefits of performing 1 percent better each day, but don't think about the benefits of recovering 1 percent better. Recovering better will feed directly into performing better and adapting to higher levels of stress and challenge, without accruing negative adaptations to that stress, like injuries.
The beauty of focusing on 1 percent improvements is the huge variety of ways to achieve them. For example, try using a recovery tool you already have available and have used before, but have perhaps forgotten about. Many of us have a bottle of vitamins in our cupboard that we bought but stopped taking, a massage gun that's gathering dust, an unused bathtub, etc. Physiological and psychological recovery tools are quite interchangeable for the reasons outlined in the next point.
2. Recognize that large recovery can occur in very short time intervals.
If you've ever done interval training for running or cycling, you'll know that very short recovery intervals of even 15 or 30 seconds can provide a large amount of recovery. If we run hard at a high heart rate, then switch to walking, our heart rate will typically decrease by 20-30 beats or more within a minute. This isn't a full recovery back to our fresh state, but it is significant.
What's this got to do with mental stress? It's the same nervous system operating, whether our stress is physiological or psychological. When we remove the stressful stimulus—e.g. our racing thoughts—and slow our breathing, we will experience significant physiological recovery from psychological stress.
Try recovering better in the very short intervals available to you, rather than only thinking of recovery as a big chunk of time at the end of the day. Improving how you recover overnight and also in recovery intervals spanning less than a minute or two both contribute to your overall recovery and your recovery skills.
3. Expand and diversify your definition of what a successful day is.
It creates psychological stress if we view ourselves as having had an unsuccessful day. Don't define a successful day as one in which you performed at your absolute peak and everything went to plan. It's not very helpful to do that. Instead, expand your definition of a successful day to include more opportunities for recognizing successes.
Let's use another athletic analogy. A runner can't only define a successful run as their fastest or longest run ever. That doesn't occur often enough. They need to also see other successes, like pacing themselves better at the start of an effort, form improvements, managing their thoughts on their run better, or running through the countdown at the end of their run.
Find something you can identify as evidence of having had a success during your day. It could be as simple as ending the day with a clean kitchen, or having improved how mindful and grateful you are when you're kissing your children goodnight.
Successful use of recovery strategies is itself a great type of success to credit yourself with when you've had a tough day. As pointed out, you can target either your end-of-day recovery, or your recovery in short intervals between tasks.
4. Sleep is the ultimate automated recovery process.
When we sleep, our bodies secrete growth hormones and engage in dozens of automated processes to repair our cells and refresh and recharge us. Take full advantage of how automated this is.
Sometimes, when I need a reminder of the benefits of sleep, I'll ask an AI chatbot something like, "I'm about to go to sleep for 8 hours. Explain in detail what my body will be doing to mentally and physically repair during this period." Hearing about the physiology of sleep and repair helps me appreciate my body's innate repair capacity and perceive myself as inherently being able to cope with stress. Perceiving ourselves as able to cope adequately with the stress we're facing is essential to recovery.
5. Call "done" on the day at a point before you collapse into bed.
Once you get to a certain time of the night, call "done" on the day. Calling done means you won't do any more tasks, even the 1-2 minute variety. This practice creates a mental boundary. An intentional hard stop will help you shift from doing to being, and transition into rest and the new day ahead.
Recovery is a foundational skill that contributes to our capacity to repair, perform, and grow. Try one of the five suggested strategies to improve your resilience and recovery, and promote your long-term success and well-being.
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