How to Find Your Sustainable Pace and Calm Your Nervous System (with Elizabeth Svoboda)

It is a real, structural pattern. It is a pendulum swing between all-out effort and collapse, and it has nothing to do with being bad at time management. It has a name and a way out, and I will walk you through both.

Your sustainable pace is the rhythm of effort and recovery you could actually keep up for years. Slowing down is only half of it. Sometimes finding your pace means speeding up, after you have pulled back too far.

There is a specific breathing pace, roughly four to six breaths per minute, that raises your heart-rate variability and settles your body in a few minutes. I explain exactly how to find yours below.

What Elizabeth and I talk about is coaching work, closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It is not treatment for a clinical condition. I draw a clear line between the two in the article.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Okay. Who else can relate? You crush it. You have a big week. You do all the things — and then, after that, you just absolutely collapse. You sit on your phone for hours at a time. You eat cereal for dinner. You cannot remember anything. It’s almost like you kind of fall apart a little bit. And then a couple days later, you’re sort of feeling restored, but you have fallen behind on everything and feel kind of panicky, and that vicious cycle starts all over again.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What we tend to do is keep giving 110 percent, putting it all on the line until we reach the total absolute limit of our capacity. If you just felt seen just then, this episode is for you. Because this is a known pattern. It is a pendulum swinging. It has a name, it has science behind it — and thank goodness, there is also a way out. That’s what we’re talking about today on Love, Happiness and Success.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My guest is Elizabeth Svoboda, and if her name doesn’t yet ring a bell, it will. She is already the author of three books, and the latest one is called The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving. Elizabeth, is that the right way to say it?

Elizabeth Svoboda: I would say I’m a science writer. I’m a contributor to Scientific American, Greater Good magazine, Boston Globe Ideas. I just work with a lot of different editors about ideas that interest me and that I think will be important to others as well.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I love it that you’re in this position of being able to absorb and synthesize all kinds of information from all sorts of different sources. And I am so excited to learn more about what you’ve learned around this pattern — this pendulum, this “all the way on and then collapse in a heap” phenomenon. Is the right name for it burnout, or do you call it something else in your work?

Elizabeth Svoboda: I do think it’s kind of a pendulum swinging effect. First of all, as you all know, we live in a society that rewards going 110 percent, and that really gets embedded in us from our earliest years. We need to work harder. We need to put everything on the line. We need to put our noses to the grindstone. So most of us never learn how to dial that back when we’re younger. We tend to keep giving 110 percent, putting it all on the line until we reach the total absolute limit of our capacity. And then we tend to crash out, and the pendulum swings toward the opposite extreme. We’re so crashed out that we need to withdraw for a while because our body is showing the damage. Our minds are feeling fried and frazzled. So we go through this recovery period — but then inevitably, the pendulum swings back again, the next time we decide we want to dive into something 110 percent.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Because you can go too far, like when you’re resting — aka not doing anything — and Laundry Mountain is piling up, there’s no food in the refrigerator. That struggle is real too. So — is there a personal connection to this?

Elizabeth Svoboda: Yeah, I do think a lot of the inspiration for this book came out of my pacing failures, to be honest with you. The way I grew up, especially in the school system I grew up in — if people thought you had potential, they wanted you to push that potential to the max. I ended up being the kind of kid who signed up for ten AP courses. It was kind of reinforcing, because I got praise for taking this much on from my family, from my teachers. But no one ever really advised me to pull back a little bit or think about why I was taking on all the things that I was taking on. I was just spread so thin. And I took that mindset into adulthood with me. Although I’ve learned better to check it, I have this ingrained tendency to go out too fast, to go out all the way, because that is so ingrained in me. It is so easy to stay in that all-out pace — what’s become the default pace for so many of us.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Right. All gas, no brakes. And when we absorb those messages, we can do it for a while, but then it starts to take a toll. Tell me about that. In your research and exploration for this book, what emerged as the hidden consequences?

