31 The Importance of Rest for Effective Leadership

The Importance of Rest for Effective Leadership | Joyfully Unstoppable Podcast

What if rest was one of the most strategic leadership tools you have?

In this episode of Joyfully Unstoppable, Becky Hamm explores the neuroscience behind rest, recovery, and sustainable performance, especially for women who lead full, demanding lives. If the holidays feel both joyful and exhausting, this conversation offers a grounded, research-backed reminder that stepping back is not weakness. It is fuel.

You’ll learn why the brain uses roughly 20% of the body’s energy; how mental recovery supports creativity, decision-making, and emotional regulation; and why your brain never actually shuts down when you rest. Becky breaks down the science of the Default Mode Network, explains why sleep and small mental breaks matter more than we realize, and shares practical ways to create pockets of renewal even during busy seasons.

The episode also connects leadership to seasonal rhythms, reminding us that winter is not a time for blooming or producing, but for renewal, repair, and strengthening what lies beneath the surface. Just like nature, leaders benefit from cycles of rest that allow clarity and confidence to grow.

If you’re a woman who wants to lead with more ease, presence, and sustainability, this episode is for you.

#JoyfullyUnstoppablePodcast #WomenInLeadership #SustainableLeadership #RestAndRecovery #LeadershipWellbeing #WomenLeadWell #NeuroscienceOfLeadership #MentalLoad #HighAchievingWomen #AuthenticLeadership #HolidayWellbeing #PodcastForWomen

