Emotionally exhausted, and your family is getting your scraps? Why fun and hobbies are the keystone rhythm that refills a leader’s emotional tank.

“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” Thomas Aquinas, philosopher and theologian, paraphrase of original quote The right relationships give us wings. The wrong ones sink us. You can trace nearly every consequential thing that's happened in your life – good or bad – to a relationship. That’s especially true when it comes to friendships. Throughout high school, we went through a very challenging season with my daughter. She gave me permission to share this. Over three years, she was admitted to psychiatric facilities four separate times for suicidality. It was a tumultuous time for her and a harrowing time for us as parents. I hope we never have to relive it. Thankfully, she is doing well, has a full-time career, is going to college in the spring, and hasn’t had an episode in several years. During one particularly intense two-week period after her second hospitalization, my two closest friends were in constant communication with me. They reached out to me almost daily to check in and offer support. It was a great strength and support to know I had people in my corner. 

The thing that finally fixed my burnout wasn't more discipline. It was letting go of control. RHYTHMS OF REST℠ wasn't born from success. It came from personal failure. Over the next several issues of the newsletter, I'm going to lay out each piece of the RHYTHMS OF REST framework – one piece per issue. But before I do, I need to share how it came to be. Ever since I can remember, I was a risk taker and leader, though admittedly, I didn't usually lead people in the right direction until my mid-twenties. One particular time at 15 years old, I had the great idea to convince my friends to rappel off a bridge in my town using a garden hose and rubber gloves. And it worked! At least the first time. The second time we did it on a wet summer evening. I, of course, volunteered to go first. Without testing it, I grabbed on and started sliding down the hose at breakneck speed, and I hit the ground below with a thud. Luckily, it wasn’t that high, maybe 15-20 feet, and I had watched a lot of adventure shows, so I knew how to drop and roll when landing on the ground from a height. I waited a while just to give my friends a scare before I began to laugh. That was just one example of many. That hard-driving personality carried through my childhood, teenage years, and into my twenties. Growing up with an alcoholic father didn't help much, as part of my risk and ambition was certainly a cry for attention and affirmation. This carried through into my early leadership, and without knowing it, deprived of a father's attention, I sought to compensate for that deprivation through success and accomplishment. While it’s great fuel for accomplishment, it doesn’t work very well for life. My first leadership roles began in a church where I became a volunteer youth, college, and music leader. That’s when the cracks began to appear — in my marriage, my lack of self-awareness, my body, and my spirit. They showed up as screaming matches with my wife, intimidation and rage, poor physical health, relentless overwork, and a spiritual life I used to compensate for what was lacking. The signs were to anyone looking, but like many churches that are simply seeking to fill holes with warm bodies, no one really took notice. During those early years, not one leader or mentor, of which I had several, pulled me aside and showed me a better way or offered help. I was a ticking time bomb.  At 27, the cracks became a chasm, and I had a full-fledged nervous breakdown on my kitchen floor. I've shared about that many times before, so I won't go into detail here, but it took me a while to crawl out of that hole.

Every time Jesh thought about taking Friday off, his chest would tighten. He never thought he could take a full weekend off. A marketing expert for mental health and wellness companies, Jesh always wanted a full weekend off. He is an elder at his church with all-day responsibilities, so Sundays have never really been a day off. Since he already takes Saturdays off, it would have to be Friday, but Jesh was afraid he would lose revenue. "What if you tried it as a summer experiment?" I asked him one day.

Why naming burnout is not enough—and how flexible, durable rhythms can help leaders build greater clarity, wholeness, and healthier teams.