Elizabeth Svoboda: Just going all out without respite — those consequences differ from one person to another. It might show up in one person as steadily rising blood pressure as week after week passes under stress at work. For me, sometimes it shows up as shooting bolt upright in bed at 4:30 in the morning, unable to go back to sleep.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Our bodies do give us these warning signs that we’re going too hard. The question is: do we heed them before things progress down the line and could even touch off chronic conditions? For me, if I let myself go with those early-morning wake-ups, I may plunge into a full-blown bout of depression. Because that’s happened to me in the past, I understand just how important it is to pull myself back from that brink before I fall in. So much of pacing, the way I think about it, is like preparation, preemptive work. How do I make shifts early to pull myself back from the brink of whatever consequences are probably going to happen if I keep going the way I’ve been going?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Thank you for sharing that. Gosh, how much self-awareness goes into that. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of work observing your own patterns and have learned from experience what those limits are. If we just override them, that doesn’t end well.

Elizabeth Svoboda: That’s so true. Much of it is about checking in with yourself and knowing yourself better than we often allow ourselves to. Being honest with yourself: how do I feel right now? The fact that I haven’t felt like eating in 48 hours — is this trying to tell me something about what I need to do to preserve my energy and my health? A lot of it is about honesty and reckoning.

Elizabeth Svoboda: And then it’s about a phrase a former Olympic athlete turned coach taught me. After you do this reckoning, you ask yourself: what’s the wise choice here? You lay it all out for yourself — this is where I’m at, what’s the next wise choice I can make? It focuses you on two things: what you really need in that particular moment, and what can you realistically do to meet that need. Often it’s an incremental thing. It might not be that you need to take the rest of the week off from work. It might be something like taking a ten-minute walk, blowing off some steam, texting with a friend for a few minutes. Then maybe you’re feeling a little more centered. It’s very responsive. You do what feels like the next wise thing, and then you ask yourself, what’s the next wise thing now that I’ve done that? It becomes this responsive pacing — you move from one wise choice to the next.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: You’ve used the word pacing a few times, and I’d love it if you could unpack that and tell us more about what you mean.

Elizabeth Svoboda: I think it can involve slowing down, but basically it’s about being more deliberate about how you manage your energy. In many cases it involves slowing down a little bit — maybe pulling back 20 percent from a volunteer commitment that’s taking up more headspace than you want it to. But it can also involve, after you’ve been in a period of more withdrawal, maybe speeding up a little bit, allowing yourself to burn a little more energy. I really do think about it as a process of energy management that is sustainable. Is the way I’m engaging and pulling back — the rhythm I’m finding — something I’m going to be able to keep up for years on end, for my entire lifetime? And if not, what changes do I need to make?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Have you found there are differences in personality or wiring that impact people’s tolerance for this? Because even as we’re talking — I could absolutely overdo it, but at the same time, I think I’m a high-capacity person. I like to go fast. I like to do a lot of things. It almost feels less comfortable for me sometimes to lay out on the porch. I live in Colorado, where the whole culture is telling me, don’t work so hard, come on, hang out. And part of me is thinking, no, I have to do stuff.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Absolutely. One person’s right pace at a particular time in their life may be totally different from somebody else’s. You may have experienced this even with people in your family — some are more go, go, go. On the weekends they really feel like their weekend isn’t complete unless they’re doing two or three different activities outside the house each day. Other people, honestly this is more like me on the weekends, just want to have time to read and relax. So it’s about learning to distinguish what feels like your right pace from the pace other people maybe are telling you to keep. The problem a lot of us run into is that we find it hard to distinguish between those two things.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I love that this is very self-directed. We need to get in touch with ourselves, because someone else’s definition of what this should be, when it is imposed on you, isn’t going to fit. That’s either somebody wanting you to go more and do more and be more and move faster — or somebody wanting to unplug you from activities that actually give you a lot of energy and feel fun for you, even if they don’t feel good for them. Tuning into yourself is really important.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Exactly. And what we know is that when we engage in the things we love the most and that give us purpose, that energizes us and helps us feel happier and more fulfilled over the course of our lives. So when I see this cultural messaging like, you know, “lie flat” or “quiet-quit,” it feels so extreme in the opposite direction. We probably don’t want to be going 110 percent all the time — but equally, we don’t want to be withdrawing all the time either, because that is going to leave us feeling drained and unfulfilled.

