How can I recover from sustained stress and avoid exhaustion? (Executive Stress)

In my own work, over the years, I have noticed that sleep is usually one of the first things to slip when pressure builds, and one of the first things to recover when it eases. I have also seen the same in clients of coaching and discussed with participants on executive education courses, who agree.

Van der Helm (2026) reports research with 1,009 US managers and executives on sleep deprivation and leadership. Recovery from sustained pressure is different from simply leaving work at the end of the day. It means getting enough sleep, interrupting fatigue before it builds, reducing demands where necessary and allowing time for cognitive, emotional and physical capacity to return. It needs space in the diary while work is still demanding. If recovery waits until the work is finished, it may never start.

Why recovery matters to leadership performance

Rest allows the brain and body to repair, process experience, consolidate learning and prepare for further demand. Sleep matters most, but short breaks, holidays, enjoyable activity, quiet reflection and time away from a source of strain all play their part. My article on sleep and leadership performance offers more help with settling at night.

As fatigue rises, cognitive and emotional performance tends to fall. A tired leader may process information less accurately, overlook risks, struggle to retrieve what they know, react more sharply or become less flexible. The danger is not only feeling unwell. It is continuing to make consequential decisions while your ability to evaluate them has quietly weakened.

Recovery also affects the people around you. When you are depleted, your patience, listening and tolerance for uncertainty shrink, and your team feels it in the form of less predictable responses and more control. Rest supports decision-making because leadership relies on attention, judgement and relationships, and each of them draws on energy you only have so much of. Barnes et al. (2015) found that poorer sleep in leaders was linked with more abusive supervision of their teams on the same working day. I find this disturbing.

Ten practical ways to support executive stress recovery

The ten practices below build up over several weeks rather than working as a single fix. Start with the two or three that match your lowest scores in the quick check above, and add others once they feel routine.

1. Learn your early signs of depletion and keep a weekly recovery log

I keep coming back to one pattern in my coaching work: depletion is usually obvious in hindsight and much less obvious while it is building. A headache, a shorter fuse, a habit of working later while getting less done. Make a short list of your own early signs, grouped as physical, mental, emotional and behavioural, so you have something specific to watch for.

The weekly recovery log is the simplest way to watch those signs build. Each day, rate your sleep quality, energy, concentration, patience and ability to switch off on a scale of one to five. It takes a few minutes. You are looking for movement across several days, not a second job built around personal data. Other articles in this series refer back to the log, so it is worth starting now.

Then ask one or two people who know you well what they notice when you are running low. They often see changes in tone, pace or presence before you do. Agree a short phrase they can use to flag it, so the conversation stays about your state rather than your capability.

2. Protect a consistent sleep opportunity

Sleep supports memory, learning, emotional regulation and the repair your brain and body need after a demanding day. Willpower, caffeine and a quiet weekend cannot fully make up for regular shortfalls. Lost sleep builds up gradually, and the tiredness can start to feel normal, which is part of the risk. Sleep loss weakens the thinking you rely on for decisions, often quietly.

Start with the time you protect, rather than a target number of hours. Work backwards from a consistent wake time, and allow for winding down and falling asleep. Notice how much sleep you need to wake refreshed. Your personal baseline is a better guide than what you managed during a particularly intense month.

In my coaching work, sleep is usually the first thing to slip when pressure builds, and one of the first things to recover when it eases. Treat the sleep window as a working commitment. A late-night email may feel productive, but it often borrows from tomorrow’s judgement. The more useful question is what kind of decision-maker you need to be tomorrow.

3. Build an evening transition that reduces activation

Work does not stop when you close the laptop. If you go straight from an intense call or a difficult inbox into bed, your body may be still while your mind keeps running at work speed.

Build a short routine that signals the change in demand. It could include noting unfinished tasks and choosing tomorrow’s first priority, dimming screens, cutting back on late caffeine, a warm shower, a few pages of a book or a short breathing practice. The routine matters less than repeating it, and less than how it affects you.

