SHRM26 Debrief · Health & Wellness · #1184

Managing Stress & Increasing Recovery to Maintain Peak Performance

with Kevin — PhD in Clinical and Neuropsychology; works with Impact Human Performance

▶ Watch on the SHRM portal ~82 min, distilled

stress managementemotional regulationrecovery

"Awareness is the number one strategy. If you're not aware, when you're experiencing stress, it doesn't matter how many techniques I teach you, you won't know when to use them."

What it was about

Stress itself isn't the problem, and it can't be eliminated. The real skill is noticing your body's physical, mental, and emotional warning signs early enough to trigger small, frequent moments of recovery throughout the day: stress plus recovery equals growth, but stress without recovery leads to degradation and eventually forced recovery or burnout.

By the numbers

3% to 5% charge left on the battery

The average self-reported energy level thousands of training participants say they have left by the end of a workday.

100% more charge collectively on your battery

Extrapolation of the same daily energy gains compounding over a month.

10% to 12% charge

The speaker's suggested realistic goal for ending the workday with more energy reserve than the typical 3-5%.

Key notes

Identify your personal stress warning signs across three categories: physical (tight shoulders, tense forehead), mental (catastrophizing, rushing thoughts), and emotional (a specific feeling word like 'frustrated'). Naming these helps you notice stress earlier.
Define your 'best self' in three words, then notice which word drops first as you head toward your 'stressed self.' That's your early warning sign.
Use the emotional regulation framework (energy level x danger/safety signal) to self-assess in the moment whether you're in high performance, stress response, forced recovery, or intentional recovery.

The contrarian takeAiming for 'high performance' mode all the time is harmful, not aspirational. Sustained high energy without recovery leads to degradation, forced recovery, and eventually burnout, so the real goal is frequent small dips into low-energy 'intentional recovery,' not constant peak output.

Take this back Monday

Do this for your team

Have each teammate name their 'best self' in three words, then post a personal 3-option recovery menu (10-min, 5-min, under-1-min) at their desk.

Say this in your next leadership meeting

Stress isn't the enemy, unrecovered stress is: without small daily recovery pauses, stress plus no recovery leads straight to burnout.

Watch out for

Trying to learn stress-reduction techniques before building awareness of when you're actually stressed — techniques are useless if you don't notice the trigger moment.
Treating high performance as a state to maintain all the time, which is actually dangerous because the body cannot sustain high energy indefinitely without recovery.
Using the word 'burnout' casually to describe ordinary end-of-day depletion (forced recovery), when true burnout is a serious mental and physical condition.

Fun fact · Kevin Kachin

Kevin Kachin was an early member of digital health startup Retrofit before it was acquired by Livongo (Teledoc), and once consulted for the National Hockey League.

If this landed, see these

↳ Go deeperBurnout to Breakthrough: Building Boundaries, Energy, and Resilience That LastTurns stress-awareness into a belt-progression system for managing energy and boundaries.⇄ The counterpointStop Demanding Fruit from Dead Soil: A Repair-First Approach to BurnoutArgues burnout comes from unrepaired environments, not from missing your own warning signs.✦ The unexpected oneThe Future Leader Is a Wellbeing ArchitectTakes personal recovery habits and scales them into designing wellbeing across the org.