Elizabeth Svoboda: If you are going into an extended withdrawal where you’re really not focusing on anything, you may start to feel listless, you may start to feel unfulfilled, and you may even descend into depression. I actually had an older family member who has passed on many years ago now, but he loved working his whole life, and after he retired he kind of went from 100 to 0 overnight. He had a really extreme bout of depression that I think was related to him not being as closely in touch with his purpose, with the way he was contributing.

Elizabeth Svoboda: That’s definitely something we always need to keep in mind in setting our right pace. We want to pull back when it’s needed to preserve our health, but there are reasons that we want to surge forward too, and move toward what gives us life, what gives us purpose, and what serves so many people around us. Finding that balance and being responsive — when do I surge forward here, and when do I pull back? What is most calling to me at this moment, and how do I pursue that? All of those things are at the heart of successful pacing.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: There are so many different dimensions of this. We’ve talked about your core wiring — people have different thermostats in terms of what they’re into. But there are also so many messages from culture and family about achievement and what you should be doing, and those can make us push too hard, result in exhaustion, this disconnection from self. At the same time, there is this purposeful activity that can also generate curiosity and excitement and meaning and joy. Ideally, if your job is in alignment with what you enjoy, that could be incredible. But on the other side, there’s a whole other contingent of cultural messages around relaxation and self-care and bubble baths, and if you extend that further, there can be a checked-out, almost helpless quality — internalizing a narrative that it’s too hard, it’s too much. That becomes an obstacle even to self-confidence, since largely observing yourself doing hard things is where self-confidence comes from.

Elizabeth Svoboda: That is such a good point. While I was writing this book, I did spend quite a bit of time with athletes, and they are so good and so smart at giving themselves surmountable challenges. They definitely have periods of their day when they’re working hard, when they’re trying to go beyond what they’ve ever done before. It really does involve supreme effort, pushing yourself beyond what you think you can do. But what they do to recover from that — they will really give themselves rest and recovery in the wake of that extreme exertion, in a way that reflects what they’ve put into it. That’s the ingredient that so many of us are missing.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Psychologists call it eustress. You give yourself that good stress that makes you grow, and then after that, give yourself the downtime. For me, it’s reading time. Reading is the best way I unwind and get back to sort of a calm nervous-system baseline. Again, I think we come back to this self-knowledge — listening to what your body and your mind need and kind of being like, okay, you did that, that was really hard, that stretched you beyond your boundaries. Let’s treat yourself a little bit in the wake of that.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Okay, so I’d love to get your insight into two different parts of this. Maybe first, what seems to me like the hardest part — the recognition, the self-awareness. What things should people be looking for in themselves that would give them insight into whether it’s too much or potentially not enough?

Elizabeth Svoboda: The foundation of any good pacing plan — you need to really get in touch with what brings you meaning in your life. What are you really striving for? That’s why I devote a lot of time early in the book to that. One of the chapters presents an exercise called the re-storying exercise. There’s a lot to it, but to boil it down, it’s about finding the narrative thread that runs through your life and almost envisioning your life as a hero’s journey. If you are the protagonist on this journey — what are you really after? What do you want the most? What gives you the most fulfillment? What obstacles have you faced along the way, and how have you overcome them, and what have you learned in the process? And the really important one: what legacy do you ultimately want to leave to your community and the people around you?

