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In 2008, immunologist Dr. Qing Li at Nippon Medical School sent a group of Tokyo office workers into the forest for three days. He drew their blood before the trip and again after. What he found reshaped how scientists think about
Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson identified it in 1908, and it has held up for over a century. It looks like an inverted U. On the left side, low pressure produces low output. As pressure increases, performance rises.
Great jazz gets your feet tapping and your head bobbing. Musicians call it swing, and for a hundred years nobody could quite explain what created it. In 2022, physicists at the Max Planck Institute finally cracked it: swing comes from a roughly 30-millisecond delay between a soloist’s downbeat and the rhythm section underneath them. The delay is so small that even professional jazz musicians can’t consciously detect it. They just feel that something is working.
Rhythm is one of the oldest organising principles in the universe. Planetary cycles create our seasons, our daylight, our tides. We feel it in rainfall, sunlight, wind. Every living creature moves, feeds, reproduces, sleeps, and recovers on some kind of cycle. Inside your own body, thousands of smaller rhythms are running at once: temperature, hormones, digestion, activity, and rest, all dancing together.
Throughout evolution, life organised itself around rhythm. Species found their niche by adapting to work within these cycles, not against them. There was no alternative. Biodiversity itself is, in part, a byproduct of countless different rhythmic strategies for surviving and reproducing.
Then modern life arrived, and many of us quietly stepped outside that framework. Artificial light runs continuously. Heating and cooling flatten the seasons. Noise and constant connectivity override the natural cues that used to shape our days. Sleep, movement, and rest have become optional, something to schedule around work rather than something work is built around.
The problem is that our rhythms are still written into our biology. They haven’t gone anywhere. When circadian, sleep, and ultradian rhythms become chaotic, the research shows it clearly: overall wellbeing — activity, sleep, digestion, rest, and even breath — deteriorates measurably.
The link between disrupted rhythms and mental health has moved from a fringe observation to an active, fast-growing field of psychiatric research known as chronopsychiatry. A 2025 editorial in BMJ Mental Health described well-synchronised circadian rhythms as fundamental for human health and particularly mental health, while noting that modern patterns of living — shift work, excess light at night, always-on schedules — are actively working against that synchronisation.
The evidence has been building for years:
The pattern across all of this research is consistent: rhythm disruption isn’t a side effect of a demanding modern life. For a growing number of people, it may be a root cause of the mental health strain that demanding modern life produces.
We face a real choice. Do we keep driving forward, disregarding these rhythms in the name of output and availability? Are we willing to pay the price in burnout, poor sleep, and impaired decision-making? Or do we take deliberate responsibility, individually and as leaders, for the rhythms our own lives run on? Regulation alone won’t solve this. It has to be a personal and organisational choice.
In our work with leaders and teams, the pattern is consistent. The people who sustain high performance over years, not just weeks, take deliberate action to identify, establish, and protect their own rhythm. If you want to build that for yourself, there are four steps: drills, rhythm, cadence, and momentum.
Our research into high performers consistently surfaces the same core inputs, but the first rule is to identify what actually works for you. Evolution favours diversity. The basic categories are consistent; the specifics are personal.
Dancers, musicians, athletes, and high-performing teams all rehearse their fundamentals long before a performance. In daily life, your equivalent drills usually fall into six categories: sleep, flow, movement, relaxation, focus, and exercise. These are your raw inputs. On their own, without structure around them, they don’t add up to much. That structure is what the next three steps provide.
Rhythm is genuinely difficult to hold onto in modern life. Between work pressure, family demands, and constant digital interruption, carving out consistent space is hard. This is exactly where the chronopsychiatry research becomes practical rather than academic: rhythms established earlier in the day are consistently associated with better mood and sharper cognition. By evening, accumulated cognitive fatigue works against you.
Build a basic rhythm that protects three things: sleep, rest, and movement. Treat it as non-negotiable, as automatic as brushing your teeth. There are three key blocks to design around:
Cadence is what drives rhythm forward. Sometimes it’s slow and quiet. Sometimes the intensity rises. You feel this instinctively in music, dance, and sport, and the same pattern applies directly to how you work and live.
There are times to lean in, executing a workout or a project with real vigour and intensity. And there are times to deliberately soften: rest, reflection, celebration. Most professionals rarely activate that slower cadence enough. Constant intensity without contrast isn’t discipline. It’s a flat line, and flat lines don’t produce flow.
Cadence is what creates the conditions for flow. In the pause, you refresh, prepare, and plan. When it’s time to re-enter focused work, commit fully: clear goal, raised intensity. As a general target, aim to sustain a flowing, focused rhythm for roughly ninety minutes at a time at work, and around sixty minutes in personal pursuits, before deliberately stepping back down.
Once your rhythm is established and you can feel the rise and fall of cadence working, momentum follows. Goals get hit. Flow states show up regularly, not just on lucky days. Rest becomes disciplined and timely rather than something you collapse into out of exhaustion. Life and work both start moving forward under their own weight.
This is the outcome elite athletes chase relentlessly, and it’s exactly why they’re so obsessive about drills, rhythm, and cadence: momentum is the compounding return on all three.
In your personal life, momentum shows up as purpose, meaning, and fulfilment, a reliable signal that things are working. At work, it shows up as innovation, agility, and the ability to adapt under pressure. Momentum can only be sustained when drills are practiced consistently, rhythm is upheld, and cadence is actively regulated rather than left to chance. Protecting that sequence is one of the core responsibilities of leadership, both in your own life, and in how you lead a team.
Aligning with the rhythms of nature is a start, but it isn’t enough on its own. The deeper work, for individuals and for leaders, is building and protecting a rhythm of your own inside a world that no longer builds one for you.
Circadian rhythms run on roughly a 24-hour cycle and govern things like your sleep-wake pattern and hormone release. Ultradian rhythms are shorter, repeating cycles within the day, such as the roughly 90-minute focus-and-fatigue cycle referenced in the cadence step above. Both are biologically real and both are disrupted by modern always-on work patterns.
The research is careful here: most large studies show a strong association, and some, including a 2026 JAMA Psychiatry cohort study, show that rhythm irregularity can predict future relapse in people with a depression history, suggesting the relationship isn’t purely coincidental. Researchers describe it as bidirectional: disrupted rhythms can worsen mood, and mood disorders can further disrupt rhythms, reinforcing each other.
There’s no universally agreed number, but the chronobiology research is consistent that earlier, consistent rhythms show benefits within weeks, not months. The four-step framework above (drills, rhythm, cadence, momentum) is designed to be layered in gradually rather than adopted all at once.
Yes, arguably more so. The research on circadian disruption specifically flags shift work and night-time light exposure as major risk factors for the same mental health outcomes. The principle isn’t “work 9 to 5.” It’s “build in consistent drills, rhythm, cadence, and recovery, whatever your schedule looks like.”
The Resilience Institute Asia partners with organisations across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Our programmes are grounded in over 22 years of global resilience research and backed by the 50-factor Resilience Assessment.
