Self-Care Habits for Effective COOs: Turning Relaxation into Recovery and Downtime into Development

Self-Care: Jargon vs. Necessity

There are at least two schools of thought on self-care. One is aligned with the same kind of new-agey self-help advice that skews toward dubious scientific claims and ads on Instagram. The other is the kind of advice you might get from your primary care doc after you tell them what your weekly schedule looks like. Typically, the advice follows a long, exasperated sigh, at least in my experience.

This fourth article in my ongoing series for new COOs is a grounded, practical overview of the rest-and-recovery activities that must be included in your schedule if you hope to maintain the kind of pace and productivity that are required to help your organization succeed. 

Advice for new executives is often vague, aspirational, or overly conceptual, and those transitioning into a C-Suite position for the first time—or growing into the role from an adjacent one like Chief of Staff—have much gain from actionable guidance that can help them find their feet. That’s what I aim to do here. 

Before getting into the illustrative personal anecdotes and the list of resources and strategies, I want to introduce the concept of the stress cycle. This is neuroscience 101 stuff. The human stress response is a healthy reaction to challenging situations. You’re out for a jog and get to the big hill on your route, so you put on Cobra Starship or Abba or whatever and kick up the pace as your adrenaline starts pumping, your heart rate jumps, and blood vessels dilate so more oxygen reaches your muscles. 

Those are the first three pieces of the stress cycle: you start at baseline, confront a stressor, and respond by amping up the physical and psychological intensity with which you’re confronting the situation. The last step is resolution, where we let go of the intensity and our body relaxes back to baseline. Without that last piece, stress becomes chronic and our overall level of function starts to drop off sharply. 

My approach to self-care is grounded in the concept of the stress cycle, and focuses on the rhythms that we need to build into our days and weeks if we want to perform at a high level for multiple years. There’s a useful analogy here to the world of sports. Not every task, or every part of your schedule, is equally important: 

“Professional athletes typically spend about 90 percent of their time training, in order to be able to perform 10 percent of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time. At a practical level, they build very precise routines for managing energy in all spheres of their lives.” from The Power of Full Engagement, by Tim Leohr and Tony Schwartz

A Personal History of Near-Burnout

Okay, illustrative personal narrative time. When I transitioned into the COO role I hit the ground running, leaving myself no time to recharge. Workdays were 8-7 plus follow-up emails after dinner; one weekends, I worked both days. I pushed myself too hard—that is, past the point where a night’s rest allowed me to fully recover. My motive was a belief that the responsibilities of leadership demanded an always-on, push-through-the-pain dedication to productivity and engagement. 

The outcome was predictable. Early in 2023, the physical tension in my neck and shoulders got so extreme that I pinched a nerve, causing excruciating pain and sending me to the ER. 

That flipped a switch. My weekly physical therapy sessions became sacred obligations; over time, the fear of the pain helped me become more aware of the physiological stress stored in my body. Because I carry it mostly in my neck and shoulders, I learned to notice the rising tension as stress built up, and began to work toward solutions. 

As I sought out ways to manage my stress, I turned first to solutions that seemed to be working for others. Most of my recommended reading is listed at the bottom of this article, but I want to spotlight the book Burnout, the resource that introduced me to stress cycles, resolution, and the fundamental productivity of planned downtime. (Here’s one brief entry point from the American Institute of Stress.) 

That book, and others like it, helped me develop a toolkit of methods to protect my health in service of both living well and reaching my full potential as a COO. It was helpful to reframe the task as one of “managing my energy,” and, in service of that goal, I went looking for a go-to form of exercise and release that I could learn to crave.

Reliable Systems for Recharging

“Take one full rest day per week. If it’s a rest day, truly allow your mind and body to relax. Turn your phone off. Keep the computer shut down. A rest day means you should be relaxed, hanging with friends or family, and eating and drinking well, so you can recharge and get back at it. It’s not a day to lose yourself in technology or stay hunched at your desk in the form of a damn question mark.” David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me


Here’s where those of us in the COO profession have a chance to leverage our strengths. Self-care is an optimization problem, just like reporting mechanisms, cross-team coordination, and how best to leverage 1:1 meetings for gathering feedback [LINK roadmap article]. Just as you would in your professional life, your task here is not to find a single solution, but rather to develop flexible, robust systems to protect the outcomes you need. 

A quick example: exercise is essential to stress relief. First, I tried working out in my apartment. I hated that—no good. Then I tried my building’s gym, and to my surprise, loved the experience. When that isn’t an option, I resort to “snack sized” movement, like getting off the train one stop early to help me get in some steps and some fresh air, or intentionally pre-ordering lunch from somewhere a mile’s walk away. 

With that approach in mind, the following is a list of tools, tactics, and strategies that I recommend considering for inclusion in your health-preservation toolkit. Not all of them will work for you; many will be useful only at certain times. I encourage you both to experiment and to add to this list as you go. 

