I answered the door in a robe

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Hey Spark Family,

The last couple of months have been a whirlwind for our whole team at Spark Brilliance. Keynotes, client launches, programs rolling out across several organizations at once, more travel than any of us can neatly account for. Our team has been extraordinary, and the work has been some of the best we have ever done.

And underneath all of it, the regular business of being parents, partners, and humans who would like to stay healthy and reasonably sane.

A few weeks ago we were in Las Vegas for a stretch that was a run even by the standards of these past months. I got to launch a new model live to more than a thousand leaders, with a fireside chat alongside a wonderful client's extraordinary COO. Then straight into a full 6 hour masterclass in one of the most electric rooms I have been in all year. Another immersive client day after that. Dinners both nights.

The work was spectacular. That is the part worth naming, because this was not a hard week I was gritting through. It was a thrilling one. And it still emptied me completely, which is something I do not think we say out loud nearly enough.

By the second night, after the masterclass, I hit a kind of fatigue that does not respond to willpower. I had dinner on the calendar with Eileen, a very dear friend. A good restaurant, a real catch-up, the kind of night I genuinely love.

And my instinct, which I suspect is your instinct too, was to push through. Shower, pull it together, show up, be great.

Instead I stopped for a second and asked myself a question I do not ask nearly often enough. What would actually feel good to me right now?

So I called Eileen and asked if she would come to my hotel room instead.

Lindsay, Spark’s amazing COO, was with me working in Las Vegas too. We ordered room service. I put on the hotel’s super soft robe and slippers and answered the door, and the three of us sat on the couch and talked for hours.

It was one of the most restorative nights I have had in months.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. I did not cancel, and I did not cut it short. The dinner was a good thing and I wanted it. What I changed was the form, because the version on the calendar was going to drain me and the version on the couch was going to fill me.

Same friend. Same night. Longer, actually. Completely different outcome.

Why this is so hard to do

We are not imagining the pace. Microsoft's Work Trend Index, built on telemetry from millions of users plus a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers, found that the average person is interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email, or notification. Up to 275 times a day. Forty percent of people online at 6 a.m. are already triaging email. Meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16 percent year over year. One in three people said the pace of the last five years has made it genuinely impossible to keep up.

That is the whiplash so many of us are living in. And it has a cost most people misname.

Sabine Sonnentag has spent decades studying how people actually recover from work, and her central finding is the one almost nobody acts on. Being off work is not the same as recovering. What restores you is psychological detachment, the experience of being mentally released from the mode, not just physically away from the desk. Time off without detachment does very little.

Which explains my night perfectly. The restaurant would have been time off. I would still have been on, still performing, still running the same system. The couch was detachment.

And then there is the finding that should take the self-blame out of this for all of us. Sonnentag's research shows that exhausted people find detachment harder, not easier. The more depleted you are, the more your mind stays switched on, which is exactly when you need it least. My instinct to push through at my most tired was not a discipline problem. It is the documented pattern.

What rest is actually doing

This is the part I wish more leaders understood.

When your brain is not focused on a task, it does not shut off. It switches into what neuroscientists call the default mode network, and that system does some of the most important work you do all day. It consolidates memory. It processes emotion. It connects ideas that were sitting in separate drawers. It is where self-reflection happens, where insight shows up, where you make sense of your own life.

Which means when you never stop, you do not just get tired. You lose access to your own clarity. The thinking that would have told you what is working and what is not never gets the chance to run.

There is a harder truth in the research too. A brain running on empty tends to use that same quiet time for rumination rather than integration. That is why rest sometimes feels terrible when you are fried, why you finally sit down and immediately start spiraling. The answer is not to stop resting. It is to recover before you are that far gone.

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🌟 Your Challenge This Week

Look at the next week on your calendar. Then ask:

➡ Which of these will fill me, and which will drain me?

➡ For the draining ones, is there a version that could fill me instead? A walk-and-talk on the phone instead of a zoom? Virtual instead of a flight? Room service instead of a restaurant?

➡ When was the last time I was genuinely off, not just away from my desk?

And the hardest one:

What is the thing I keep pushing through that I could simply do differently?

The goal was never to do less of what matters. It was to stop handing the good things over to a version of yourself who has nothing left to bring to them.

That night in Vegas, I was fully present with someone I adore and missed for the first time in weeks. Not because I cancelled anything, but because I finally asked what would fill me instead of assuming I had to push through.

That question is available to you all the time.

Grateful,
​Jackie

P.S. If you try this and change the form of something instead of cancelling it, hit reply and tell me what you did. I read every one, and I am collecting good ideas for my own calendar.

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