Keep the routine simple enough to survive a bad day. Two or three cues you can keep when the week is demanding will do more good than a longer routine you abandon by Wednesday.

4. Use short breaks before you feel you have earned them

Fatigue builds quietly, and waiting until you are exhausted turns a break into a rescue. Short pauses reduce cognitive load and help you return with clearer thinking. I encourage clients to treat them as routine maintenance rather than a reward.

Step away from the desk for lunch. Leave a few minutes between demanding meetings. Walk outside, stretch, breathe slowly or look at something far away. A useful break changes your physical state or your focus. Moving from one work document to a stream of messages usually does neither.

Match the break to the load. A difficult board discussion, a charged conversation or a long stretch of analysis may need recovery even if it lasted only an hour. Build in space after high-load work before you move on to the next consequential task.

5. Match the form of rest to the type of fatigue

Tiredness comes in different forms. Physical fatigue may ease with stillness or sleep. Mental saturation often responds better to movement or an absorbing task. Emotional strain may need solitude, connection or a safe conversation. After a day of constant interaction, another social event may not restore you, however much you enjoy it.

Before you choose how to recover, ask yourself what exactly is tired. Then pick an activity that restores that resource. A walk can settle a racing mind, music can create some emotional distance, time with a trusted friend can ease isolation, and a hobby can hold your attention without carrying responsibility.

Build a small menu of options that fit different amounts of time, perhaps two minutes, twenty minutes, two hours and two days. Having options makes recovery easier to reach on a busy day.

6. Use naps selectively, not as a substitute for regular sleep

A short nap can sharpen alertness after a poor night or a long stretch of demand. Treat it as a planned, brief intervention, rather than a slide into longer sleep that leaves you groggy.

If napping suits you, find a quiet place, remove interruptions and set an alarm. Keep it short to reduce the chance of waking from deeper sleep. Watch how it affects your night, because a nap that lifts the afternoon but disturbs your sleep works against recovery overall.

Needing daytime sleep to function on a regular basis is useful information. It may point to your workload, your health or the adequacy of your main sleep period, and each of these is worth examining.

7. Put personal time into every day

When pressure rises, personal time tends to be whatever is left once everything else is done. Usually nothing is left, so recovery keeps getting postponed while each day takes more than it gives back.

Protect a small period each day that belongs to your life outside work. It might be time with family, a meal without devices, exercise, reading, gardening, music, prayer or unstructured quiet. It does not need to impress anyone. It needs to be clearly separate from professional responsibility.

Daily time matters because long holidays cannot carry the whole load of recovery alone. Regular, small experiences of pleasure, connection and autonomy stop work from becoming the only thing that shapes your week.

8. Reduce demands instead of recovering around an unchanged overload

Rest cannot keep pace indefinitely with a workload that consistently exceeds your capacity. If every recovered hour is absorbed by avoidable commitments, the answer lies in the load itself rather than in a better way to relax.

Review your diary and responsibilities. Which activities need your authority or expertise? Which could be delegated, shortened, combined, delayed or stopped? Which give you energy, and which drain it without matching value? Saying no can be the step that makes sustained performance possible.

Pay particular attention to commitments you accepted out of habit, status or a wish to avoid disappointing people. When a new priority arrives, name what will move or stop. That makes the limits of your capacity visible to the people who depend on you.

9. Schedule longer recovery before the calendar fills

Daily and weekly rest keep capacity steady, but sustained pressure often calls for a longer break. Holidays, long weekends and periods of reduced responsibility create the distance that deeper restoration needs. Left unscheduled, they tend to be absorbed by operational demands.

Put longer breaks in the diary early, and plan the conditions that make them possible. Clarify decision rights, arrange cover, agree what counts as a genuine emergency, and close off any informal channel through which normal work reaches you while you are away.

