Tapping Into Your Ultradian Rhythms for Max Productivity

When it comes to the average workday, most of us simply try to power through from start to end. We
sit down at our desks and get cracking, hopefully attacking our most difficult project first and avoiding
the early morning email trap. When we’re finished with one thing, we move on to the next.
But what if I told you that this isn’t the most effective way to get things done? What if I told you that
working this way actually puts you in competition with your own body and that strategic rest during
the day is necessary for maximum productivity?
What exactly am I getting at? Ultradian rhythms.
This isn’t a particular hack or trick for focusing. It’s all about working in concert with your body’s
natural rhythms to optimize your performance. If you know how to tap into your body’s ultradian
rhythms, you can get more done by working when your body is at it’s best and then recharging when
you need it most.
In this post, we’re going to break down the what, why, and how of ultradian rhythms so you know how
to tap into this unique function of your body

What Are Ultradian Rhythms?

In the 1950’s, sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that the human body tends to move
through 90-120 minute cycles. At night, these cycles correspond to the different stages of sleep
(alertness, light, REM, deep, etc.). During the day, these cycles correspond to different levels of energy
and alertness.
Kleitman referred to these cycles as the “basic rest-activity cycle”. Since then, others have called these
cycles ultradian rhythms.
In their book The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz say:
These ultradian rhythms help to account for the ebb and flow of our energy throughout the day.
Physiological measures such as heart rate, hormonal levels, muscle tension and brain-wave activity all
increase during the first part of the cycle—and so does alertness. After an hour or so, these measures
start to decline. Somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, the body begins to crave a period of rest and
recovery.

While this may seem like a mere piece of science trivia, the implications for productivity are massive.
Every 90-120 minutes, your body has a period of significant energy and alertness followed by a period
of fatigue. During that burst of energy, you can work with your body to get far more done. During the
low point of the cycle, you have to work against your body’s natural rhythms to accomplish much at
all, which is often a losing battle.
Think about your own experience. How often have you hit a point in the afternoon when you’re
physically incapable of getting more done? You’re most likely at a very low point in an ultradian cycle.
Trying to break through that cycle and be productive is difficult and even coun terproductive
Again, to quote Loehr and Schwartz:
We are capable of overriding these natural cycles, but only by summoning the fight -or-flight response
and flooding our bodies with stress hormones that are designed to help us handle emergencies. The
long-term cost is that toxins build up inside us. We can only push so hard for so long without breaking
down and burning out.
The more you try to fight against your body, the less productive you’ll be and the more burned out
you’ll become. Working in concert with your body, however, can unlock reservoirs of productivity you
didn’t know you had.

Building Your Day Around Your Rhythms

Researcher Anders Ericsson has studied high performers for many years, including athletes,
musicians, chess players, and writers. In almost every arena, his findings have been the same: those at
the top practice in very intense bursts.
While studying the best young violinists, Ericsson noted two very interesting items:
 They tended to work in 60-90 sessions.
 They often used naps to recover from the intense practice.
It turns out that intense bursts of work followed by periods of recovery are essential for maximum
effectiveness and productivity.
The implications for the work day are clear. Instead of plowing through the day with your nose
constantly to the grindstone, you’ll be more effective if you have periods of deep focus followed by
short periods of total rest. You don’t need to be sleeping during those periods of rest, but your brain
should be disconnected from work and able to recover.
It’s relatively easy to implement this by using a routine like the following:
 Work on your most important task for between 60-90 minutes. Take your cues from your body.
When you find your concentration and energy beginning to falter, it’s a good sign that you’re
beginning to hit a low point in an ultradian rhythm.
 Break up those 60-90 minute periods using 30 minute Pomodoro sessions (25 minutes of focus, 5
minutes of rest).
 Take a full stop after 60-90 minutes. This break can last from anywhere between 20-30 minutes
and could include taking a walk, meditating, a short nap, conversations with a friend, etc. Your
goal is to let your brain turn off.
It’s crucial to ensure that you’re highly focused when you’re working and really resting when you’re on
a break. If you don’t draw these hard and fast lines, you’ll end up wasting prime focus time and not
letting your brain and body recover sufficiently during the downtime.
Some simple ways to ensure high amounts of focus are:
 Put your phone in airplane mode.
 Shut down email, Slack, iMessage, and any other communication channels.
 Block social media sites.
 Listen to focus enhancing music.
If you’re not intentional about scheduling your day around your ultradian rhythms, someone else will
schedule your day for you, especially if you work in an office. Christopher Barnes helpfully notes:
Many employees are flooded with writing and responding to emails throughout their entire morning,
which takes them up through lunch. They return from lunch having already used up most of their first
peak in alertness, and then begin important tasks requiring deep cognitive processing just as they start
to move toward the 3pm dip in alertness and energy.
The standard 8-5 work schedule was not designed with optimum productivity in mind. It was designed
to keep employees in the workplace for a set period of time under the mistaken assumption that they
would be working the entire time.
Whenever possible, don’t adhere to the standard practice of working straight from 8 -5. Listen to your
body. It may feel like a waste of time to take a break, but it’s not. In fact, it’s es sential for operating at
peak levels. Managing energy is the secret to maximum effectiveness.

