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I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
A police officer, right?
But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue?
This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down.
I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to The Girlfriend's Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I am delighted to welcome Dr. James Hewitt to the show.
James is a human performance scientist and the author of the book Regenerative Performance.
So James, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
Yeah, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
So I've been fascinated with human performance for as long as I can remember, and certainly a long time before I called it human performance.
That fascination started when I was a kid.
I was always fascinated by anything that went fast.
So think space rockets, racing cars, anything with wheels.
And eventually that interest led me to discover this sport called road cycling, racing.
And so I was enamored by this idea that you can hit speeds of 100 kilometers an hour on tires a few centimeters thick.
And it's amazing, what you can convince yourself is a good idea before your prefrontal cortex is fully developed.
But to cut a long story short, I moved to the center of France to pursue this dream of becoming a pro cyclist.
That didn't work out.
So I returned to the UK to study sports science, eventually set up a coaching business, ended up working with um what i call knowledge workers now, so people who think for a living because i found out that as much as i wanted to work with pro athletes, they couldn't afford to pay me.
And um ended up working with these really interesting people who had very demanding jobs in london, where i was based at the time who, for some reason, after working 80 hours a week, wanted to go and race 180 miles every weekend, And this led to this fascination with the workplace, but also this revelation that the same things that were holding them back from performing well on their bike were also stopping them from reaching their potential in their professional life.
And this really often came down to this imbalance between effort and recovery.
And so I ended up developing this conceptualization of knowledge work.
Thinking work like a cognitive endurance activity, where optimal performance, peak performance, sustainable performance however you want to frame it emerges from this integration of effort and recovery, rather than this endless pursuit of being always on.
That's been my area of focus and passion for the best part of 15 years now.
Excellent.
So there are parallels then, between even what we're doing, sitting at our desks, and someone cycling hundreds of miles.
There is a parallel there, you're saying?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think there's several.
The most fundamental, I think, relates to a general principle that sustained performance for humans, whether it's cognitive or physical performance, relies on us oscillating between periods of deliberate effort and effective recovery, where we recharge and regenerate.
And if we get that mix right, then we don't just bounce back, we can actually get stronger over time.
There's this really interesting concept in sports science that some of your listeners may have heard of, called super compensation.
And it describes how if we induce a load, we work hard.
Actually, following that, we experience fatigue.
Our performance might drop even.
But it provides a stimulus for growth that if we have the right resources available in the context of sport, that might be adequate nutrition, enough sleep, enough time.
Then we don't just bounce back.
We actually get stronger over time.
And that general principle, I think, applies to the workplace too.
And if you think about a career, for example, what at one time would have felt overwhelming early in a career, over time actually feels very manageable because we are super compensating.
We're learning to tolerate and grow through that load.
But unfortunately, sometimes we can get that relationship between effort and recovery wrong.
In sport, you might describe that as overtraining.
We technically, we call it non-functional overreaching, which isn't very memorable, is it?
But in a workplace, we might call it burnout.
And that can be quite challenging to recover from, in a similar way way that, for athletes, overtraining or this non-functional overreaching can be difficult to recover from.
So, at a very fundamental level, i think there are general principles that govern cognitive and physical effort, and we can use those general principles to try and design work and life in a way that might enable us to achieve our goals, but do so in a way that doesn't harm our health and well-being in the process.
Well, that whole idea of effective recovery I think a lot of people are unclear what that would actually mean, right?
That?
What does it mean to have rest that has a function as opposed to just being when you stop doing whatever you are doing?
Right.
So I often think about this in three dimensions.
And anyone who speaks to me for any length of time soon picks up on the fact that I think in frameworks for better or worse, and maybe too much so sometimes.
When I think about recovery, I'm often thinking about the replenishment of three dimensions, three resources or three types of resources.
You could think about it.
So we've got physical resources, we've got emotional resources, we've got cognitive resources.
So there is an aspect of recovery from both physical and cognitive effort that is physical.
We know, for example, during sleep, that adequate quality sleep actually involves some physiological processes, some physical processes in our brain.
They think it might even be associated with some type of cleaning process, associated with something called the glymphatic system, which you can almost think about as the plumbing for your brain.
And we also know that recovery has this emotional component.
And many of us will have experienced this.
Imagine your typical work day.
We hold it together with our colleagues for the most part.
You might be in a difficult meeting.
You hold your tongue.
You stay quiet.
There's a difficult interaction with a colleague.
But you're self-regulated and you're calm and you say the right thing.
And you get home and you're with loved ones, family, friends.