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Transcript

Becky: 1:06

Welcome to Joyfully Unstoppable, the podcast for women who are ready to lead boldly, live lightly, and reclaim their joy. Whether you're leading a team, a classroom, a boardroom, or your own big, beautiful life, I am so glad you found us. I'm your host, Becky Hamm, leadership coach, speaker and founder of Women Lead Well. After years of high level leadership, I discovered that success doesn't have to come at the cost of your peace, your values, or your wellbeing. Each week, we'll explore what it means to lead joyfully, sustainably, and authentically. Even in a world that tells you to hustle harder and prove your worth, you carry a lot. Let's help it feel lighter. So here's something that makes sense once you hear it, but feels wild all at the same time. Did you know that your brain accounts for about 2% of your body weight, but consumes about 20% of your body's energy even when you're sleeping? Our brains are energy hungry machines. And again, when you think about it, yeah, that makes sense because of everything the brain does to keep the body alive. But 20% of all of your energy, 20% of all your calories goes to brain function. All of the decision making, all of the creativity. We talked about inner critic on the podcast last week, right? All of those self-doubt, self-critical thoughts, all of that takes a lot of energy. So that's another reason to overcome your inner critic and feed your inner cheerleader. You're gonna be burning that energy anyway. You might as well be burning it, be more energy efficient and burn it on something that is actually productive for you. So why am I talking about your brain's weight and the amount of energy that it consumes on a leadership podcast? Because we have entered the most wonderful time of the year, which for many of us. Is also the most stressful time of the year. We've got the holiday parties, we've got the gifts, we've got the kids' activities, we've got potentially religious events. We have a ton of extra planning, maybe some travel on top of that. And then, you know, we've got the entirety of our regular lives, which may already be overly full for you if you're like a lot of the women who I work with. And so our brains. Might be just a little bit starved right now for the energy they need to support strong decision making, emotional self-regulation, and high performance. We spoke back in episode six, one of the first episodes of this podcast about our body budget. Remember, there are so many of us who are in the red right now when it comes to our body budget. So today we are gonna talk about the life changing magic of taking breaks. I'm not gonna have you declutter your physical space, but we're gonna talk about what you can do to declutter some of the stuff that's weighing your brain down and how you can even through this holiday season, build in time for rest and renewal. And we're gonna start with the neuroscience of it all. What recovery means for our brains. Now, there are a few things to know here, and the first thing, again, it's one of those things that is wild when you first hear it, but it makes a lot of sense at the same time, and that is that our brain doesn't shut down when we go to sleep. It doesn't shut down when we rest. The brain never shuts down because the brain is critical to doing things like making sure we breathe and our heart pumps and the blood moves and, and all of that, right? But when we sleep in particular, but when we rest, when we disengage, the conscious thinking part of the brain, our brain shifts into a different mode of activity. And when it's in that different mode, it does all of the background processing to support our memory, to support integration, emotional integration, as well as cognitive integration to support creativity and insight. And this activity is linked to what's known in the default mode network, the DMN. when you think of the DMN. Think of all of the background processing of the brain, what you need to maintain the neural circuits in the brain, what you need, to maintain the non-cognitive, automatic biological tasks that the brain supports, that sort of thing. The DMN is all of that background processing that goes on in the brain. And so what that means is that when you rest. Again, your brain doesn't turn off. You're not idling. What you're doing is you are allowing the brain to sustain that vital maintenance and restoration. You're giving your brain time to do that background maintenance that it's not doing. When you are actively, consciously busy during your day with the decision making, with the emotional regulation, with that background, the DMN supports all of that. But when you're consciously doing those. Things the DMN isn't working, so you've gotta build time into your day to let that DMN do that part of the processing. You are preparing your mind to operate at full capacity when you are then conscious and moving. And I am sure at this point of 2025 that. You have heard of sleep hygiene and someone has talked to you about why sleep hygiene is so important. Well, this is why your brain really does need you to be asleep, to turn the conscious, logical processing off so that it's got time to do what it needs to do in that default mode network in the DMM for all of those neurological housekeeping activities. Why is this interesting? Well, for us, perimenopausal ladies who struggle to get good sleep or you amazing new moms who might be getting three hours of uninterrupted sleep at a stretch at night.'cause you've got little ones who can't sleep all night. Their bellies need to be filled more often than a good night's sleep. Sometimes we feel a little fuzzy headed. Sometimes we get forgetful, sometimes we're short-tempered. Is that just me? No, it's not just me. That's all of us. And that is because our brains didn't get the time it needed to reset. Our DMN didn't have the space it needed to do that neurological reprogramming. So what can you do through our crazy holiday season? Maybe you're not gonna be sleeping 10 hours a night. I mean, let's just be real. I can't sleep 10 hours a night. It doesn't work like every once in a while. But maybe you can make a commitment to yourself to go to sleep at roughly the same time every night and look a hundred percent. We are. We're not striving for perfection, but maybe you can set a regular bedtime and honor it most nights if you can. Maybe also limit your alcohol intake. In the evenings because we know that alcohol interrupts good sleep. Maybe if you can also limit screen time before bedtime. Get the blue light out of your eyeballs so that your eyes start to process. They tap into that circadian rhythm and know that it's time to settle down and rest for the evening. And on the flip side of that, if you wanna support a better night's sleep, when you first get up in the morning, get your eyeballs out into some actual sunlight outta your house in the world. Eyeballs getting sunlight once the sun is up again to trigger your circadian rhythm that the day has now started. And so that brings you energy throughout the day and