Elizabeth Svoboda: As you work your way through these questions, it really brings you face to face with: does what you’re pursuing now on a day-to-day basis actually align with those goals that come up when you find the narrative thread in your life and the legacy you want to leave? When the things you’re doing day to day are out of alignment with those goals, you may need to do some more fundamental reorientation as far as your pacing goes. Before you try to pace yourself granularly on a day-to-day level — figure out how many hours you need to rest after working, all of that stuff — this underpinning and foundation needs to be in place, that you really feel like you’re heading in a direction that aligns with what you want most, or what you want to leave to the world. That’s where I always start with people.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Gosh, how wise. Don’t take any action until you figure out what you really want to do. You got to start at the studs. It sounds like in your book you’re laying out power questions, journaling exercises that help people really tap into what the answer to that question is for them — what do I want, what do I care about? What you’re talking about is something we do a lot of in my field. My background — I’m a psychologist, I’m a family therapist. But what I do now in my practice, and have actually begun working with other therapists to teach these competencies…

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s a big part of my business at Growing Self. The field of psychotherapy is for the purpose of diagnosing and treating clinical mental-health conditions. What you bravely shared earlier — when it is capital-D Depression, and it has taken hold and people are really stuck in that state — that’s a different deal. That can sometimes be the outcome of self-abuse over a period of months or years. That’s the pool at the bottom of that particular water slide.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: But with coaching — and tying it back to what you were saying — a big part of what we’re doing is not therapy. It’s not mental-health treatment. There’s nothing wrong with you. It is intentionally bringing visibility into the gap between where you are in your life and how you’re operating, and where you really want to be. Sometimes even understanding the “where do you want to be” part is quite challenging. So what you’re saying is that the first step of your process is illuminating that distance between where you want to go long term, and then that reflection of: is my way of being in the world right now congruent with that outcome, or is it going to get in my way?

Elizabeth Svoboda: Exactly. It’s so key. And that comes up in the research too. We know that when people feel like they have what’s called a sense of coherence in their lives — a sense that their lives have meaning — they are less likely to burn out down the line. They are just going to feel more energetic on a day-to-day basis. When you are in alignment with where you say you actually want to go, every day is going to feel easier. It’s not going to feel like you’re putting forward as much effort as if those things are not aligned.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Can I highlight this for a second? Because this also illuminates something so important when it comes to macro decisions — even what you do for work, career exploration, career counseling. There’s such a difference between somebody who doesn’t have congruence with what they do for a living, so if they think about spending eight or ten hours doing it, there’s this “get me out of here as fast as I can, I need to go recover” — versus, as you were saying, if it’s in alignment and it’s energizing and joyful and interesting, you could do it for 16 hours a day and not bat an eye. There’s a difference. It’s not just the time or the energy.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Some people just do that really well. I know for my husband, it’s very hard for me to tell the difference between what he does for leisure and what he does for work, because what he does for work, which is computer graphics, is also the fun stuff he does in his free time. Maybe not always can we have that close an alignment. But ideally, what you’re doing day to day should be fun. It should be engaging. Not to say it should never be hard — sometimes it will be hard, but it will feel like a good kind of hard. Like you’re doing this for a reason.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: To extend the metaphor, what is your finish line? Some people haven’t thought about the finish line that much. Now that we’ve been bringing these things into visibility, I would love to get your thoughts on some strategies you’ve seen people use to start to restore balance — what does it actually look like when people do this?

Elizabeth Svoboda: There are many strategies you can try, but one of the ones I love the most is called energy management. Many of you are familiar with time management — you may have tried mapping your days by 15-minute or 30-minute increments. I have tried that, and every time I try, it fails terribly, because inevitably something comes up that I don’t expect and the entire careful calendar I spent 30 minutes putting together gets shattered, and I have to start all over from scratch. That doesn’t work too well for me.

Elizabeth Svoboda: With energy management, the advantage is that it’s a lot more flexible and it’s in tune with your body’s natural rhythms. How it works: you observe when you normally have the most energy and focus during the day. This may be different for everybody. For some people it’s mid-morning — for me it tends to be between 9:30 and 11:30 in the morning. For some people it’s late afternoon. For some creative people I know, it’s the wee hours of the night. It’s about knowing this about yourself. Some coaches call these energy windows or optimum energy windows. You align your most important or most demanding work or projects during those times. You’re riding your own natural energy peaks.

