REFLECTION
Football season is seven months long. It’s a full-time job. For a starting quarterback, it can be even more than that. It’s a 24/7 lifestyle. The hours at the facility might be fairly normal, with workouts and practices and meetings structured within typical business hours, but in 23 seasons, there was never a moment between the middle of July and the beginning of February when football wasn’t on my mind.
In the shower. On the drive home. Sometimes at the dinner table or TV with the kids. Then when everyone went to bed, I’d sit down to watch film.
Football was almost always right there, front of mind. It had to be. That was the mindset of a champion as I’d come to understand it.
At the end of seven months—whether we went to the playoffs, or made it to the Super Bowl, or won the whole thing—I was ready for a break. There was obviously the need for a physical recharge. Nobody survives an NFL season unhurt. There was always a wrist or an ankle to deal with, maybe some joint stuff, and then the typical aches and bruises that come with getting hit by defensive ends and linebackers for 16-20 games.
As I got older, however, what surprised me about this period of physical rest and decompression after the season was how much I needed it for my mental and emotional state. When you’re younger, you don’t realize how much of your time during those seven months you spend with your cortisol red-lining and your fight-or-flight response clicked into red alert status. For half the year, you ride this roller coaster of wins and losses on Sunday. Every day, you’re going full speed for 10-15 seconds at a time, over and over again, for hours on end trying to be perfect while not getting your brains beat in or getting benched or cut. Your job is never safe and neither is your body.
It’s a lot. And when the season is finally over, you need time to calm your nervous system and come down off the permanent stress high. You need time and space to process all the emotional highs and lows you endured over the course of the season. This is how you balance your levels out and reset your brain and body toward a more sustainable lifestyle with your family and friends. This rebalancing allows you to recharge your batteries in a way that sets you up to do this all over again next season.
It’s a cycle.
LESSON
What’s been interesting since retirement is realizing that the cortisol spikes and the fight-or-flight response to the stress of a busy life didn’t go away after football, it just changed based on how my life changed. It has a different magnitude, a different frequency, a different pattern now. I’m no longer getting hit by defenders or yelled at by coaches, and my week doesn’t swing on the outcome of a game, but I’m still doing many things professionally and personally that demand a lot out of me and that I care deeply about. And those things can really use regular periods of decompression if I want to continue doing them at a high level into the future.
Part of this is a product of my ambitious personality, but a lot of it is just a standard feature of adulthood. When you’re younger, a lot of the responsibility for your physical, mental and emotional health is borne by other people. Parents, counselors, training staff if you play a sport–they feed you, they nurture you, they protect you and fix you up and guide you. And in doing that, they take that responsibility off of your shoulders. Your load becomes lighter and it takes much longer to find yourself in a place where you need to decompress. Some people never reach that limit when they’re younger.
That all changes as you get older. All of that responsibility for your physical, mental and emotional well-being comes back to you, and when you have kids, theirs falls to you as well. The need to decompress becomes more acute and more frequent, because the stress of responsibility is heavier and steadier. Decompressing in this context simply means parking aspects of that responsibility somewhere else, or with someone else, for some period of time so that you can tend to whichever piece of your physical, mental or emotional health has been depleted and needs to be recharged in order to effectively pick back up whatever responsibilities you’d just put down.
We are all subject to this phenomenon in our own ways. Combat infantry and special operators, firefighters and police, nurses and pilots—they experience it at extremely high levels, above and beyond what professional athletes experience. But it doesn’t matter what you do for a living. As adults, we all have things going on in our lives that we need to decompress from if we want to both perform at a high level and lead a balanced life.
We just have to give ourselves permission to do it.
There's a great line I’ve mentioned in a previous newsletter: when your outputs exceed your inputs, your upkeep becomes your downfall. When too much energy is going out and not enough is coming in, the physical, mental and emotional stress that results inevitably leads to suboptimal performance, burnout, or a diminished quality of life—sometimes all three.
The trick for a lot of people, especially ambitious, career-oriented types, is understanding that the source of your stress isn’t always going to be work related. In fact, your need to decompress may never be work related. Think about a single mother with two kids under the age of five. Think about a 16-year-old in China or India or the UK studying for university entrance exams. Think about someone on a really difficult health journey.
None of these have anything to do with how you pay your bills, but they can take just as much out of you as a high stress job. You need to make a habit of checking in with yourself about this, so you don’t confuse or conflate the source of your stress or burn out.
APPLICATION
The reason you want to clearly understand what you need to decompress from is that different kinds of stress demand different kinds of decompression.
Is it a physical break you need? To recharge your batteries is the best course of action laying on a beach and letting your body recuperate or checking into a resort and going to the spa every day?
Is it a mental break you need? Do you need to go somewhere peaceful with limited external stimuli where you don’t have to make a lot of decisions? Do you just need a couple of weeks where you don’t have to think, and you can allow your nervous system to recalibrate to a slower pace?
Or is it an emotional break you need? Do you need to get away from certain people or certain environments and reconnect with some of those other priorities we’ve talked about in the past that can get put to the side sometimes when we’re focused on other things?
Of course, it doesn’t always need to be so dramatic. You shouldn’t have to get on a plane and fly halfway around the world just to decompress. That gets expensive.
There are easier ways. Smaller ways. Things you can do on a daily or weekly basis that help you regularly decompress so your situation never gets so out of hand that the only option is to strand yourself on a desert island, proverbially speaking.
Some people lean on long-form journaling. Some love mindful meditation or long open water swims. I know some people who like to wash clothes by hand, others who go for walks in the woods, and yet others who go to the range with just their driver and try to hit golf balls.
Whatever the case, the goal of decompression is always the same. It’s to recalibrate your brain-body connection. To get off the hamster wheel. To recharge your battery. To re-align with your priorities, to sit in gratitude instead of in stress, and ultimately to prepare yourself to get back in the game with the enthusiasm, energy, and effort necessary to perform to your fullest potential.