They often get the worst of us because we're emotionally depleted and we need environments that will help us to emotionally recover, to restore those emotional resources.
For some people, that might be people. who recharge them.
For others, it might be time on your own.
And then finally, we've got these cognitive resources that need to be restored.
We're deploying cognitive resources all day.
We're solving complex problems.
We're switching between tasks.
We're under time pressure.
And at the end of the day, we need time.
We need space where cognitive load decreases so that we can restore those cognitive resources.
And again, you've probably experienced this.
You know you get to the end of the day and you've been making difficult decisions.
You've been solving complex problems.
You've been pulled in multiple directions, but you're on top of it and you get home and someone says well, what do you want for dinner?
And you say, oh.
I've just got no idea.
That feels like an insurmountable decision.
And because we're cognitively depleted and so we need to be in environments where we can restore those cognitive resources.
But unfortunately many of us live and work in a way where that recovery doesn't happen and where we're under pressure.
Emotional stress, sometimes that's out of our control, outside of work.
Sometimes though, it's within our control, because we end up doom scrolling social media and seeing all the terrible things that are happening in the world.
Not to say that we want to ignore those things, but the access that we have to this constant stream of terrible news.
It's very unnatural for a human.
For most of human history, that wasn't possible.
Similarly, cognitively, we sometimes engage in kind of pseudo work.
You open our laptop and are we really productive?
Or are we just trying to distract ourselves from something else or make ourselves feel better because we're still working?
And finally physically.
Sometimes inadvertently, we end up compromising our physical recovery without realising it.
And the classic example of that for many knowledge workers is you get to the end of the day, you have a glass of wine.
You think it relaxes you and it might do psychologically in the short term.
But even a single glass of wine can impair your physical recovery by about 10 percent because of its disrupting effect on sleep.
So I think that gives you a bit of an idea and a framework to think about recovery.
Absolutely.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back talking about how we can use this knowledge during an average workday.
We'll be right back.
Think podcasting can help your business?
Think iHeart.
Streaming, radio, and podcasting.
Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com.
That's iHeartAdvertising.com.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight, and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you.
From smartless media, campsite media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist.
And me, Rory Scovel comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city?
And meets some memorable antiheroes.
There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch.
And it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow him?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, I am back talking with Dr James Hewitt, who is a human performance scientist and the author of the book Regenerative Performance.
So James, we've been talking about the various things that we need to recover on these various dimensions.
I would imagine even during the course of a workday it doesn't need to just be at the end of a workday that we build in these moments of regeneration.
What might it look like during a workday to build in regeneration?
So we aren't reaching the point where by 3 pm people have kind of lost it and are having nothing else good happen after that.
So my number one tip would be to tackle what is sometimes described as productivity theatre.
And this describes this challenge that many of us have that we feel a need to look busy rather than being able to focus on being productive.
And that might look like meetings that you attend because of fear of missing out rather than feeling like you truly add value, or trying to make sure that your status in your communication channels is active, and responding to chat messages continually just to show that you're online rather than being able to focus on your highest priority tasks.
And as a result of that, we end up in this state of continuous what you might call constant, partial attention, rather than being able to really focus when it matters and then properly recover.
So my number one tip would be to try and tackle some of that, to really think carefully about when we're falling into this pattern of pseudo work, of partial attention, and try and create patterns, opportunities where you're focused in periods of more deliberate attention and then you have time to recharge and those recharge moments can be effective even if they're only five or ten minutes long.
Sometimes they're called micro breaks and to give you a practical example of that, it might be that you reduce your default meeting length down by from 30 minutes to 25 or from 60 to 50, to create these little micro breaks in between, rather than having kind of the intensity and the utility of the meeting just drift off at the end and fall into that kind of pseudo work pattern.
Or maybe because the meeting's only half an hour versus 60, instead of everyone multitasking.
Everyone's fully present and engaged, which creates a bit of time for people to take breaks.
So it's really about being deliberate about those micro breaks.
And it might be that you even put them in your calendar.
We put everything often in our calendars except for time to recharge.
But I often encourage people to think about it like a pit stop.
I've worked quite a lot in motorsport in Formula One over the years and I often talk about micro breaks like cognitive emotional, even physical pit stops that you introduce at brief periods throughout the day.
Absolutely.
And if I'm managing a team, what can I do to create an environment where people are not as tempted to do these bits of productivity theater?
I think the fundamental driver of a culture which enables people to work effectively and also rest efficiently is that the leader creates an environment where people experience psychological safety which is underpinned by trust.
Fundamentally, because the data would indicate that a significant portion of this productivity theatre is driven by the gap between how productive employees feel and how productive leaders think their teams are being.