The grind that got you there is killing you. Earlier this year, the CEO of a large global company paused midway through a discussion on talent and said, 'We have a problem. Burnout is becoming a real issue.' He went on to explain that the people struggling weren't average performers. They were the organization's most experienced and capable leaders, the ones the company was counting on to move into its most senior roles, and they were disengaging and stalling out. 'We are losing momentum at exactly the point we need it most,' he said. I find that ridiculous. It's not becoming a real issue; it has already been an issue for years. You scaled hard for the better part of a decade, and somewhere in your forties, the responsibilities of life and the weight of leadership are crushing you. You're wondering how long you can keep all the plates spinning. You promised to be home for dinner but forgot. You had planned to make it to your kids' game, but couldn't. Rest seems like an impossibility, and even when you're supposed to be resting, your mind won't stop working the problem. You feel your chest tightening as the anxiety builds, and you're not sure why it's there, but you feel constantly overwhelmed, maybe even on the edge of a panic attack or a breakdown. Twelve years after I had a full-blown nervous breakdown, and nearing 40, I landed myself right back in the same place. Things had gotten better but incrementally. Life had moved from a three to a five out of ten. Leading a church we had started from scratch and now planning a grand opening, working part-time for an urban youth center, and most importantly, trying to be a good husband and father. I was drowning. I was at a crossroads: keep pushing and burnout again or let go of control and let the chips fall where they may. It was a normal Wednesday afternoon, and I had blocked time for some prayer, thought, and reflection. But that day, I had a laundry list of seemingly urgent decisions that needed to be made. As I processed through each item on the list, my anxiety didn’t resolve; it grew until another breakdown felt imminent. That’s when this thought hit me like a Mack truck: You don’t have to understand or control everything to live from rest. In that moment, I threw my list to the ground, lay down on the bed, and let go of every burden and every decision I was grasping so tightly. My heart rate slowed, the weight on my chest lifted, and a sublime peace came over me. The breakthrough wasn’t a system. It was a posture of rest. I had been trying to understand and control everything before I would allow myself to rest. No more. That one insight became the foundation for the RHYTHMS OF REST℠ Framework — four cadences a human life runs on, the way a heart runs on four chambers: Relational, Emotional, Spiritual (faith or a philosophy of life), and Tangible. The illusion of control. To live from rest, you have to give up something you never really had in the first place: control. The only real control we have is self-control, and let’s be honest, some of us don’t even have that. If you have kids, you know what I mean. You can try to control your kids, but it only works for a short while and ultimately backfires. Why? Because anything other than self-control is an illusion. Control over your employees, revenue, the economy, and outcomes is an illusion. What releasing control doesn’t mean. Releasing control means being intentional about inputs and holding outcomes loosely. It doesn't mean abdicating responsibility, and it isn't 'let go and see what happens.' I see this constantly with owners and executives in my own coaching practice. The more they fixate on what they can't control, the more the anxiety compounds, and the worse their decisions get. Releasing control is an open-handed posture that must be chosen again and again. It's the difference between a team that waits for your sign-off on everything and one that moves in confidence without you in the room. When a ‘season’ becomes a lifestyle The rise-and-grind hustle culture had its heyday in the 2010s. It said optimize everything, sleep is for the weak, and squeeze every second out of your workday. It works for a while. Until it doesn’t. Part of the reason for the change is you’re not the same person anymore, and you’re in a different season of life. You're ten years older, and there’s a good chance you're married with kids. Life has changed and so have you. You may be starting to notice a change in your cognitive ability, but if not, it’s coming soon. Arthur Brooks writes about this in his book From Strength to Strength, noting that professional decline in high-skill fields typically begins between the late thirties and early fifties. Brooks goes on to note two types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. Fluid intelligence, the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems, or just “raw smarts,” diminishes rapidly starting in one’s thirties and forties. It’s the reason why the most common age for great discovery or innovation is one’s late thirties. Crystallized intelligence, which