Boosting endurance, with Dr. James Hewitt

Human performance scientist Dr. James Hewitt shares tips for being productive over the long haul

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. 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

(00:23):
they have for the rest of us. So today I
am delighted to welcome doctor 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.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Thank you, it's great to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit
about yourself.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
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

(01:03):
called road cycling racing. And so I was enamored by
this idea that you can hit speeds of one hundred
kilometers an hour on tires if you centimeters thick and
It's amazing what you can convince yourself is a good
idea before your preference of cortex is fully developed. But
to cut a long story short, I moved to the
Santa France to pursue this dream of becoming a pro cyclist.

(01:25):
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 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 ended
up working with these really interesting people who had very
demanding jobs in London, where I was based at the time,

(01:47):
who for some reason, after working eighty hours a week,
wanted to go and race one hundred and eighty miles
every weekend. And this led to this fascination with the workplace,
but also this revelation but 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,

(02:09):
and this really often came down to this imbalance between
efforts 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.

(02:33):
And that's been my area of focus and passion for
the best part of fifteen years now excellent.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
So there are parallels then, between even what we're doing
sitting at our desks and someone cycling, you know, hundreds
of miles. There is a parallel there are you're saying.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
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, 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

(03:11):
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 supercompensation,
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

(03:32):
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

(03:54):
very manageable because we are super compensating. We're learning to
tolerate and grow through that load. Unfortunately, sometimes we can
get that relationship between effort and recovery wrong. In sport,
you might describe that as overtraining. 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

(04:18):
can be quite challenging to recover from. In a similar
way that for athletes, overtraining or this nonfunctional 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

(04:39):
in a way that doesn't harm our health and well
being in the process.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
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 at three dimensions, three of resources

(05:20):
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

(05:43):
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.
Many of us will have experienced this. Imagine your typical workday.
We hold it together with our colleagues. For the most part.

(06:05):
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.

(06:27):
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. You know, 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

(06:49):
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 more directions,
but you're on top of it. And you get home
and someone says, well, what do you want for dinner?
And he said, I've got no idea. That feels like
an insurmountable decision. And because we're cognitively depleted and so

(07:12):
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, where
you know, we're under 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.

(07:34):
Not to say that we want to ignore those things,
but the access that we have to this constant stream
of terrible news is 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 you just
trying to distract ourselves from something else or make ourselves

(07:57):
feel better because we're still working and finally, physically, sometimes
inadvertently we end up compromising our physical recovery without realizing 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 ten percent because of its disrupting the

(08:20):
effect on sleep. So I hope think that gives you
a bit of an idea and a framework to think
about recovery.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
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 work day. Well, I
am back talking with doctor James Hewitt, who is a
human performance scientist and the author of the book Regenerative Performance. So, James,

(08:46):
we've been talking about the various things that you know
we need to recover on these various dimensions. I would
imagine even during the course of a work day. It
doesn't need to just be at the end of a
work day that we build in how these moments of regeneration.
What might it look like a workday to build in regeneration,
so we aren't reaching the point where you know, by
three pm people have kind of lost it and are

(09:08):
having nothing else good happen after that.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
So my number one tip would be to tackle what
it's sometimes described as productivity theater, 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

(09:33):
feeling that you truly add value, or trying to make
sure that your kind of 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

(09:57):
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 opportunities where your focused in periods
of more deliberate attention, and then you have time to recharge.

(10:17):
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
from thirty minutes to twenty five or from sixty to
fifty to create these little microbreaks in between, rather than
having kind of the intensity and the utility of the

(10:39):
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 sixty, 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 microbreaks, and it might be that
you even put them in your calendar, if we put
everything often in our current except for time to recharge.

(11:02):
But I often encourage people to think about it like
a pit stop. I've worked quite a lot in most
sport in Formula one over the years, and I often
talk about microbreaks like cognitive, emotional, even physical pit stops
that you introduce at brief periods throughout.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
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 there's people experience psychological safety,
which is underpinned by trust fundamentally, because the data would
indicate that a significant portion of this productivity theater is

(11:52):
driven by the gap between how productive employees feel and
how productive leaders think their team their teams are being,
and that trust gap often ends up getting filled with
this productivity theater. So I think leaders need to really
think carefully about whether they're creating environments where people feel

(12:13):
supported or surveiled. 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

(12:34):
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. You know. 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

(12:57):
a good proxy for productivity. That may be the case,
but often it isn't. So as a leader, 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 behaviors are you modeling?
So you might choose to schedule those micro breaks in

(13:19):
your calendar and make that visible to your team so
that there's implicit permission for them to do that too.
You know, John Maxwell, Leadership Gury, said decades ago, leaders
reproduce who they are, and I think that is incredibly
pertinent to many leadership behaviors, but perhaps particularly to this

(13:40):
balanced 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.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
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

(14:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
I mean, it's going to sound pretty obvious, but for me,
it's about trying to find ways to emphasize 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've got two kids. They're a bit older
now their teenage at where they're eleven and fourteen, we've
got a teenager, but we have had many years of
when you're not working outside of work, it's kind of

(14:54):
a different kind of labor often a lot of emotional labor,
if not physical labor of having to just do you stuff.
So I get it. You know that the 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.

(15:16):
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 a cognitive and physical load does decrease. That might

(15:37):
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 have time

(15:57):
to do something structured, but could you may be shift
you can meet around so that you can integrate a
ten 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
bits of activity post work, and that can have quite

(16:17):
a significant positive effect. The third component is regis 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 can suggest have you thought about

(16:38):
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 it's 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

(17:01):
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 this sense

(17:22):
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 pace work, even if it's five or ten minutes,
and empersise quality over quantity, and you might find that
your experience some benefits.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Absolutely. Well, We're going to take a word more quick
ad break and then I'll be back with more from
James Hewitt. Well, we are back. I am talking with
doctor 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

(18:02):
also maybe seese 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

(18:23):
mentioned that few morning routines survive the first contact with Monday.
I'm curious if you have any morning routines now that
you've do now or have tried in the past ones
that are more sort of sustainable or realistic for busy people.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
To 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
orange neared espresso machine at home, which I love, and

(19:03):
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 kind of 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

(19:24):
bit as well. And so what it 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 kind of five

(19:45):
step routine and because the problem is it ends up,
instead of supporting peak performance, which is what a lot
of these influencers would say, actually ends up reinforcing fragility
because when life gets in the way and you can't
follow this elaborate morning routine that influencer has told you must,
suddenly you start the day feeling bad that you failed.
So try and find that thing for you. Maybe for

(20:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
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 seven am. 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.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
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

(21:12):
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 their habit of something that I always used to do,
which was to plan my day and look at her
to do list in a very action oriented way and
give myself specific time blocks for the things that I

(21:33):
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,
which is just ridiculous because it's probably when I most
need to do it. But I've reintroduced that and it
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

(21:55):
X in fifteen 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.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
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?

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Well, I'm about to go into my final block of
travel for the year and I've got a refund trip
coming up to the States. I spent 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.

(22:44):
I absolutely love speaking. There's some great clients of speaking
with there, so that's going to be fun to end
the year with some great people and some really fun events.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yes, ended on a high note for sure. So James,
where can people find you?

Speaker 2 (22:57):
So my website Doctor Jane Sewit dot com is a
good place to begin typing the doctor. It's important because
there was a guy called James Hewett who had an
affair with Princess Diana and if you just type 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, behind the scenes

(23:18):
and stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
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 Laura vandercam dot com. And in
the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's
to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening

(23:43):
to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
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(24:06):
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