1. Track your self-care

Keeping a rough-and-ready record of self-care activities is useful both to help you stick to your plan and to learn what is and isn’t making a real difference. My preferred approach is a simple Google Sheet with daily entries: energy level, where I worked, nutrition, sleep hours and quality, and exercise. 

2. Invest in your health parallel to investing in your career

Most COOs find themselves shorter on free time than they are on disposable income. Use your financial resources to help you stay healthy.

Experiment relentlessly until your find an exercise routine you enjoy: After lots of experimentation, I fell in love with strength training and highly recommend the FitBod app to help you learn how to use all those scary machines, automate progressive overload (it tracks as you get stronger and increased weight/reps), and inspire you to maintain your habit. Invest in a session or two with a personal trainer, or use an app-based trainer.

Automate healthy eating: Personally, I love to cook and I love the idea of going to the farmer’s market, but I dislike the reality of spending a few hours. I LOVE Farm to People, which delivers to your NYC doorstep your choice of farmer’s market selections (use code ALICIAD37 for $25 off your first order). I get my produce delivered and do my grocery pickup on Sunday mornings, and then spend an hour washing/chopping to prep for the week.

Create a meal prep calendar: I have two months of pre-planned dinners and weekly lunch meal-prep on a calendar, with each event recurring every two months. This gives me an idea to start with and confidence to buy groceries, but if I’m feeling creative I just skip the plan. I've continually improved the calendar based on reality: by Thursday night, I’m tired and it’s breakfast for dinner.

If you don’t like to cook, invest in a meal planning service like HungryRoot or EatThisMuch.

3. Build self-care into your calendar

Reminders and scheduled events are just as useful outside of work . Add reminders for habits that’ll help you sustain your energy—short meditation breaks, nutritious snacks, and especially movement. 

My perspective on this benefitted especially from Erik Partaker’s The 3 Alarms: 

“He’s defined a high-performing life as one in which you consistently experience success, over the long term, without sacrificing your health and relationships.” 

4. Find your tribe

At work, being effective in your role requires maintaining a degree of distance from colleagues. Outside the office, that habit becomes counterproductive. Find the people who make it easy to live well—exercise buddies, friends to share meals with, and so on. 

5. Get outside (literally and figuratively)

Lou Gerstner, for all his excellent advice, has some unhelpful takes. Here’s one that struck me right away as getting it backwards: 

"I read a lot of books, but not many about business. After a twelve-hour day at the office, who would want to go home and read about someone else’s career at the office?"

I, for one, find it both inspiring and calming to read about smart people solving similar problems to those I face myself. It’s a way to reflect, process, and learn while also starting to unwind. 

The generalized version of this piece of advice is: create a habit that helps you find external inspiration and a feeling of camaraderie. That can come from nonfiction (as it often does for me), or from adding a novel to your reading rotation, or listening to podcasts, etc. In other words, get outside your bubble. Give your brain a rest from the real problems at work.

Also, of course, literally get outside. Being outside is one of the most important things we can do for our mental and physical health. Try active commuting, or schedule a repeat meeting as a walk-and-talk. I now make a point to spend most of Saturday and Sunday outside, even if I’m feeling low energy, and “going outside” just means reading in a lawn chair. 

6. Observe your digital sabbath 

Give yourself time off-screen. The idea of the digital sabbath isn’t new (this Atlantic piece dates it to at least 2001), and can be hard to observe strictly. Many of us just can’t take a full 24 hours offline without missing important calls or messages. Instead, I aim for Analog Afternoons on Sundays, setting aside all my screens by 12 PM. Kindle excluded, of course. If I haven’t convinced you, let Esther Perel give it a try:

7. Exercise

In some ways, this is the most important piece of the puzzle. The ideal exercise routine looks different for everyone. CrossFit, yoga, jogging, swimming, always taking the stairs—whatever you’re able to fit into your schedule is the right thing for you to be doing. If you’re looking for goalposts, the CDC recommends 150 minutes of moderate activity per week, or half that much of vigorous workout. 


If you need inspiration to find exercise you love, here are a couple of starting points:

8. Mindfulness and meditation

After exercise, the single best-studied stress relief method is mindfulness—any consistent practice that combines calm awareness and slow breathing. Whether you try out an app like Headspace or develop a practice of your own, spending a few minutes per day on mindful activity has important physical and mental benefits. 

Wrap-up & Further Reading

Most of all, enjoy the process of discovery. Embrace the novelty of finding practices that serve you well in this chapter of your life. Appreciate that as the chapters change, so too will the practices. Remember that it takes time to build habits, and lean on the scheduling tools that work for you elsewhere. 


To help you craft a self-care plan that gives you what you need, I recommend picking up some of the following: 


If you aren’t feeling motivated, I don’t recommend following my path by working yourself straight into the ER. Instead, try one of these excellent books that’ll both inform and, possibly, scare you into prioritizing your health at least as much as your career. 

Best SelfAlicia DiamondCOO