One strategy common to most great athletes, in almost any sport, is that they work in bursts of peak activity and then take mini-breaks. For example, one day on television I watched Shahar Peer, an Israeli who is one of the highest ranked female tennis players in the world, play an intense and hard-fought match in the U.S. Open. In between points Shahar often turned away from the court and her opponent and closed her eyes. The commentators suggested that she was employing a visualization technique — seeing herself serve the ball into her opponent’s court, or receiving the serve from her opponent and hitting the ball with speed and accuracy. Whatever she was imagining, though, she was using this time to quiet her mind, relax, and ready herself for the next point. She was taking a quick break to refocus, and it was effective.

In a 2001 Harvard Business Review article “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” Jim Lohr and Tony Schwartz describe how great tennis players use rituals in between points that can lower their heart rates by 15 to 20 percent. These rituals include concentrating on their racquet strings or visualizing the next point. Lohr and Schwartz, whose consulting practice includes training athletes and training business leaders, find that “disciplines in the daily lives of people, including regular exercise and routines of shutting down throughout the day, resulted in executives working fewer hours and getting more done.” Later in the article they make a somewhat arresting assertion: “[T]he real enemy of high performance is not stress, which paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the stimulus for growth. Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined, intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance.”

It’s striking that they conclude that stress is not only not the problem but that stress has a positive impact. To work better, we don’t need to eliminate stress from our lives. This is good, because we can’t. What we need to do is find ways to regulate stressful conditions and situations. For most of us, our daily lives are not so different from the flow and pace of a tennis match. As our day moves from home to work and back, we enter various “courts” full of intense and constant activity, but for only limited times. We then play games or interact with others (we may not have opponents, per se); these matches operate within a fair amount of mutually understood structure and rules, but they also include various levels of unpredictability and surprise. We constantly “serve” and “receive,” not tennis balls but words or ideas.

As in tennis, most of us have times when we work with intensity and we also have moments when we can take breaks, right in the midst of our work. I make a point to do this regularly throughout my day. As I was writing this book, I would block out periods of time, such as three hours, when I committed to just writing. This meant that during this three-hour time, I wouldn’t read the newspaper, answer emails, answer the telephone, or watch tennis on television. I did, however, find it useful to stop about every twenty to thirty minutes. I stood up, relaxed, took a deep breath, and let go of what I was doing. These breaks allowed me to work with more intensity and with more freshness. These respites are the good distractions I spoke of earlier, and they can be quite renewing.

Create this same routine for yourself:

While at work or while engaged in any intense activity, stop at regular intervals; take a deep breath, and let your entire body relax.

If you are sitting down, stand up. Take a few small and relaxed steps.

If you work standing up, sit down. Let your eyes partially close as you become aware of your breath and body. Let the muscles in your body relax.

For one conscious minute, or the length of several slow breaths, let go of thinking about work or whatever problem you are engaged in — put your attention on your breath and body. Your breath is always there, and it is always a tool for stress reduction.

Develop routines and rituals for relaxing right in the midst of intense work, as well as in between bursts of work. If you are feeling intense stress in the form of anger or anxiety, stop: pause, feel your connection to the earth by noticing your feet coming into contact with the floor. This simple connection with the earth can help you to relax and to open yourself to new possibilities with more clarity and skill.

What strategies do you use, to work more effectively, to find more composure at work?