increases through middle and late adulthood and does not diminish until much later in life, is the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past. Think of a librarian amidst a vast library collection. She knows where to find a book, even if it takes a while. Youth comes with raw smarts and age with wisdom. “Work is a priority. It is not the priority.” In addition to the physical and cognitive changes you are experiencing, your values and priorities are also changing. As Meghan French Dunbar noted in This Isn’t Working, “Yes, work is a priority. It is not the priority.” Over time, you stop idolizing short-term wins and start paying attention to a more sustainable way to work. The leaders who do this well are building decade-long companies, not five-year ones. They do it by treating employees like adults, caring about their lives beyond the paycheck, and building a team culture that wins or loses together. Valeria, the CEO of FriendsheepⓇ, friend, and coaching client, cared deeply about her employees, but her own pace was unsustainable. As we identified the faulty narrative driving her pace and instituted two new rhythms, she went from working 5–6 nights a week to protecting 2–3 nights off and adding a full day of rest each week. In her own words, "Kent helped me see that rest isn't laziness; it makes me a better leader. I was able to watch a movie on the couch with my family for the first time in months without opening my laptop." In that same stretch, revenue continued to grow as she worked smarter and even had time for herself. I know what you're thinking. The grind is just a part of building a company, especially in the first few years. I can't afford to slow down right now; my competitors won't, and the two times I tried to pull back, revenue dipped. Like Valeria once did, maybe you believe that rest is laziness and slowing down will cost you growth. Or like many of my clients, you say, 'I don't know how to rest,' or 'I'll rest once I sell the company," or “I will rest when the work is finished.” In the meantime, you’re sacrificing relationships for success. Your physical health has taken a back seat to quarterly growth. And caffeine-induced energy has replaced replenishing rhythms of sleep and movement. That might work if you are planning to exit in five years as a shell of a human being or if you're fine building a company that falls apart the moment you step away: no bench, no successor, no one you've trusted enough to hand any real responsibility to. But as we have already discovered, it's not what the most effective and long-lasting companies do. My prediction: the leaders who don't figure this out in the next five years won't lose their companies outright. They'll lose themselves first. Then they'll lose their best people to the leaders who did, and they'll spend years wondering why. Or maybe it’s time to admit what was once a season has become a lifestyle. The grind that got you here will kill you. It might also cost you the people and the life you were trying to build in the first place. The bill always comes due. Yours is already accruing interest. The only open question left is what will you have to pay it with? Until next time, Kent

What if the reason nothing has stuck is that you have been fixing the wrong thing? I had a full nervous breakdown at twenty-seven. There I was, face down on the floor in a puddle of tears, in the middle of my kitchen when I was supposed to be driving to a weekend training conference for my leadership role. A second breakdown was waiting for me at thirty-nine, and I almost did not see that one coming either. Between those two moments, I tried every item on the wellness menu. Exercise. Counseling. Meditation and prayer. The early morning routine. I am writing this today because twenty years taught me what no one in the wellness industry was willing to say. I had been working very hard for a very long time at the wrong question. For over a decade, the wellness industry has told leaders and executives that the answer to burnout is balance. By every measure that matters, balance has not delivered. If you are a business owner or senior leader reading this, your odds of feeling burned out today are higher than they were the year you started your company. Every Leader Knows Work-Life Balance Doesn’t Exist, But They Can’t Name A Viable Alternative. The investment has been real. The Global Wellness Institute sizes the wellness industry at more than six trillion dollars globally. Corporate wellness budgets have grown into the largest single line item in many HR departments. Deloitte's most recent survey of senior executives reports that more than three-quarters experience symptoms of burnout. The American Psychological Association documents the highest levels of workplace anxiety and chronic stress among leaders that it has ever measured. Gallup's engagement data has slid backward across the same decade we got more wellness. Whatever the menu was supposed to do for the people running organizations, it has not done it. The metrics have not moved. I spent over