Brain Dump

The Hidden Price of Deep Work

I’m a coach. I teach self-monitoring strategies to support performance longevity. I have extensive experience using data and metrics to fine-tune my body and mind. But sometimes, life catches up with me. I miss things. I lose the plot. Or small habits build up over time without me noticing.

Improving the skill of self-calibration doesn’t mean reaching some stable utopia of total human optimization—a lesson I was recently reminded of. Instead, it means being better equipped to handle the inevitable ebbs and flows of life, deploying strategies more effectively and much sooner than I otherwise would.

That reminder came when my HRV and sleep quality suddenly declined. My mood and motivation slipped, and my recovery from exercise and jiu-jitsu wasn’t terrible, but the usual residue of fatigue seemed to linger. Over the course of two weeks, I even noticed an occasional low-level buzzing or shaking sensation, something I’d usually associate with low blood sugar.

Had any of these symptoms occurred in isolation, I might have brushed them off. But with multiple small disruptions happening at once, I had to take a step back. I needed to pump the brakes, reset, and figure out what was going on.

At first, I went through the usual checklist. Exercise volume and intensity weren’t excessive. I wasn’t sick or injured. My food quality and intake were stable. No major stressors had emerged in my personal or professional life. And yet, something was off. Even now, as I write this, I can still feel the aftereffects of whatever it was, though to a lesser degree.

Subtle Costs, Hidden Drains

One of the first things I realized was that the primary contributor to my “downshift” was not obvious. It was subtle, creeping in gradually like water wearing a hole in stone. Subtle stressors like this tend to be the most insidious because they build so gradually that they go unnoticed until they start causing problems.

The second realization was that there wasn’t a single cause. As tempting as it was to look for one neat explanation, real life doesn’t work that way. Human health and performance aren’t controlled lab experiments with isolated variables. Instead, multiple factors had woven together, creating a larger issue. The real challenge wasn’t in pinpointing a singular root cause but in figuring out which levers to pull to create the biggest net positive effect without causing further stress on my system.

I share this story not to offer a simple solution but to provide a perspective that may help others respond more effectively to shifting demands—whether in sport or in life.

Heavy Learning

I love doing athletic things, but I don’t consider myself an athlete in the competitive sense. I haven’t competed in years. I love training too, and I’ve long used the training environment as a tool to test and shape myself. But neither training nor competition provides my deepest sense of fulfillment anymore.

For me, the most interesting puzzle—the one I find myself obsessing over—is the wildly complex and ever-changing world of human health and performance.

These days, I spend most of my time as an educator, problem solver, and writer. My work revolves around thinking, analyzing, and developing frameworks. When my wife Thomi and I still had our gym, I was on the training floor working with people all day, six days a week. I was solving performance puzzles then too, but I was physically engaged much more of the time. Now, most of my work happens on my laptop.

This shift in my career isn’t new—it’s been happening for more than five years. But only recently did the physiological and psychological costs of this transition become obvious to me. Or, more accurately, only recently did I actually notice them. That’s the thing about self-awareness—it’s hard to see something when you’re in the middle of it. It’s like trying to explain water to a fish.

The Cognitive Load Factor

As my health metrics, mood, and motivation started slipping, I decided to take a step back and make adjustments. The easiest lever to pull was reducing training intensity and frequency. That helped, but only slightly. I then tightened up my nutrition beyond my usual 80-85% adherence to high-quality eating. Again, a marginal improvement. Sleep hygiene was already dialed in, so there wasn’t much to adjust there.

At this point, I had to ask myself: What am I missing?

It finally dawned on me that maybe the stress I was experiencing wasn’t physical at all. Maybe it was cognitive.

Even though I know from both science and experience that cognitive load can be a significant source of stress, I resisted giving it credit at first. It didn’t feel like stress. I wasn’t ruminating on problems, nor was I overwhelmed by anything negative. But I had been in a deep, intense phase of intellectual work—immersed in rapid learning and professional development. And, as life tends to do, everything piled up in a short period of time.

In the span of a few weeks, I was preparing for an international trip filled with dense speaking engagements, refining my book for promotion, working on three different coaching projects, mapping out a systems model for jiu-jitsu as a side project, co-authoring a white paper, and doing an unofficial "Master’s project" alongside ALTISedu students.

Somewhere along the way, I started waking up at 3:30 in the morning to sketch mind maps in a notebook.

Stress Isn’t Always What You Think It Is

When we think of stress, we often associate it with negative emotions—anxiety, frustration, overwhelm. But stress isn’t always tied to negativity. Cognitive load, even when it comes from exciting and fulfilling work, still carries a cost.

That’s what stress is—the cost burden on the system for a given set of activities at any one time. I realized that my cognitive workload had become expensive. Or, at the very least, the way I was managing it was becoming costly.

The Role of Mental Respite

Not only was I buried in heavy cognitive work, but I was also obsessively focused on it. This deep engagement leads to valuable insights, but it can also be detrimental. In the past, I’ve found that having unstructured downtime is essential for balance. Not meditation or breathwork—because then I just turn them into tasks—but real, unstructured mental wandering.

This kind of mental idling activates the Default Mode Network (DMN), the part of the brain responsible for organizing emotions and memories. The DMN is highly active during REM sleep, but it also engages when we let our minds drift freely, away from sustained attention on a specific task.

Ironically, I neglected to use this strategy when I needed it most. But once I did, I noticed an immediate shift.

The Cost of Doing Business

I don’t want to stop challenging myself. I won’t stop chasing puzzles that stretch my capacity or pushing myself in meaningful ways. That’s just the cost of doing business.

The real challenge is figuring out how to remain aware of our evolving needs. How do we build support systems that allow us to keep pushing ourselves intelligently? How do we track the more subtle psychological and emotional demands before they accumulate into something disruptive?

These are the questions I’m asking myself now. And I’d love to hear how others navigate these challenges. If you have experiences or insights, share them in the comments below.

Thanks for reading,

Rob

P.S. Here’s a related article you might enjoy.

FUNCTIONAL REVERIE

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