Creating Your “Recovery Room”
“It’s easy to get caught up in the urgency of life—to get so busy ‘sawing’ that you don’t take time to sharpen the saw.” — Stephen R. Covey
In last week's blog, I invited us to reflect on the essential role of recovery in sustaining high performance and well-being. Many of us in healthcare are masters at pushing through, but less skilled at pulling back. This week, I want to share how I’ve come to integrate recovery into my own life—and offer a few ways you might do the same.
For a long time, I treated recovery as something that, if even necessary, would happen after everything else was done. In retrospect, I often treated myself as if I was immune to the need for it at all. Eventually, after yet another instance of “hitting the wall” energetically, I concluded that it was a necessity rather than an option or indulgence. But interrupting my “drive” wasn’t easy. So, I started small: a pause between patients, unplugging from email in the evenings, a few pages of pleasure reading before bed—not as another task, but as a gift to myself. To my surprise, these small shifts didn’t slow me down but rather helped me show up more fully and with greater focus.
A turning point came five years into my clinical practice, when a 4-month period of working very part-time while transitioning jobs provided an extended period of “recovery.” During that time I read voraciously, including Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey’s 7th Habit, “Sharpen the Saw,” emphasized recovery as a discipline rather than a luxury—something that fuels, rather than interrupts, high performance. He emphasized intentional renewal across physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual domains and the importance of literally putting it on one’s schedule. This included daily moments of grounding, and weekly and seasonal times for reflection and recalibration, allowing one to focus on what matters with greater clarity and energy.
Since then, I’ve experimented with integrating these rhythms into my own life. Morning writing and movement, evening reflection, and regular fasting aligned with monthly and seasonal cycles have all become small investments in my own renewal. This rhythm has been translated into the PeerRx process as well, through weekly, monthly, and quarterly PRx90 check-ins. While consistency is still a challenge, the payoff is clear: I’m more present, more grounded, and better equipped to serve others.
Your recovery practices may look different—and they should. What matters is not the form, but that they happen and do so as a priority you regularly make time for. This week, consider what small recovery practice you might integrate into your day. Then commit to it—inviting your PeerRx partner or other trusted colleague to check-in with you. It doesn’t have to be big. It just needs to be consistent, remembering that making room for recovery must be an essential and integral component of your plan to be and stay effective. Or, as Stephen Covey would say, don’t “get so busy ‘sawing’ that you don’t take time to sharpen the saw.”