twenty-five years leading organizations and the last six years working with executives. I have tried the menu personally, watched dozens of CEOs try it before they walked into my virtual office, and I have seen dozens of leaders crash and burn. Why “Balance” is the Wrong Frame Balance is borrowed from physics. When taken out of the context of physics, it implies that the body, the marriage, the team, and the company are weights on a scale, and that equilibrium is achievable with enough adjustment. Nothing in nature works that way. The body does not balance. It cycles. The seasons do not balance. They rhythm. Sleep and waking. Hunger and meal. Tension and release. The most productive things on Earth are not balanced. They are rhythmic. I built a framework called RHYTHMS OF REST℠: four cadences a human life runs on, the way a heart runs on four chambers: Relational, Emotional, Spiritual (faith or a philosophy of life), and Tangible. When one chamber is out of sync, the whole system suffers. When all four work together, performance and presence stop competing. Most People Think They Are Burned Out From Too Much Work. Actually, They're Burned Out From The Wrong Rhythms. Here’s what to do: Stop optimizing for balance and start auditing your rhythms. Balance means equilibrium and life is not equal. The useful question is not "am I balanced this week?" but "which of the four rhythms is most out of sync and needs attention right now?" One of them is dragging the others down. Name it. Pick one keystone change in that single chamber. Not a five-pillar overhaul. One structural move that changes everything else. A weekly meal with your family that does not move. One regular hobby that refills your emotional tank. Five minutes of silence and solitude every morning. A weekly Sabbath day or day of rest where you do activities that replenish you with people you enjoy. Choosing to get a full night's sleep most nights. Stop calling it self-care. Self-care is what we call wellness when we are still operating inside the frame that failed us. Call it structure. Call it cadence. Call it the way the world actually works. That is the language your team will understand. To be sure, the wellness industry has not been useless. Some executives have found real value in a meditation app or breathwork. Some have read a good book on burnout and changed their lives. I think often about the version of me on the kitchen floor at twenty-seven and what led me there. He thought pushing through was the answer, until he couldn’t anymore. He approached life one-dimensionally when it required a four-dimensional approach. What he needed was someone to tell him that he had been working very hard for a very long time at the wrong question. Rather than balance, he was seeking wholeness. He didn’t need a new approach; he needed an ancient one. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Daniel was brought into Babylon and offered the king's diet, the king's schedule, and the king's productivity system. He declined all of it and kept his own rhythms. The Hebrew Scriptures record that at the end of his trial period, he outperformed every peer in the room. He faced the same pressures but had a different structure. If you are reading this and something in it feels caught, you are him. You are also still in time to make the move he did not know how to make. Stop chasing balance. Start naming your rhythms. Your RHYTHMS Check Each time we do this, we're pausing on one of the four RHYTHMS OF REST, Relational, Emotional, Spiritual, or Tangible, with one action step for the next 24–48 hours and one reflection question to go deeper. Today's chamber: Emotional. People often mistake this for a Tangible problem, just working too many hours. It usually isn't. Burnout is rarely about the hours themselves. It's about the rhythms you're avoiding, or not tending to, because work is easier to hide inside. More often, what's actually running the show is control. Wanting to work all the time is rarely the real driver. Action step (24–48 hrs): Block 30–60 minutes. No phone, no laptop, no scrolling. Ask yourself: Do you feel inadequate at home, and does work validate you instead? Is work your primary source of identity? What would you do if you couldn’t do it anymore? When did you last do something just for fun? What relationships are you neglecting by working this much? This isn't about working less. It's about adding back what actually replenishes you. Reflection question: What are you currently trying to control that was never actually yours to control in the first place? Go deeper: Take the RHYTHMS OF REST℠ Assessment. In under three minutes, you have real clarity on which rhythm is depleting your energy and what to do about it. Kent Murawski is an executive coach, author, and speaker based in Boston and the founder of RHYTHMS OF REST℠. He works with owners and executives of mid-market companies. His book on the framework is forthcoming.

Explore how to shift from work-life balance to sustainable rhythms for leadership. Start your journey with Kent's framework today.

