Every November, a familiar electricity pulses through adland. Black Friday. Christmas campaigns. Q1 planning. It’s the season the industry quietly prides itself on surviving – the one that “separates the strong from the spectacular.”
But beneath the buzz lies a truth we rarely say out loud: this industry is addicted to adrenaline.
We’ve normalised speed as intelligence, responsiveness as devotion, and exhaustion as achievement. Teams pack late-night sprints into already overfilled calendars, then congratulate each other for making the impossible happen.
But adrenaline isn’t a strategy; it’s a stimulant. And without recovery, stimulants always crash.
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The real problem isn’t the sprint – it’s that we’ve eliminated the space that follows.
Creativity collapses without recovery – and the data backs it
Adland loves the mythology of the “late-night best idea.” But the science points in the opposite direction.
Researchers at MIT found that participants who entered even the earliest sleep stage – the soft, liminal zone where the mind drifts – saw a 43% improvement in creative problem-solving.
Creativity literally spikes when the brain is given permission to slow down.
And researchers at the University of Arizona discovered that downtime activates the brain’s default mode network; the system that’s closely tied to imagination, divergent thinking and insight.
Conversely, extended overwork produces measurable creative decline:
cognitive flexibility drops
and creative output can fall by 20–30% after periods of prolonged intensity
If creativity is the currency of our industry, then adrenaline without recovery is inflation. Teams might still produce – but they produce less valuable work.
Peak seasons aren’t the issue. Permanently peak culture is
Intensity has always been part of agency life. The problem is that the peaks have flattened into a plateau. What once happened in December now repeats in April, August, October. Urgency has become the operating rhythm, not the exception.
People aren’t burning out because they can’t handle the sprint. People are burning out because adland no longer has an off-ramp.
And when recovery disappears, creativity isn’t the only casualty: morale drops, retention suffers, collaboration becomes transactional, and risk-taking evaporates. The long-term costs far outweigh the short-term client wins.
Recovery is not a wellness perk – it is creative infrastructure.
What adland gets wrong about high performance
Creativity lives in the gaps, not the grind
The industry still glorifies the full calendar. But packed calendars don’t produce bold ideas – they produce efficient, predictable ones.
Innovative work comes from whitespace, curiosity, cross-pollination, and mental spaciousness.
Leaders are measuring speed, not impact
Too many leaders confuse being “always on” with being high-performing.
Real high performance is cyclical – intensity, rest, restoration. Without the pause, there is no rebound.
Burnout isn’t a personal resilience issue – it’s a systems issue
No amount of breathing exercises, webinars or Friday pizzas can compensate for a calendar designed for chronic overload. Burnout is not a character flaw; it’s a design flaw.
What recovery-driven leadership actually looks like
Build the rebound into the plan
After big campaigns, we build in decompression: lighter loads, fewer meetings, creative reset days. We also honour the rebound this industry is craving by baking it into our monthly rhythm. While we already work hybrid (two office days a week), the first seven days of every month are fully work from home — our “WFH week”.
It’s the reset. The exhale. And if it were a movie scene? It’d be that final moment in Babe when the farmer says, “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”
The three weeks before WFH week are full throttle, strategy, implementation, adrenaline, deadlines. Then, right on cue, a new month arrives and we drop into seven days of deep focus at home.
Every creative strategist here counts down to that reset. It’s when we finally dig into analytics instead of living in the frenzy of “do”, and unsurprisingly, our best ideas always come from WFH week.
The dashboards back it up: productivity spikes. But what data can’t capture is what happens to creative humans when they’re given regular time to simply… stare out the window.
Protect “white time” like it’s billable
White should not be mistaken as indulgence; it’s strategic. It’s where the good ideas come from. Reading, reflecting, absorbing culture, exploring thinking that isn’t tied to a deliverable.
Measure creative health, not just creative output
Instead of tracking hours or tasks, measure:
number of bold ideas generated
originality vs iteration
team cognitive bandwidth
the diversity of thought within ideation sessions
These metrics reveal far more about performance than a colour-coded workflow board.
Leaders must model the behaviour
Teams don’t follow policies; they follow patterns. If leaders Slack at 10pm, the culture is set.
It helps to normalise a traffic-light system on Slack where red means you’re not to be messaged because you’re deep in something big – honouring the neuroscience around what constant notifications can do when you’re in the zone. Orange means a person can message you but an immediate response is unlikely, which allows that person some breathing room knowing there’s no urgency to immediately respond. Finally, the more obvious one, green means go.
A love letter – and a wake-up call
This isn’t a criticism of adland, it’s a reminder of what makes it extraordinary: its ability to imagine, disrupt, provoke, inspire.
But creativity is a fragile resource. It needs space, rest, boredom, silliness, experimentation and detachment as much as it needs deadlines and briefs. Adrenaline gives us speed. Recovery gives us originality.
The future of the industry won’t belong to the agencies that run the hardest – but to those that run well, rest deeply, and return sharper.
If we want work that cuts through culturally, not just commercially, we need to rebuild the systems that shape how creative people live and think.
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