Elizabeth Svoboda: The great thing is that when you do that, you often get so much done, and at the same time it feels like you’re putting in less effort because of the alignment with your peak. Sometimes for me, I know after lunch I have a really hard time focusing. A lot of us get into this post-lunch slump where we try to make ourselves do 30 minutes of work and it feels like pulling teeth. But if I start at 9:30, I might plan to do 15 minutes of writing on a project I’m really excited about. It may get to the point where I really get into flow, and I end up doing two hours, and it’s like, whoa, I just got a lot done here — and it felt like nothing. It felt like I wasn’t even exerting myself at all.

Elizabeth Svoboda: What scientists have found is that when you’re in a flow state of total engagement, you’re actually using lower-energy networks in your brain. That explains why you’re almost effortlessly gliding through this, and you come out the other side and you feel like, I feel great, I did a lot, but I still feel energized.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: How do you get access to that information? Just by observing yourself throughout the day?

Elizabeth Svoboda: Observing yourself. We know ourselves better than pretty much anyone else. It’s just that sometimes we don’t get in touch with that knowledge. If I have to do something that brings me to the very edge of my capabilities, when do I tend to do that best? Or, if I have a phone call when I need to be absolutely on, what would be the ideal time of day to schedule that? Or if you really are not sure, you can experiment during the week. I’m going to do two hours of work on a big project in the morning. Now I’m going to do the same two hours after lunch the next day. Which felt like gliding, and did the other feel more like trying to walk uphill on skis?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It might even change over time as well. Years ago in my 20s, I liked to stay up all night and do stuff, and I would sleep until 2 in the afternoon. Now I wake up at 5 a.m., ready.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Right, and it can be affected by non-negotiables in our lives. If you need to be up at 6 a.m. to get the kids out the door to school, that’s going to affect the rest of your circadian rhythms throughout the day.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: So lastly, I’d love to hear a couple of your thoughts about ways to — you used a word earlier, modulate. If you notice you’re in the red zone, what are healthy strategies to walk it back without going too far in the other direction?

Elizabeth Svoboda: On a daily basis, one of the pacing strategies that I love and use the most is modulation. I learned this from a psychiatrist named Joe Arpaia, who has practiced this with clients who are a little on the anxious side, or a little on the spun-up side, or maybe have what he likes to call highly activated nervous systems. If this rings true to you, modulation may be very helpful. It involves breathing at a specific pace that research shows really does calm your nervous system. More specifically, it’s the pace where there’s the greatest variation between the way your heart rate speeds up as you breathe in and how it slows down as you breathe out. Some of you might have heard of heart-rate variability — we know that high heart-rate variability is good; it’s associated with physical calm and resilience. With modulation, you’re getting yourself into the state where your heart-rate variability is going to be the highest.

