Last year a US senator stood up on the Senate floor and spoke for more than twenty-five hours without a break. The longest speech of its kind on record. When people asked him how he physically held it together, he said he had been fasting for days beforehand and had put himself into a state where his body was running on a different fuel. By his own account, he felt sharper and more focused than he ever had.
I opened my latest conversation with Dr Tom Buckley with that story, because it makes a point most of us miss. We treat fasting as a weight loss diet. A politician used it as a performance tool.
I did not sit down to talk about diets. I wanted to understand the mechanism underneath, and what it tells us about how humans are built to operate. What I came away with had very little to do with food.
The question we ask is the wrong one
Almost every conversation about food is about what. Good foods, bad foods, more of this, less of that. Dr Tom’s reframe was simple. The conversation we actually need is about when we eat and how often, as much as what.
Sit with that for a second, because it applies to far more than your plate.
I ask leaders this question often, and I hear the same answer back. What should I focus on. What is the priority. What is on the list. Rarely does anyone ask the question that matters more. When do I stop, and how often.
It is not what you do that is draining you. It is that you never stop doing it.
We have lost the ability to switch gears
Here is the idea from the conversation I keep returning to. A body that is constantly fed loses something called metabolic flexibility. The ability to switch between burning one fuel and another. Feed it a steady stream of the easy stuff and it forgets how to draw on its reserves. It becomes lazy, locked into one mode, and over time that rigidity becomes a problem.
I am not going to give you medical advice on fasting. I am not a doctor, and how, when and whether you do it is a decision for you and yours. But the principle is a mirror for how a lot of senior people now operate.
We have lost our ability to switch gears too.
The constantly connected leader is the constantly fed body. A steady drip of low-grade input all day. The phone at breakfast. The meeting that runs straight into the next with no gap between. The half-glance at email in the queue, at the lights, in bed. None of it is intense. All of it is constant. And a system that is always receiving a little bit of everything slowly loses the ability to drop into a genuinely different state. Full recovery. Deep focus. Real presence with the people in front of you.
You do not notice it going. You just wake up one day flatter than you used to be, and you cannot work out why, because nothing in particular is wrong.
Performance lives in the pulse
There was a line I used in the episode that sums up how I think about this. Life is an extreme sport. You should eat well and connect with people, and you should fast. You should lift heavy and you should rest. You stress the system, then you let it recover. That gives you a pulse, rather than a flat line.
Static linearity is the enemy. Running at one steady speed, all day, every day, feels responsible. It looks like commitment. It is actually the fastest way to erode the very capacity you are trying to protect.
The bodies and minds that perform over a long horizon are not the ones held at a constant hum. They are the ones that oscillate. Hard, then genuinely easy. On, then properly off. Load, then recover. Sustainable performance is not a steady output. It is a rhythm.
Most high performers are good at the load. They are terrible at the recovery. They treat the off switch as a weakness, or a reward they have not earned yet. So they never pull it, and the pulse flattens into a line.
The discipline is in the stopping
Dr Tom said the worst thing we do as humans is snack. Not because a snack is a catastrophe, but because the constant input never lets the system settle. There is no gap. No pause. No moment where the body gets to do its other work.
The professional equivalent of snacking is everywhere. The constant checking. The meeting with no white space around it. The refusal to be unreachable for even an hour. Each one feels harmless. Together they remove every gap from your day, and it is in the gaps that recovery, thinking and perspective actually happen.
I have practised fasting for years now. When I started I found it genuinely hard. As a former athlete I had trained myself to fuel constantly, and holding hunger felt wrong. What I learned had nothing to do with weight. I learned that I could sit with discomfort and not immediately act on it. That the urge to reach for something does not have to be obeyed the moment it arrives.
That skill transfers directly. The leader who can sit with the urge to check, to fill, to respond, and choose not to, is building the same muscle. The discipline is not in the doing. Most of us are already doing plenty. The discipline is in the stopping.
Awareness is not change
Here is the part that separates the people who talk about this from the people it actually helps.
You can read this, nod, feel the truth of it, and change nothing. Understanding that you never switch off is not the same as switching off. Knowing does not translate into behaviour on its own, or there would be no doctors who smoke.
The shift is not a burst of motivation. It is a rhythm you build and repeat until it holds. One deliberate gap in the day. One genuine stop. One evening where the system is properly off. Then again the next week, and the week after, until the pulse is built into how you operate rather than something you keep meaning to get to.
So this week, do not audit what you are doing. You are almost certainly doing enough. Audit where you stop. Look honestly at your day and find the gaps. If there are none, that is not a sign of commitment. It is the flat line, and it is worth taking seriously.
The performance is not in the constant. It is in the pulse.
Closing the gap between how a leader knows they should operate and how they actually operate under pressure is slow, deliberate work. It rarely fails for lack of awareness. It fails for lack of a system that reinforces the change. This is the work we do with senior leaders at Performance Intelligence: building the operating rhythm, the recovery and energy management, and the behavioural reinforcement that turn good intentions into sustainable performance.
If you are leading at a pace you cannot hold, there are two ways we can help.
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About the Author
Andrew May is a mental skills coach, leadership advisor, keynote speaker and author. As founder and CEO of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior executives and high-performing teams across Australian business, elite sport and the Australian Defence Force to build the systems, culture and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Exercise Physiology and a Master’s in Coaching Psychology, and has worked as a mental skills and leadership coach with the Wallabies, Waratahs, Sea Eagles, Tim Tszyu to name a few. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
