Across this series I’ve talked a lot about recovery: settling the nervous system, processing stress rather than suppressing, giving the body its signal that the pressure has passed. There’s an obvious objection, and it’s a fair one. If recovery depends on each individual being disciplined about it, it may tend to fail. People are busy, tired, and under pressure, which is often exactly why they skip it.
So the recovery that seems to hold up best is the recovery that’s built into how work runs, rather than left to willpower.
Consider the difference. Recovery that depends on willpower is the annual leave you technically take while answering emails from the beach. It’s the lunch break you mean to have and rarely do. It tends to be the good intention that evaporates the moment things get busy, which is often the moment it’s needed most. Individual recovery is real, but it can be fragile, and it may break under the very loads that make it necessary.
Recovery built into the system tends to be sturdier, because it doesn’t depend on any one person’s discipline on a hard day. It might be the meeting that ends ten minutes early by default, so nervous systems get a moment to settle between demands. It might be annual leave that’s genuinely covered, so nobody returns to a fortnight of chaos as the price of having rested. It might be catch-up time placed in the diary after a heavy stretch, planned in rather than hoped for. It might be a workload a senior person is able to lighten before someone breaks, rather than after.
None of that relies much on individual toughness. It relies on design.
This may be why the research keeps pointing towards a combination approach. Individual strategies appear to help somewhat. Organisational change appears to help somewhat. Together, they seem to shift the numbers more reliably, perhaps because the structure holds the recovery in place on the days willpower can’t.
Built in recovery time is showing promise as a way to reduce burnout: a 2025 trial across 141 organisations in six countries, including New Zealand, found that structurally reducing hours to a four-day week lowered burnout, compared with the control group companies that kept a five day week.
And if you are someone who decides how work is organised: encouraging people to look after themselves, inside a system that quietly penalises them for doing so, may not function as a wellbeing strategy. It can end up passing the problem back to the individual and hoping.
The healthiest workplaces I’ve seen tend not to rely on hope. They build it in, so that recovery isn’t an act of quiet rebellion. It’s just how the place works.
Human Foundations is a weekly look at the science behind high performance and wellbeing at work, from keynote speaker, psychiatrist, comedian and author Dr Jo Prendergast. Subscribe to get each edition as it lands.
Next week: Why recovery is hardest when we need it most.
Dr Jo turns this thinking into keynotes for conferences and leadership teams.