Work Like The Hare, Not the Tortoise

When it comes to daily productivity, we should actually follow the example of the hare, not the
tortoise. Your body was designed to work in sprints followed by breaks, not constantly throughout the
entire day. You aren’t a machine. You can’t endlessly go without eventually breaking down.
Digital strategist Tom Gibson has a helpful perspective on this:
We need to start thinking of productivity and output in cyclical, rather than linear terms. Many
already recognize that they have peak times during the day in which they’re better workers. Other
times, they’re better thinkers. Other times, all they’re good for is Netflix.
Taking anything more than a short coffee break can seem indulgent as if you’re being lazy. But you’re
not. You’re recharging your batteries. When you use a cordless drill, it becomes more ineffective as the
battery drains. The same goes for you. You have to recharge or you’ll become ineffective.

All About Ultradian Rhythms

Ultradian rhythms matter a lot. Far more than the health media ever reflect, far more than most
doctors know, and far more than most people realize.
In fact, as healthy living skills go, I would say noticing and managing your ultradian rhythms
likely ranks in the top five most important things you can do for your wellbeing.
Ultradian rhythms are natural, undulating cycles of energy — oscillating patterns of energy production
and recovery — that occur in people (as well as in other living things) many times throughout the day.
Like circadian rhythms, but smaller.
The basics: After 90-120 minutes of sustained energy output and mental focus, the body and brain
need a 15-20 minute break. Your systems use that down time for recovery, repair, replenishment and
rebalancing. After which time, they return to a high level of productivity and efficiency for another 90
to 120 minutes.
If we refuse to take a break when we need one, bad things happen. The byprod ucts of productivity
build up in our system, creating high levels of stress and fatigue.
We get groggy and distracted. Bodywide inflammation rises, immunity drops, mental capacity,
metabolism and mood all suffer. We can’t think as straight, so our error rate increases and our
productivity plummets.
In other words, we start getting significantly diminished returns. And the more ultradian rhythm
breaks we skip, the worse the damage becomes.
Many people react to their body’s “need a break” signals by taking a coffee or cigarette break or
eating sugar. While these solutions provide temporary relief (sugar and coffee work by forcing the
system into a momentary energy spike; cigarettes by blunting feelings of emotional stress and
reactivity), they establish unhealthy dependencies, and none of them supply the physiological recovery
and repair opportunity the body and brain are really looking for. Accordingly, they don’t return the
body and brain to a state of optimal function.
For that, you need an ultradian rhythm break, which I refer to as a “URB.”
So, how does one take a proper URB? According the research (much of which has been done by the
U.S. Department of Defense), the best way is to lie down, preferably in a dark, quiet room, and take a
mini nap. But you don’t have to actually nap (or even lie down) to have it count. Not even close.
Reclining, sitting, leaning or moving calmly (e.g., walking, doing yoga, or tai chi) are all good options.
The main thing is to free your system from stress, to let your body relax or change positions, and to let
your mind wander or be calm.
Any mental and physical break, or even a shift of focus to something different and less demanding, is
better than nothing. And any quality time spent taking a URB better than none.
Here are some great ways to take a URB (feel free to mix and match for a total of 15 -20 minutes, or for
however long you can manage):
 Hit the restroom (even if you don’t think you have to go)
 Get a drink of water or cup of tea
 Grab a healthy snack (avoid refined carbs and sugars)
 Get outside and walk calmly
 Stare into space
 Close your eyes and meditate or do deep breathing
 Sit on a curb or bench and let your mind wander for a while
 Walk around the building
 Visit with a colleague or friend
 Listen to a guided meditation or piece of calming music
 Do a little restorative yoga (shivasana is highly recommended)
 Do a mindless task, like refilling your stapler or cleaning out your purse
 Run a simple errand
 Make dinner reservations or book an oil change
 Call a loved one to say hi, or to tell them you love them
 Visualize how you want the rest of your day or evening to go
 Make a quick list of things you are grateful for
What you don’t want to do is more of whatever you’ve been doing for the past couple hours, especia lly
if that’s looking at some kind of screen. You need a gear shift, a reboot, a change of scene.
I have done a couple of fun podcasts on ultradian rhythms recently, including “Pause,” (one of my
favorite “The Living Experiment” episodes ever), and a fun one I did as a guest on Dr. Aviva Romm’s
Natural MD Radio podcast, so I won’t belabor the subject here.
Just know that the more you understand and respect your own ultradian rhythms, the more capable
you’ll be of getting the best from your body and mind.