you will naturally start to sundown or sunset when it's evening. So set yourself up for success in the morning to get a good night's sleep at night. Maybe you can't do all of those things all together right now. That's fine. What can you do? Make a commitment to yourself over the remaining few weeks of 2025 to dial in some sleep hygiene practices and see what that does for your creativity, for your complex decision making ability for your emotional self-regulation. And as we move through the crazy next few weeks through the holidays, see if it doesn't make your life just a tiny little bit better.'cause it will. so that sleep breaks are also critical. Research shows us that when people pause, consciously working on a problem, then return later to that problem. They arrive at better solutions. In fact, Christine Sre, Jessica De Bloom and Dirk Laer published a longitudinal study in 2021 that followed 274 white collar workers, and they found that after some type of recovery experience, maybe a vacation, maybe something else, but an experience that was defined by detachment, relaxation, and autonomy, that participants reported higher creativity than before their break. When we step back, we are not wasting time. It can feel like it, right? We talked when the inner critic episode last week, I talked about how I've got my inner critic script. One of my scripts is that I'm lazy, and so I can feel like when I step back, oh, I'm being lazy. But that's not the truth. The truth is when we step back, we are preparing our brains for better ideas. Better decisions, deeper insights that detachment, that kind of back burner processing is a catalyst for improved cognition. It just is. This is especially true for women in leadership roles who were juggling a ton of complex and conflicting demands. And I can hear it now. I can hear it, but Becky, there is no way that I can take a real break right now. Okay. Maybe you can't take a relaxing vacation in the last three weeks of the year. I got. I got you. I hear you. But can you get up and take a walk around your building? Can you practice some deep breathing for two minutes in between your meetings? Could you maybe play some white noise while you're folding your laundry to help your brain stop looping on all the tasks that you haven't finished yet? Maybe you can't take a week off. Maybe a vacation. Maybe a vacation is in your future for the last few weeks of 2025, but maybe you're traveling with kids through the holidays and maybe it's not relaxing. I get ya. I hear ya. I live that life too. But there are still things that you can do during your crazy day to create a little pocket of a mental break. That's what I'm talking about here. For us, we don't need, I mean, we might need, but if it's not realistic, we don't need the Cadillac version of a break. We need to find the little pockets of the little space that we can carve out of our everyday crazy full lives. To just give the brain a moment to detach, do a little bit of that back burner pondering, and when you come back, you come back stronger. You just do the little pockets of disengagement can be small and still have impact. Now as we wrap up for today, let me tie this to our current season of winter because I love the metaphor of this. I know it might be cheesy to some, but for me it is meaningful. So I'm gonna share it just like nature slows down to rest and restore and redirect. Its energy inward during the winter, right? The leaves fall off the trees, the flowers, the crops, all of that dies off, and you're just left with. The brown, as I look out my window right now, we got a bunch of brown grass'cause our grass is seasonal. We've got the bulbs that are in the ground that need the winter. They need the freezing weather in order to regenerate, to shoot up, to give us the beautiful tulips and daffodils and crocuses that we'll have next spring. But right now we are in a season of fallow, and that is intentional. The energy goes inside the plants so they can grow stronger next year. And my sweet friend. I'm telling you the same is true for us. We need a little energy going in instead of all of our energy going out. This is not our harvest season. This is our reset and renewal season. Our brains, biologically our brains benefit from that time of rest and lower demand. And again, during those rest phases, if you do dial in your sleep, if you do create little pockets of space through your day for your brain to come offline for just a few minutes, that DM in driven background processing, the reflection, the integration, the incubation, those can operate more fully and that supports better long-term performance. Slowing your pace. Embracing the stillness is poetic, but it is not only poetic, it is also neurobiological. It gives you energy, it gives your energy hungry brain a chance to restore, reorganize, and build capacity for the months ahead. So. I would encourage you to treat rest and recovery as part of your performance toolkit. This is not some kind of an afterthought. This is not something you have to earn. No, ma'am. It is a baseline part of the business, and it's not something that you get if there's time left over. No, no. This is a strategic choice that you make. A strategic priority that you protect to preserve your cognitive energy, to foster your deeper thinking and to support sustainable leadership. And I know that rest can feel countercultural, right? Especially for women who are high achieving and who often carry a heavy mental load. But again, the research is the research. Rest is not weakness. It is fuel for your brain. If you want to perform at a high level, you gotta give yourself that space. So finding pockets of stillness now, it gives your mind, the room it needs to renew, to reflect and to align that will make your future bloom, more sustainable, more creative, more grounded. It's a good thing. Now I hope this episode has inspired you to find some pockets of stillness and to be intentional about protecting time for your brain to renew. And I hope you'll join me next week when we talk about finding flow this holiday season. While it is so important to rest, you also deserve to move through the next several weeks with more ease. That can be a challenge this time of year. So we're gonna talk about it now. If this episode spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a woman who's running on empty. We need more women leading from alignment, not adrenaline. And please don't forget to like and subscribe. And if you could leave a review, I would really appreciate it building those reviews on Spotify, apple, YouTube. Really does help a little podcast like mine to get some traction and to show up for more women who could benefit. And remember, you can always grab our free resources, like the Thought Catching Journal prompts, the year-end review, or the Mental Load Reset at the Women Lead Well website, and I'll link it in the show notes below. Remember, joyful, sustainable, and authentic leadership is possible, and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it. Until next time, I'm Becky Hamm. And this is joyfully unstoppable.