Some Days, It’s All I Can Do to Not Put Up a Zero

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PERFORMANCE INTEGRITY   ·   5 MIN READ

Some Days, It’s All I Can Do to Not Put Up a Zero

Here’s why that’s a powerful strategy.

This article is for everyone who got up this morning and chose to “not put up a Zero.” I see you.

Last night, on the backside of the clock, I stared at the ceiling for a few hours, cursing my earlier-evening decision to have that extra glass of wine with dinner, because it was ‘date night’. I’m cognisant that poor sleep is often an unwelcome side effect for me now, of even two glasses of wine. I’d had three last night, and saw midnight before I slept.

Of course, it was also book-week dress-up day, so my 6-year-old was poking my face in excitement before 7am as she chattered about the costume we had DIY’d the night before. I was tired. My mind was tired and my body was tired. I flailed into the busy Friday that I knew was ahead of me.

Dragging my feet, reprimanding myself for my sloppy morning discipline, no stretches or deep breathing before launching into the school routine. Later, after I got the kids safely to the bus stop, I pulled my sports bra from the depths of my dirty clothes basket because, who’s got time to find the clean one? And I went to the gym anyway.

That is what matters. I went. And I wasn’t a hero. I didn’t push out huge sets, and I didn’t set any new standards. But I was there. I didn’t put up a Zero.

We are overwhelmed in numbers never before recorded: 39% of employees say they’ve felt overwhelmed in a way that directly affected their job performance, according to the 2026 NAMI-Ipsos Workplace Mental Health Poll. And the anecdotal evidence is all around us.

I feel it. I feel a creeping busyness some days, that isn’t directly attributable to the tasks in front of me or any latent stress. More just the plethora of tiny threads that I track as a wife, mother, entrepreneur and investor.

The overwhelming minutiae. An army of capacity-sucking micro-thoughts. And it’s not changing.

What I see in our future is an environment that keeps growing in complexity, and a human operator who has more demanded of them every year, not just from within their workplaces, but from society as well. And I’m just talking about the trends that are already here: technology integration, AI systems, geopolitical instability, and increased domestic responsibilities (or decreased support). None of that is going away. So the real question isn’t whether we create more capacity in our lives, but whether the system for creating that desperately needed capacity gets built now, or whether it gets built later, under pressure, once the cracks are already showing up as poor performance or disengagement at work, or more impactfully as chronic fatigue or health challenges.

Maybe we could think about it like this: we’ve all got a battery, and if we don’t recharge it, our battery starts to go flat, and we just don’t have as much energy to face challenges or new threads with. That sounds a bit like resilience.

But it’s more than that. Because what we want is the ability to recharge, and also to build capacity so that we can expend more energy for longer and still have enough to function at the highest level. Like upgrading from an AA battery to a rechargeable car battery.

These are all skills that can be learnt. That’s the lens through which I view performance.

So here’s one thing we can do to recharge, and one thing we can do to build capacity. Both are important.

I didn’t put up a Zero.

The recharge: the physiological sigh

That flailed, flustered morning, digging a sports bra out of the dirty clothes basket, is exactly the kind of moment this tool is built for. Not the ten-minute version of self-care. The twenty-second version.

The physiological sigh is two breaths in through the nose, the first long, the second a short top-up on top of it, then one long exhale out through the mouth. That’s it. Repeat it once or twice more if you need to. It works by popping open collapsed air sacs in the lungs and clearing carbon dioxide fast, which research suggests makes it one of the quickest ways to bring a spiked nervous system back down, quicker than a standard deep breath, quicker than most meditation.

You don’t need quiet for it. You don’t need to lie down. You can do it standing in a school hallway with a costume in one hand and a sports bra in the other. That’s the whole point of a recharge tool. It has to fit inside the life you actually have, not the life you’d have if overwhelm ever gave you fair warning.

Building capacity: sleep, incrementally

Here’s the thing about my extra glass of wine and the midnight ceiling-staring. That’s a withdrawal from a battery I didn’t refill. And the research on what happens when you make deliberate deposits instead is more compelling than most of us give sleep credit for.

In a Stanford study of college basketball players, researchers didn’t ask them to overhaul their lives. They just asked them to sleep more, most nights landing around 8.5 hours instead of the under-7 they’d been running on, an increase of well under two extra hours. Over a few weeks of that one incremental change, free throw accuracy improved by about 9%, three-point shooting improved by a similar margin, sprint times got faster, reaction time sharpened, and mood lifted.

Nobody trained harder. Nobody added another skill. They just had more capacity to deploy the skill they already had.

Building capacity doesn’t require a life overhaul either. It starts with something as unglamorous as a consistent bedtime, protected the way you’d protect a meeting with someone you respect. Not perfect. Not every night. Just more, most nights, and mostly at the same time. Your battery, upgrading itself, while you sleep.

I didn’t push out huge sets that morning. I didn’t fix the busyness, or quiet the army of micro-thoughts, or find the clean sports bra. I just did two small things. I breathed, standing in a hallway with a costume in one hand.

And somewhere in the nights since, I’ve been trying to protect a bedtime the way I’d protect a meeting that mattered.

The battery keeps count, even when you don’t. Every twenty-second breath. Every earlier night. Small deposits, on days that are otherwise forgettable, are exactly how you end up with a bigger battery than the one you started with.

So on the mornings you’re digging through the wrong basket, dragging your feet, cursing last night’s extra glass of wine or late night crisis meeting: you don’t need a personal best. You just need to not put up a Zero.

I see you. What will your recharge look like today?

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Sourcing note

• 39% overwhelmed stat: 2026 NAMI-Ipsos Workplace Mental Health Poll.

• Physiological sigh: mechanism per Balban et al. research on cyclic sighing; already in Belinda's Core Power Toolkit under Rapid Recovery (Core tag, instant/under pressure).

• Sleep extension stat: Mah, C.D. et al. (2011), Sleep, 34(7), 943 to 950. Stanford basketball players, average sleep increase of 110 minutes/night (under 7 hours to about 8.5), free throw and three-point accuracy each improved approximately 9%, plus faster sprint times, sharper reaction time, improved mood. Already a verified defensible stat in Belinda's Stats Standard file.