Expect the first part of a break to feel strange. It often shows how tired you actually are, because your system has finally stopped running at operational speed.

10. Track what genuinely restores your performance

The rest you need changes with the demands on you, your health, your travel and the nature of your work. Rather than fixing a formula, observe how each activity affects how you function afterwards.

Over several weeks, keep the recovery log and add brief notes about your concentration and the quality of your decisions. Look for patterns. Which routines help you wake refreshed? Which days produce the steepest decline? Which activities leave you more capable rather than merely distracted?

Recovery is part of a wider pattern. Exercise may support sleep, support can reduce strain, nutrition shapes energy, and self-awareness helps you notice when a break is due. The article on managing energy rather than only managing the diary develops this wider view.

Design a working environment that makes recovery possible

Fatigue is shaped by the working environment as well as by the person. Meeting patterns, travel, time zones, digital norms, staffing and decision bottlenecks all affect whether leaders have a realistic chance to rest.

Review the shape of a typical week. Are high-stakes decisions routinely placed at the end of long days? Do meetings run back to back? Are evening messages treated as needing an immediate answer? Does taking leave create a backlog so large that you return more stressed than before? Are people rewarded for visible exhaustion while thoughtful pacing is read as a lack of commitment?

Structural changes that help include protecting preparation time, adding recovery space after intense events, rotating on-call duties, setting clear communication windows, spreading decision authority and arranging cover before holidays. Leaders also set the norm through example. If you send messages at midnight and skip every break, people may copy the behaviour rather than the policy.

Recovery is easier to sustain when it is built into how work is designed. When the people making important decisions are rested, they process information better, manage emotion better and notice when their capacity is slipping.

When ordinary rest is not enough

Self-directed recovery is useful when the main problem is an intense period of work followed by insufficient restoration. It is not a substitute for professional support when exhaustion persists or functioning continues to decline.

Consider speaking with a qualified health professional if sleep problems continue despite a realistic opportunity to rest, fatigue remains severe after time away, or exhaustion comes with persistent low mood, anxiety, physical symptoms or difficulty functioning. Seek prompt help if tiredness is affecting your driving, your operation of equipment or other safety-critical decisions. Executive coaching can help with priorities, boundaries, working patterns and leadership behaviour, but it should not diagnose or treat a medical or mental health condition.

Conclusion

Recovering from sustained stress is less about enduring exhaustion and more about restoring capacity before depletion starts to shape your thinking, behaviour and relationships. That starts with sleep, but it also needs breaks, personal time, enjoyable activity, boundaries and a workload that leaves room for recovery. Begin small: an earlier night, a protected lunch, one declined commitment or a holiday placed firmly in the diary. Then notice the effect.

Further reading

• Assignment resilience: sustaining performance on difficult assignments
• Finding joy: sustaining energy and meaning in leadership
• Delegation: matching tasks to people and letting go
• Groundedness: stability and self-possession under pressure
• Caring for team members: leading as a steward of team wellbeing

Reflection questions

• What are the first signs that sustained pressure is turning into exhaustion for me?
• Which forms of rest genuinely restore me, and which only distract me?
• What longer period of recovery do I need to schedule now rather than hope for later?

This article is part of a seven-part series on executive stress. You can find the full series on the executive stress hub page.

Sources

• Barnes, C. M., Lucianetti, L., Bhave, D. P. and Christian, M. S. (2015) ‘”You wouldn’t like me when I’m sleepy”: Leader sleep, daily abusive supervision, and work unit engagement’, Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), pp. 1419–1437. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.1063
• Thompson, H. L. (2010) The Stress Effect: Why Smart Leaders Make Dumb Decisions and What to Do About It. 1st edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Van der Helm, E. (2026) ‘Research: sleep deprivation is a leadership problem’, Harvard Business Review, 6 October. Available at: https://hbr.org/2026/10/research-sleep-deprivation-is-a-leadership-problem