Elizabeth Svoboda: It involves breathing at what’s called your resonant breathing pace. Most people’s resonant pace is anywhere between four and six breaths per minute. You can dial in on your exact resonance pace. There are some apps that help you do this — one is called Elite HRV — but I think the easiest way is to go to YouTube and search for paced-breathing videos. You’ll find, okay, here’s one that paces you at five breaths per minute, here’s another that paces you at 5.2 breaths per minute. You experiment with these different paces. What Dr. Arpaia told me is that the pace that feels the most comfortable to you — where you don’t feel like you’re trying to get ahead or that you’re behind, it just feels like a totally natural rhythm — that is going to be very close to your resonant pace. Once you figure it out, your body learns that pace very quickly. Say my pace is about 5.2 breaths per minute. Initially I’d breathe in time with the 5.2 breaths-per-minute video on YouTube. But after a few times, my body learned it. It just naturally fell into that rhythm.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: The idea is that finding a specific breathing pace and doing that intentionally will, if you’re overly activated, bring you back down.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Yeah. You can almost control that based on the number of minutes you spend doing the breathing. Two minutes, you’ll notice you feel quite a bit calmer. Five minutes will feel like a lot at first if you haven’t done that before. When I met with Dr. Arpaia, he had me find my pace and spend some time breathing at it. The whole time I had a heart-rate monitor clipped on my finger, and there was a heart-rate tracing on the screen of his laptop. I was doing the breathing, and I was watching the jagged tracing relax into these S-shaped waves, which indicated that my body was calming down. At the end of it, Dr. Arpaia said to me: if I had put an IV sedative into your arm five minutes ago, it would not have calmed you as much as you just calmed yourself right now. That was really striking to me, because honestly, I had gone in there not sure how much this was going to help me.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I’m trying to synthesize a lot of things right here, Elizabeth. What’s coming up for me is all the damn self-medication we all do — three glasses of wine at the end of the day to unwind, or binge-watching shows until three in the morning. What you’re saying is that you could literally spend three minutes breathing in time with a YouTube video, and it would be more effective than all of those things, without hangovers, without messing up the rest of your life.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Absolutely. And I should stress, you don’t even need the video for more than a couple of days. Once you know what that pace is, you can break it out any time you need it. Full disclosure — I’m not a great meditator myself. It’s hard, especially when you have a busy life and kids and all the background static. But with modulation, you can do it alongside other things you’re doing. I do it when I’m chopping veggies. You’re going to be breathing anyway — you could just do it on purpose a little bit. The other benefit is not just in the moment. When you’re in that state, you think more clearly and you make decisions that are better for you in the long run. If you’re in your relationship, upset with somebody, talking about a topic that’s triggering — if you’ve calmed yourself down this way first, you’re going to be a lot less likely to jump down that person’s throat in a way that would cause you to have to do a whole lot of repair work.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Absolutely. Sleepless nights of stress. We just add to our burdens unintentionally. When we’re super activated, when we’re angry, we lose some of our capacities. But the problem is that in the moment, you don’t know that you have. And it seems like a really good idea to say whatever it is. So what you’re saying is: these breathing techniques, calming down, doing it intentionally, and even in just a couple of minutes — your thinking brain comes back on, your heart rate smooths out, you’ve lowered these ambient activation levels.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Now what about the other side of this — you’re in that place, you’re like, I should get up now, but you don’t. Is there a remedy for that? When you’re too checked out?

Elizabeth Svoboda: I think the first thing is looking at what does that bring into my life when I do that? Maybe I lost my job and I’ve been languishing. I’ve been sitting on the couch reloading Instagram for a week. How do I feel as a result of that? You kind of come to a realization that you just can’t continue this way. The research backs that up. When we’re not engaged and we’re not contributing, our motivation just goes down the tubes and we feel depressed. So reminding yourself that when you languish this way, you’re just going to become more and more depressed, and it’s going to become more and more difficult to motivate yourself. It just gets worse and worse.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Sometimes it’s hard to take that first step. That’s what a lot of us run into — it feels like we’re stuck in mental sludge. How do we take the first step out of the woods? The answer may be a little different for everybody. For me — I actually do love my to-do list, and I have a few things on it that I do first thing every morning, and I check them off. I study language on Duolingo, so I do one Duolingo lesson — check. I always unload the dishes. It might sound like stupid little things, but not at all. You’re giving your brain these little dopamine boosts with each of these, and you’re setting up momentum you can then move into the things that are a little harder.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Sometimes people who have been in the military will say, it’s so important for me to make my bed. That starts the momentum for me. Finding that small thing that starts the momentum can be really, really important in getting out of the muck.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s such good advice. That little tiny corner, little tiny win. Make your bed in the morning, get in the shower, put on shoes. But also getting started — unloading the dishwasher. You do not have to redesign your entire life. Just empty out the silverware thing, put it in the drawer, that is something. Start somewhere.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: But I don’t want to let you go without highlighting another thing you said, which was really insightful and counterintuitive for a lot of people. You were saying that in addition to taking a small action to get your engine started, you were saying to actually think about where this is going. If you keep doing what you’re doing right now — where does this go? What you’re doing right there is actually mobilizing anxiety. You are mobilizing fear. I think we have been socialized to believe these are negative things that should be avoided, when the reality is that healthy fear and healthy anxiety are motivation. They are mobilizing us to take action. Sometimes the way to activate yourself is actually to connect with thoughts of, yeah, this isn’t going to end well. I do need to do something.