And that trust gap often ends up getting filled with this productivity theatre.
So I think leaders need to really think carefully about whether they're creating environments where people feel supported or surveilled.
And unfortunately, in remote and hybrid settings, we're seeing this trend towards time monitoring, activity monitoring software, which in my view is really counterproductive because You're eroding that psychological safety.
This is all part of a bigger topic around how do you truly measure productivity in knowledge, work where we think for a living?
I think there's a bigger conversation about perhaps needing a shift towards focusing on outcomes rather than hours worked.
Unfortunately, there was a survey published which suggested that many HR executives still believe that high performers work longer hours, which indicates that there's still this general belief that hours worked are a good proxy for productivity.
Sometimes that may be the case, but often it isn't.
Are you creating an environment of psychological safety?
Are you trusting people to produce the outcomes you've asked them to produce, regardless of how long that takes?
But the third thing I would say to leaders is what behaviours are you modelling?
So you might choose to schedule those micro breaks in your calendar and make that visible to your team.
So there's implicit permission for them to do that too.
John Maxwell, leadership guru, said decades ago, leaders reproduce who they are.
And I think that is incredibly pertinent to many leadership behaviours, but perhaps particularly to this balance between effort and recovery, where if leaders aren't visibly recovering, taking these micro breaks, showing that we want people to work really hard but also to rest well, it's very unlikely that their teams are going to do that independently.
So what advice do you have, for I mean?
A lot of my listeners are people who have kids at home, for instance, which means that time off work is not automatically going to be rejuvenating, right.
Like that.
There's going to be a million things going on over the weekend.
The evening is spent getting people fed, make sure they do their homework, go to bed.
All that stuff.
It's not exactly naturally going to be rejuvenating activity.
What can people in those situations do to make time off work still feel restorative, given that you still do have to go in and put in your time the next day?
Mm-hmm.
I mean it's going to sound pretty obvious, but for me it's about trying to find ways to emphasise the quality of the recovery and accepting that the quantity is probably going to be compromised.
I mean, I can relate.
My wife and I have got two kids.
They're a bit older now.
They're 11 and 14.
We've got a teenager.
But we have had many years of when you're not working outside of work.
It's kind of a different kind of labour situation.
Often a lot of emotional labour, if not physical labour of having to just do stuff.
So I get it that life can be tough inside and outside of work.
But what I'd often encourage people to do and certainly we've tried to do is to find these moments where you can do at least something to restore you, even if it's only brief moments.
So there's a really interesting framework called the Recovery Experiences Framework and it describes four different experiences which can be really helpful for restoring those resources cognitive emotional physical, even.
The first aspect is that we try and find an opportunity where our cognitive and physical load does decrease.
That might involve five minutes where you literally put your feet up and change your posture.
Inevitably you'll be interrupted by someone wanting something, but try and enjoy those five minutes while you're doing it.
So relaxing.
In contrast, some type of activity can be really helpful.
Now, you might not have time to go to the gym.
You might not have time to do something structured, but could you maybe shift your commute around so that you can integrate a 10-minute walk?
So park slightly further away from the office if you're driving, so you have to walk to your car.
Might not be possible for everyone, but it may be possible for some.
Integrate these micro movements these um, these bits of activity, post work, and that can have quite a significant positive effect.
And the third component is related to something called mastery, mastery experiences, and this describes the restorative effect of doing something, ideally non-work related, where we can experience a sense of progress and achievement.
Now, for some people that might be hobbies, But for people who are really time constrained, I often suggest have you thought about trying to find a book that you like?
And it could be fiction, maybe not.
But many people find that even five minutes of reading each day gives them this sense of progress, and particularly something they're interested in that engages them.
And the fourth component is control being able to experience something where you've got a sense of autonomy over your time.
So you're doing something where you're choosing to invest that time and energy in the way that you want to again, even if it's only for a short time.
So we've got relaxation, we've got these mastery experiences, control experiences, and then ideally, we should experience a sense of detachment where hopefully, we get that sense of mental distance.
And there's, even for a brief period, an ability to experience some time away from those work-related thoughts.
So try and find those little opportunities in your post work, even if it's five or 10 minutes, and emphasize quality over quantity.
And you might find that you experience some benefits.
Absolutely.
Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from James Hewitt.
Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
Think again.
More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.
So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.
Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.
Think podcasting can help your business?
Think iHeart.
Streaming, radio, and podcasting.
Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com.
That's iHeartAdvertising.com.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight, and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you.
From smartless media, campsite media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist.
And me, Rory Scovel comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city?
