Unlocking the power of natural productivity cycles

Productivity is often viewed solely through the lens of hustle and output. However, natural biological cycles within us influence our energy levels, mood and cognitive abilities throughout the day. This article explores ultradian rhythms — the 90-120-minute cyclical patterns our bodies go through, alternating between periods of peak performance, then rest and recovery. Understanding and aligning with these rhythms can help you sustainably maximize productivity without compromising your well-being.

A marketer’s day to day: Chasing productivity and peak performance

You’ve been tethered to back-to-back meetings all day, trying to anchor your focus in the present moment. Despite your best efforts, your thoughts take their own journey, and you’re lured away by the urge to peek at your phone, email or Slack. Before you know it, you realize the wave of concentration has ebbed away and find yourself multi-tasking, looking at your calendar, trying to jigsaw together a block of time to complete your quarterly reporting and board slides.

Suddenly, your name slices through the virtual room, interrupting your side quest. You look up, panicked that you have no idea what was just said. Embarrassed, you explain that you need the question repeated. Even once you have time to process the request, your surface-level answer is developed in a heavy fog within your brain. Once the meeting ends, a tinge of guilt overcomes you, but you push it away (not considering where the emotion retreats) and get back to your growing to-do list, working as quickly as possible to check tasks off before the day ends.

By 5 p.m., you realize you’ve completely neglected your physical needs most of the day — forgetting to eat, barely moving your body and feeling annoyed at wasting time taking care of bathroom needs. The rhythm of your day has been anything but harmonious, a symphony of demands without a pause, leading you to depletion by its end. Switch off, eat, sleep, repeat. Does this cycle sound familiar?

Now imagine if, within the unfolding story of your day, you found a rhythm in tune with your innermost needs and most pressing to-dos. Picture yourself as the orchestrator that you are, finding a flow that moves you from a reactive, treading state to mindful guidance and flow — where you command the performance of not only your professional endeavors as a marketer but also the personal moments that replenish and enable you to be at your very best.

Not only is this rhythm possible, it’s already happening! Unfortunately, the majority of us just aren’t paying attention to it. Further, most of us don’t know what it is or how it works. All of the best productivity hacks, prioritization methods, calendar and organization apps, or AI in the world can’t save you, at least not until you discover and honor the precious rhythms flowing within you. The key to your success as a marketer, or in any role you step into, will always be internal. 

The following builds on my previous article, “From friction to flow: A marketer’s secret productivity engine,” tackling another internal process you can align with to drive sustainable energy, productivity and peak performance — your ultradian rhythms.

Unveiling ultradian rhythms: Nature’s pulse

Ultradian rhythms are natural biological patterns coded into your DNA, happening within our bodies multiple times daily. These cycles influence very important bodily functions such as hunger, alertness, mood and even the release of hormones, among other things. Because of these influencers, our ultradian rhythms ultimately impact our energy production — the energy we need to be at our best. The systems and processes within your body work together diligently, on a tight schedule, to keep you functioning. While these processes can flex and flow with your current state or chosen environment, they are not without detriment. 

When we ignore this cycle, we get diminishing returns and increase our risk of things like burnout, lowered cognitive abilities, high cortisol (stress hormone), high cholesterol, inability to focus, poor immunity, loss of memory, slow metabolism and many more cascading negative effects. In this state, you lose out on your decision-making ability, creativity, emotional regulation, disrupted hormones, and sleep — even your vision is impacted. Hopefully, you can start seeing how this precious cycle is interconnected with critical processes that drive your ability to function and thrive.

As mentioned, these cycles happen multiple times a day where, over the course of the day, you move in and out of available capacity for energy, up and down — through peaks and troughs. During peak moments, we only have a window of about 90-120 minutes where we can expect higher capacity. We are presented with the opportunity to take advantage of these resources to achieve peak performance.

However, after this window closes, our body moves into a 20-30-minute rest and recovery phase, where these systems work hard to flush, reset, and prepare to ramp back up. Here’s the deal: this will happen whether you like it or not. There is no benefit to ignoring this cycle and going heads down for over two hours, as it will only worsen your performance and overall health. 

Here’s what the process looks like:

It’s simple when you think of it in this way — when we nurture and align with our bodies’ cycles and provide them with positive inputs, we get positive outputs, such as energy that can be used for reaching peak performance. We can maximize those peak performance windows if we honor and support these cycles.

So, just as we can ride the waves of our brain, we can predict, influence and ride the peaks and the troughs of our ultradian rhythms to capture these peak performance moments. It’s not about the hustle and grind you often see the startup tech bros boasting about; that’s performative. It’s about flow, balance, and support both internally and externally.

Dig deeper: 20 ways to make your marketing team more productive

Embracing the cycle: Strategies for alignment

How can we be more proactive in honoring this cycle to optimize productivity? The first thing we need to do is come to terms with the cycle’s timing. You will only get 90-120 minutes of peak performance before that 20-30 minute rest and recovery phase. That’s it. 