Elizabeth Svoboda: That is a good thing. What am I going to regret? But I think with that, you can also generate positive motivation. What is my life going to look like in two years if I make this kind of choice as opposed to that other kind of choice? And how am I going to feel when I’m in that life I’m moving toward, versus how I would feel if I continue in the languishing life? So maybe yes, the fear can be a little bit motivating, but positive motivation is so important as well.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Absolutely. Going back full circle to being connected to that vision of life. This has been such a good conversation, Elizabeth. If people wanted to learn more about you and your work — and certainly this book, The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving — where can people learn more about you?

Elizabeth Svoboda: Yes, I do have a couple of other books. My first was called What Makes a Hero?, about the science of heroism and altruism. I also have a kids’ book along similar lines, called Live the Life Heroic. If you’d like to find me and continue the conversation about pacing or any of these things, my website is elizabethsvoboda.com — just my first and last names together.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Elizabeth, thank you again so much for the time. It’s been a really pleasurable conversation, and I’m so grateful for all the practical and actionable strategies you shared.

Elizabeth Svoboda: Thank you so much. It’s been quite a delight, Lisa.

A sustainable pace is a rhythm of effort and recovery you could realistically keep up for years, rather than one that leaves you crashing and rebuilding on repeat. It is set by your own energy and values, not by the pace other people expect of you.

Breathe at your resonant pace, roughly four to six breaths per minute. Slow, even breathing at that rate raises your heart-rate variability and settles an activated nervous system within a few minutes. Paced-breathing videos can help you find your rate; after a little practice your body remembers it.

For settling your nervous system in the moment, resonant breathing is remarkably fast and has no downsides. In one striking example, a psychiatrist told science writer Elizabeth Svoboda the breathing had calmed her more than a sedative would have. It is a healthier reset than the things many of us reach for at the end of a hard day.

Therapy diagnoses and treats clinical mental-health conditions. Coaching is not treatment. It focuses on closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. There is nothing wrong with you when you seek coaching; you are choosing to build the life you want.

Yes. Extended withdrawal, disengaging from everything, tends to leave people feeling listless and unfulfilled, because meaning comes from being engaged and contributing. Researcher Corey Keyes calls this quiet stagnation languishing. Sometimes the healthy move is to surge forward, not pull back.

Energy windows are the times of day when you naturally have the most focus. Find yours by observing when hard work feels easiest, or by experimenting — doing a demanding task in the morning one day and the afternoon the next and noticing which felt like gliding. Then schedule your hardest work in those windows.

Flow is a state of total engagement where hard work feels almost effortless and time seems to disappear. Research suggests that in flow the brain uses lower-energy networks, which is why you can do a lot and still come out feeling energized rather than drained.

Start with one tiny win, such as making the bed, doing one language lesson, or unloading the dishwasher. Each small completion gives your brain a little dopamine and builds momentum toward harder tasks. Then use healthy anxiety and a clear picture of your future as motivation to keep going.

Treat effort like an athlete does. Give yourself real, growth-producing challenge, then recover in proportion to what you spent. Ambition is not the problem; skipping recovery is. Match your effort to your energy windows and check that you are pushing toward a goal that actually matters to you.

You can absolutely start on your own with the tools here. Many people find, though, that the hardest part is applying them consistently in the moment, alone, against a lifelong pattern. Coaching gives you a person who knows your patterns and helps you stay with the change. A free consultation is a low-pressure way to see whether it is a fit.