And meet some memorable antiheroes.
There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow him?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, we are back.
I am talking with Dr James Hewitt, who is a human performance scientist and author of the book Regenerative Performance.
We've been talking about ways to have little micro breaks during the workday and also maybe seize moments of rejuvenation even if we have a busy personal life, kids at home and things like that.
So we often talk about productivity routines on this show and I really enjoyed your sort of making fun a little bit of morning routines in your book that you mentioned that few morning routines survive the first contact with Monday.
I'm curious if you have any morning routines now that you do now or have tried in the past, ones that are more sort of sustainable or realistic for busy people.
So my morning routine, the only thing that is really pretty much non-negotiable for me is that first coffee of the day and trying to be mindful and present when I'm making and drinking that coffee.
So I'm a big coffee fan and I've got a really over elaborate, over engineered espresso machine at home, which I love.
And one of the things I love about it is that it's a very manual and involved process.
The grinding, the distributing, the grinds, the tamping, all that kind of stuff that anyone who's obsessed with espresso, like I am, will know.
But that process of just being present, of making it, of drinking it, for me has a grounding effect each morning.
And obviously the caffeine helps a bit as well.
And so what I'd encourage people to do is, if you do find that some type of morning routine is helpful, try to find the minimum viable expression of that routine.
Because many people do find that having something consistent is helpful.
My challenge is when people believe that you need this super elaborate five-step routine.
Because the problem is it ends up, instead of supporting peak performance, which is what a lot of these influencers would say, it actually ends up reinforcing fragility.
Because when life gets in the way and you can't follow this elaborate morning routine that the influencer has told you you must, suddenly you start the day feeling bad, like you failed.
So try and find that thing for you.
Maybe for you it is coffee.
For other people I know, it's like, again, maybe reading a little bit of a book.
Might be going for a walk.
Might be walking the dog.
But can you find a five minute practice that grounds you and provides that level of consistency?
So at least you start the day on your schedule, which I think is the key really, rather than feeling like you're always starting it on someone else's.
Yeah.
Well, having something that you can actually succeed at doing is a good way to start the day, because there's nothing worse than starting the day feeling like a failure already.
And it's not even 7 a.m.
So we don't want to do that to anyone.
So James, I always ask my guests a question, which is what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Hmm.
So for me, it's about rediscovering the value of time blocking.
Now the funny thing is is I've realized that a lot of the things that I write about and speak about are probably related to the things I really struggle with.
And a lot of people think I'm a really organized person and I really aspire to be, but I think my default state is actually quite chaotic.
And so I've had to create all these routines and systems and processes to try and deal with my underlying chaos.
And I fell out that habit of something that I always used to do, which was to plan my day and look at a to-do list in a very action-oriented way and give myself specific time blocks for the things that I needed to do.
And it was because ironically, I had so much to do.
It felt overwhelming that I felt like I didn't have time to do that little planning process anymore, which is just ridiculous, because it's probably when I most need to do it.
But I've reintroduced that.
And not only has it made me feel calmer and more in control, it's actually helped me stay focused, because these time blocks giving myself a target I need to achieve X in 15 minutes helps me to avoid getting distracted and pulled into other things.
So that has helped me shift from a good day, which is I get a few things done, to a great day, which is not only do I get things done, I do it in a way that feels efficient effective decisive focused, and I've got time for other things outside of that as well.
Absolutely.
Time spent planning is almost always returned back to you in terms of making a return on the investment there.
So what are you looking forward to right now?
Well, I'm about to go into my final block of travel for the year.
And I've got a really fun trip coming up to the States.
I spend an increasing amount of time in the US, even though I'm based in the UK, speaking at events there.
So I'm going to be over in Nashville in a few weeks and then finally in Detroit.
And I'm really looking forward to that trip.
I absolutely love speaking.
There's some great clients I'm speaking with there.
So that's going to be fun to end the year with some great people and some really fun events.
Yes, end it on a high note for sure.
So James, where can people find you?
So my website, drjameshewitt.com is a good place to begin.
Type in the doctor.
It's important because there was a guy called James Hewitt who had an affair with Princess Diana.
And if you just type James Hewitt, you'll find it.
And that's not me.
So that's a good place.
And then also I'm quite active on LinkedIn and you can find me there and increasingly on Instagram as well for some behind the scenes stuff.
Awesome.
Well, James, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura, at LauraVanderkamcom.
And in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
A police officer, right?
But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue?
This dude is the devil.
He'll hurt you.
This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down.
I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
I got you.
I got you.
I got you.
Listen to The Girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloose?
Guaranteed human.