This is a hard pill to swallow, particularly for most high-performing marketers I talk to who are conditioned to the hustle, burnout and never-ending to-do list. It might sound like I’m asking you to work less. How is that even possible? 

It’s a complete mindset shift that you need to embrace. Ask yourself: What are my beliefs around productivity, and where do they come from? Perhaps you believe that productivity is only associated with output for others (revenue, performance, or even external validation). This belief must be challenged. Productivity can also be about rest, recovery and sustainability. We can get more done in a shorter period when we surrender to these cycles because it’s not about time (it never was) but energy production. Acknowledge this to build awareness around the existing negative thought patterns you have around productivity and allow your brain to create new pathways that will drive the adoption of new habits.

Develop a talk track for yourself that can support this process. It might sound like:

• “I don’t have to work harder to be successful. I need to work in alignment with the pre-existing cycles within me. By doing this, I will create all the energy I need to be the most productive, healthiest version of myself.” 

Or it could sound like: 

• “My beliefs around productivity are rooted in social norms and expectations that are not realistic or healthy. I am challenging these beliefs and moving into a mindset where my definition of productivity expands to include the very drivers of that productivity, increasing my capacity to perform at my best without harming myself.”

With the right mindset, we can observe these cycles and understand how they show up for us individually. The easiest way to do this is to start tracking your energy throughout the day, from when you wake up to when you’re ready for sleep.

Give this about a week or two, and you’ll start to see a pattern emerge. Guess what that pattern will look like? Yep, the ultradian rhythm cycle. Also, note the potential inputs that could impact your personal rhythm. Our environment, stimulants, mood, other humans and many other factors can act as onramps or offramps to our energy production driving productivity. 

For example:

• Maybe you learn that coffee may push you into a false peak production cycle when your body is not ready to be there quite yet — and just like that, your entire rhythm is thrown off. 
• Maybe you start to observe that after a short exercise and rest period, you feel like you’ve taken a limitless pill. 
• Or perhaps you meditate for 15-20 minutes during the day and feel like you’re ready to take on that urgent and important task without fear afterward. 
• And my favorite, the afternoon slump. Sometime between 1–3 p.m., we feel the urge to get up and move, shut off our brain, and maybe even take a nap (this is your body trying to tell you it’s time for a rest and recovery phase). 

This is all very personal to each of us because of the habits we have developed over time, so it’s important to move through this process without judgment and to understand that we all can change, build resilience and introduce new habits.

Protocols for peak performance: Crafting your rhythm

Now that you’re starting to see the interconnectedness of it all and the reality that you’re operating in, you can make changes that align more closely with this process and even create healthier onramps that help you reach maximum peak performance and offramps to enhance the recovery process.

We can use the tools in our toolkit to create protocols that allow us to access the right state of mind at the right time of day, all in the name of our well-being and sustainable peak performance. This is where we can also leverage knowledge around our brainwaves, as discussed in this previous article, to enhance the flow of moving through these peaks and troughs. 

For example, if you have observed that when you wake up in the morning, you often feel sluggish and tired, you can ask yourself: 

• What’s going on for me at night that isn’t working? 
• Am I not reaching a deep restorative state of sleep that prepares me for my first peak in the morning? 

Maybe you introduce a nighttime protocol that includes seamlessly moving through alpha → theta → delta waves in the form of music, knowing this will help provide the right environment for restorative sleep. What we’re creating is a proactive mindset around foundational impactful solutions versus surface-level solutions.

One final fascinating aspect of peak performance is the moment after the rest phase, but just before the peak. Each and every one of us needs some sort of arousal to reach that peak. As we have explored, our body often does this for us in the background. However, we each have a unique threshold for arousal that drives the level of performance we can expect. Some of us need more, and others less, to reach that peak. So, while you can rely on your body to do this, some of us might need additional support to create the perfect onramp, depending on the situation.

If you have a big presentation on stage in front of hundreds of other marketers, the amount of arousal you need in that situation is likely more than you would need in a weekly 1:1 meeting with your boss. What could your protocol look like? What tools do you have at your fingertips that can create the onramp you need to be at your peak?

As we circle back, close the loop and follow up (h/t to Corporate Erin) with our opening visualization, it becomes clear that the dissonance felt during a day filled with high demands and distractions can be harmonized through conscious alignment with our ultradian rhythms. By embracing these natural cycles within us, we elevate our productivity and nurture our well-being, creating space for both professional ambition and personal needs. 

The journey from friction to flow is not merely about managing tasks and time but about orchestrating a symphony of self-awareness, adaptation and mindful living. Reflect on building awareness and releasing attachments to beliefs, assumptions, values or negative thought patterns that aren’t serving you. Discover tools and create new protocols that get you closer to your desired state.