Did you know I was a piano major in college? (Yes, that’s right - piano performance at University of Southern California, then a Masters program at Bob Cole Conservatory.) 🎹

As a Masters student, one of my teachers had a rule that confused most of us at first: spend no more than four hours in the practice room each day.

As an undergrad, we were used to practicing upwards of 6-8 hours a day. We practically lived in the cells that were our practice rooms. So hearing this advice befuddled most of us.

We were ambitious kids trying to master Rachmaninoff and Chopin. Surely more practice meant better results, right?

…turns out, no. 🙃

Our teachers knew something we didn't. They told us to spend the rest of our time walking in nature, reading, exploring life outside the confines of drilling repetitive passages over and over. The real work, they said, happened when we weren't working at all.

They knew that in order to play the most heartfelt interpretation of Schumann, or to understand the richness and depth of Ravel, we had to experience life.

As an undergrad, I learned Chopin’s first ballade, and my teacher said, “Regina, you’ll never play this part correctly until you have had your heart broken one day.” I scoffed at that.

Several months later, I went through one of the worst breakups that left me feeling like shit. Right in time for my performance.

She was right. I didn’t perform it properly until I had my heart broken.

Sometimes, the results we get don’t come from brute forcing something: sometimes, it comes with time, with life experience, and outside of “strategy problem solving” mode. That was one of the biggest lessons I learned, that still carries with me today.

Years later, coaching executives and founders, I've watched this same pattern play out in boardrooms and startups.

At my previous coaching company, we worked with a very famous musician who was hitting a creative funk. They were terrified they'd never one-up their biggest album.

We told them to do something that sounded insane: get bored.

Disconnect. Stop forcing it.

This musician took our advice. They disconnected completely. Got bored. Let their mind wander.

When their next album released, it ended up being even bigger than the first.

They were blown away at how slowing down allowed them to speed up.

Today, I watch leaders grind themselves into the ground, convinced that more hours equals more progress. Their inboxes overflow. Their Slack channels never sleep. Their minds race with half-formed strategies and fire drills.

They're getting pinged constantly on Slack from all corners of the organization, stressed they're missing something critical. They're pulled into board meetings with investors demanding answers, wondering why the line isn't moving up more aggressively. They're tuned into the news, FOMOing into technologies that have nothing to do with their actual business.

Their lives are consumed by cognitive clutter.

And they wonder why they can't think straight.

The reality is, the more you try to brute force your way through complexity, the harder it becomes.

Remember Devil's Snare from Harry Potter? You have to relax to find your way through. If you tense up and fight it, if you don't surrender, you die.

Strategy works the same way.

If you're stuck, if you're trying to solve complicated problems, if you have mental fog, the answer isn't to push harder. It's to create space. Real, actual cognitive space where your brain can finally do what it does best: make connections you couldn't see before.

If you’re stressed, you likely have a whole list of "Q2 stuff" sitting in your Eisenhower Matrix - that's the time management framework that sorts tasks by urgency and importance.

But because you never focus on one problem long enough, you never solve it.

It's like trying to build several 1,000-piece puzzles simultaneously, jumping from puzzle to puzzle. Sometimes, you need to focus on just one thing, one piece at a time. Everything else needs someone else to solve (delegation), or needs to be revisited later (iceboxing).

The detox implies you're already past the point of healthy behavior. You need to go extreme.

The Playbook on How to Detox Effectively

The Resistance You'll Face

When I first suggest this to leaders, they resist. Hard.

Moving slow to move fast feels backwards, but it's not.

Then they try it out and feel even more resistance. They expect fast results. But this is not an overnight process.

It's only after a week of mindful detox that they really discover how clouded their judgment was and how racing their minds were. This is a huge shift in their thinking: it's impossible to see it until you're out of it.

They worry about missing critical stuff. When they do the detox and realize nothing catastrophic happened, they learn an important lesson: if critical things fall apart without them, it means they haven't built good systems of accountability. It means they don't trust their leadership team enough.

And here's the ego piece: Most of them feel like they have to hustle hard and spend all their time on the company to prove something. When they realize the only person who really cares about how much time they're grinding is them, that's when they see it's a vanity metric.

What really matters is if you win or not. Not if you spent hours and hours being "on" and battling burnout and ending up in the hospital for bad health decisions in the name of getting there.

Your Cognitive Space Is a Strategic Asset

Think about it this way: your brain is the most expensive piece of equipment your company owns.

Would you run your servers at 100% capacity 24/7 with no maintenance? Would you never defragment your hard drive? Would you keep adding programs until everything crashed?

Of course not.

But that's exactly what you're doing to yourself.

Every unread Slack message, every unresolved decision, every context switch between puzzles is fragmenting your cognitive capacity. You think you're being productive, but you're just busy. There's a difference.

And thinking requires space. White space. Boredom. Time for your default mode network to light up and start making the connections your conscious mind can't force.

Where to Start

You don't need to book a cabin in the woods tomorrow (though if you can, do it).

Start here:

1. This week, pick one boundary and hold it. One evening where you're completely unreachable. One morning where you don't check email until 10am. One walk without your phone.

2. Notice what happens. Notice the resistance. Notice how your team handles it. Notice what your brain does when it finally has permission to wander.

Then build from there.

If you’re already too far gone, consider doing the detox. After all, you have to slow down in order to speed up.

Everything else is just noise.

And if you work with an exec who needs this reset badly, forward this to them. It might be scary, but they need to hear it from someone who cares.

Until next time,

📌 Resources Mentioned:

• Atomic Habits | James Clear

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