Yep. The REST guy is officially fried. The good part that came out of the fall-down-on-the-floor nervous breakdown I had twenty-plus years ago is that I now have a built-in alarm that tells me when I’m pushing too hard. The thing about burnout is, by the time you feel it, you're already further along than you think. For the past few months, I’ve been pushing hard — working on my upcoming book, finalizing a three-hour workshop for executives, rebuilding my quad muscle from a patellar tendon rupture, and trying to be fully present for my family. I’m feeling weary and stretched thin. Business may move in quarters, but life moves in trimesters. That’s why I do some serious re-evaluation and take a retreat moving into the summer (more on the retreat next time). You probably feel it, too. Summer is approaching, and you want to slow down. Enjoy the weather. Hang with your family and friends. Go on vacation. Relax. But instead, you find yourself busier than ever. Business doesn’t stop just because summer arrives. But is it possible to slow down without losing momentum? Slowing down doesn’t only preserve momentum; I believe it increases it. The Thing You’re Ignoring Every June I fought this for years. The season was telling me to slow down — the kids are home from school, the weather is getting nicer, and my energy is low from pushing from January to April. All the while, driven me is shouting: If you slow down, everything falls apart! For years I missed precious time with my kids — fishing, playing at the park, riding bikes — while trying to push through all summer long. And it changed nothing. Leaders feel a unique pressure to “make things happen,” as the success or failure of the company or organization relies solely on us. It doesn’t. In fact, it only makes things worse. As Tim Ferriss wrote in The 4-Hour Work Week, as soon as he removed himself as the bottleneck, profits increased 40%. Slowing down forces you to delegate and automate your business. In 2014, I was leading a small, struggling church we founded four years earlier in Cambridge, Mass — one of the most difficult areas of the country (and maybe the world) in which to start a new church. We had never introduced ourselves to the city as a new church, so we decided to hold a grand opening. It involved raising $35,000 (a significant sum of money which I had to raise) and hundreds of hours of labor. All this while working part-time as an urban youth worker for the City of Cambridge to make ends meet and, most importantly, trying to be a good husband and father. Wednesday afternoons were set aside for what had always been a refreshing time of prayer and stillness, but on that particular Wednesday, there was a long list of items that needed answers. None of them could wait. With each prayer, I felt my anxiety grow — to a level I hadn’t felt since my nervous breakdown, twelve years earlier. Instead of pushing through, I tossed my prayer list to the floor, lay down on the bed, and let go as these words flooded into my heart and mind: You don’t have to understand or control everything to live and lead from a place of rest. As I did, a deep peace came over me, unlike anything I had experienced. I would never be the same again. What Are You Holding Onto? I still feel anxiety sometimes. I still feel the temptation to push through the warning signs. So what changed? I no longer hold on so tightly to outcomes I can't control. And you don’t have to either. The best way to manage the future? Joshua, a pastor friend of mine, puts it this way: "Look ahead but don't live ahead." There’s nothing wrong with looking ahead and planning for the future. But living in the future only creates anxiety. There are too many unknowns. Too many things we can’t control. Too many questions we can’t answer. You have your own version of that prayer list — that never-ending list of unfinished, anxiety-producing tasks. Lying on that bedroom floor taught me to rethink my approach to summer in three ways. 1) Rethink what’s most important. What opportunities are only available in the summertime that you don’t want to miss? 2) Re-evaluate your schedule. As the season changes, so must your schedule. If you have school-aged children, that happens in trimesters, not quarters. 3) Ruthlessly eliminate . Kids home, vacations, and good weather make summer a natural time to slow down. So why fight it? It’s also a good time for experiments. One of the business owners I work with, Jesh, always wanted to take Fridays off but was afraid his business would suffer. After some encouragement from me, he decided to try it as a summer experiment. Within 2-3 weeks, he secured two new retainer clients and hit his revenue goal for the year. It happened six months early, all while taking Fridays off! Your RHYTHMS Check Slowing down doesn't cost you momentum; it restores it. My clearest thinking doesn’t happen when I’m pushing through anxiety; it happens when I’m at rest, at play, or on a walk. This is about your Spiritual and Tangible rhythms — where they meet. The Spiritual work is letting go of the outcomes you've been white-knuckling. The Tangible work is practical: looking at how you actually spend your time and asking whether your schedule is fighting the season or moving with it. Summer has a rhythm. The question is whether yours is working against it. If you keep overriding the season, packing your summer calendar the way you pack every other quarter, you'll hit September empty, wondering where the summer went. But if you look honestly at what summer actually requires of you and make even small adjustments to join the season rather than fight it, you'll enjoy it more and lead better now and in the fall. This week's Rhythm of REST: Calendars don't manage themselves, and they need a fresh set of eyes every season. Pull up yours. Find three places where you're scheduled against the grain of summer: meetings that could move, commitments that could shrink, margin that got filled out of habit. Make one adjustment this week. Just one. See what it costs you. I think you'll be surprised.  Reflection Question: Where in your schedule right now are you fighting the season, and what would it look like to stop? Until next time,