S2E330 How to Thrive Without Burning Out - a Conversation with Dr. James Hewitt
It's a Good Life
Brian Buffini
4.4 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today’s fast-paced culture, many of us push ourselves to the limit in pursuit of success—only to end up exhausted and burned out. Dr. James Hewitt knows this firsthand. A former elite cyclist, coach, and now renowned human-performance scientist, he has advised everyone from Formula 1 teams to Fortune 500 executives. His new book, Regenerative Performance: How to Thrive in an Always-On World Without Sacrificing Your Well-Being, offers a practical framework for sustaining high performance without sacrificing well-being. In this inspiring conversation, Brian Buffini and Dr. Hewitt explore the power of recovery, the pitfalls of “high-performance theater,” and the freedom that comes from pursuing purpose over perfection.
YOU WILL LEARN:
- Why you should strive for healthy flexibility that incorporates hard work and recovery time over trying to achieve balance.
- The importance of lifelong learning to your overall cognitive health.
- Practical strategies to recognize and move past burn out.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
NOTEWORTHY QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE:
“Hard work is required to achieve big results. But you need to balance that with really effective, proactive recovery.” — Dr. James Hewitt
“It’s not actually possible to overtrain, but you can under-recover.” — Dr. James Hewitt
“One of the number one signs of early burnout, to be honest, in myself and others, is I stop experiencing as much joy in the things that usually bring me joy.” — Dr. James Hewitt
“People who commit to being a ‘learn it all’ rather than a ‘know it all’ have better cognitive and brain health long-term” — Dr. James Hewitt
“We know that we can endure a huge amount if we feel it's purposeful and meaningful, sometimes to a fault, but continuing to reconnect with that sense of purpose is going to be absolutely key.” — Dr. James Hewitt
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to It's a Good Life, the podcast for entrepreneurs, where it's all about growing yourself and your business. |
| 0:09.6 | Here's your host, founder of America's largest business coaching company, Brian Bafini. |
| 0:16.9 | Well, the top of the morning to you and welcome to It's a Good Life. I'm your host, Brian Bafini. |
| 0:21.4 | And today, we have a doctor in the house. And this doctor is going to help us change the way we think about performance and resilience. |
| 0:29.7 | Very, very excited, Dr. James Hewitt, and just to show how much love there is in the world these days, an Irishman is going to interview an Englishman. |
| 0:36.5 | I mean, we are breaking ground here today. James is a human performance scientist, a former elite |
| 0:41.9 | cyclist, cancer survivor, God bless him, an advisor to Fortune 500, and what really excites me |
| 0:47.7 | is the Formula One teams, he's helped. He has a brand new book that just came out called |
| 0:53.0 | regenerative Performance. |
| 0:55.0 | And as someone who's in the coaching business, we are very, very excited about this content. |
| 0:59.3 | It shows us how to thrive without burning out with our natural rhythms and building real |
| 1:04.0 | recovery into our lives. |
| 1:05.2 | So we're very, very excited about this content. |
| 1:07.7 | James, welcome to the show. |
| 1:08.9 | You're in Sweden joining me today, traveling all over the world. Thanks for taking the time for us. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks so much for emblapping me. So before we dive in, you have a fascinating story. Now, it's interesting. I'm going to ask you to kind of Americanize yourself here for a second because the English are not great at telling their stories. I got to tell you, they're great to telling other people's stories, right? You guys are, just get on with us. |
| 1:31.1 | It's an admirable quality. But I just think you have a fantastic story that makes you |
| 1:35.3 | eminently relatable. You know, you were an elite cyclist hanging with the high performance. |
| 1:41.9 | You had your own health battles. I'd love you to kind of walk us |
| 1:45.0 | through the story of where you started from and how you ended up in the regenerative performance |
| 1:49.5 | business. Yeah, I'd be happy to. So for as long as I can remember, I've always been fascinated |
| 1:55.9 | with anything that goes fast. So space rockets, racing cars, anything with wheels. And in my teens, I discovered |
| 2:04.3 | the sport of road cycling. So that's road racing. Think tour de France. And I was enamored by this |
... |
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