What Is Healthy High Performance? The Science of Performing to Your Potential While Getting Healthier

When I was 15, I broke my neck while training for Canada’s National Youth Swim Team. I went through traction, neurosurgery and extensive physiotherapy, and for a while it looked like my swimming career was over. My body healed, I got back in the pool, and I returned to elite swimming. Years later I rode my bike across Africa, bounced back from a heart infection, and completed two Ironman triathlons.

Every one of those comebacks taught me the same thing. Your body adapts to what you ask of it, as long as you give it the chance to recover. That idea has driven my career as a scientist, and it’s the foundation of what I teach: Healthy High Performance.

What Is Healthy High Performance?

Healthy High Performance is performing to your potential while getting healthier in the process.

Most of us have been taught that we have to choose. Either you push hard and pay for it with your sleep, your health and your relationships, or you take care of yourself and accept that you’ll achieve a bit less in your work. I’ve worked with more than 200 Olympic athletes and delivered keynotes for companies like Apple, Salesforce and General Electric. The best performers I’ve met across all industries do something different. They’ve figured out that the practices that keep them healthy (sleeping well, eating well, moving every day and recovering with purpose) are the same routines that let them perform at a world-class level.

I first wrote about this in The Ripple Effect and Powerhouse, where I describe foundations of a healthy, high-performance life. This idea has become the focus of everything I do.

The Demand-Capacity Gap: Why So Many High Performers Burn Out

So why do so many capable people end up exhausted?

Think about what’s on your plate right now: deadlines, meetings, hundreds of emails, decisions, kids, aging parents, and a world that seems to change every week. Those are your demands. To meet them, you rely on your capacity, and your capacity is limited. It comes from the energy your mitochondria produce, how well you slept last night, how calm your nervous system is and how clearly your brain is working.

When your demands grow faster than your capacity, a gap opens up. I call it the demand-capacity gap. For a while, you can cover it with adrenaline, caffeine and willpower. I’ve done it, and you probably have too. The trouble starts when the gap stays open for months.

I saw this with Sophia, an executive and single mom I wrote about in The Ripple Effect. She loved her work, but by the end of each day she was so tired she could barely engage with her eight-year-old daughter, and she wasn’t happy with how things were going. She had plenty of drive. What she had run out of was capacity.

When you’re under stress, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline to help you rise to the challenge, which is exactly what you want in short bursts. When the stress never switches off, those same hormones start to do damage. Dr. Bruce McEwen of The Rockefeller University called this cumulative wear and tear allostatic load, and he showed that it affects your blood pressure, your blood sugar regulation, your immune system and even the structure of your brain [1]. In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon caused by chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed [2].

Unfortunately given the state of the world at the moment demands aren’t going down any time soon. Healthy High Performance works on the other side of the equation. We build capacity in a healthy way.

Stress Plus Recovery Equals Adaptation

Here’s what excites me as a physiologist: capacity is trainable, because your body is built to change.

Every time you challenge yourself, whether it’s a hard workout, a tough project or a new skill, you create stress. Then, while you recover, your body adapts so it can handle that stress better next time. After exercise, for example, your muscle cells build new mitochondria and make the ones they already have more efficient. Dr. John Hawley and his colleagues have described how this adaptation unfolds across your entire body, from your muscles to your heart to your metabolism [3]. The result is that you can produce more energy the next time you face the same challenge.

Notice when that adaptation happens: during recovery. That’s why I tell every team I work with that recovery is where performance gets crafted.

Sleep is the clearest example. In a classic study at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Hans Van Dongen and Dr. David Dinges limited volunteers to 6 hours of sleep a night for 2 weeks. By the end, their cognitive performance had declined as much as if they had stayed awake for up to 2 full nights in a row. When the researchers asked how they felt, the volunteers said they were only slightly sleepy [4]. Think about that for a moment. When you cut your sleep, your performance drops, and you also lose the ability to notice it.

The Healthy High Performance Model: Body, Mind and Life

So how do you actually build capacity? Over the years, I’ve organized what I’ve learned into a simple model with three parts:

·      Body: Sleep, Eat, Move. This is your foundation, where your energy comes from. Dr. Yanping Li and her colleagues at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed more than 120,000 Americans for up to 34 years. People who practised five healthy habits (not smoking, eating well, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight and drinking only moderately) lived an estimated 14 more years from age 50 if they were women, and 12 more years if they were men, compared with people who practised none of them [5]. Imagine if someone developed a drug that could do that!

·      Mind: Focus, Learn, Create. This is how you direct your attention, grow your skills and come up with new ideas. Your body and mind are deeply connected here. A 2023 overview from the University of South Australia pulled together 97 reviews covering more than 128,000 people and found that physical activity is highly effective at reducing depression, anxiety and psychological distress [6].

·      Life: Breathe, Energize, Thrive. This is how you manage stress in the moment, protect your energy through the day, and build the relationships, purpose and joy that make everything else sustainable.

What I love about this model is how the pieces connect. When you sleep better, you focus better. When you move, your mood lifts and you learn faster. When you slow your breathing, your stress response calms down, which helps you think clearly under pressure. One small change sends ripples through your whole life.

Why Healthy High Performance Matters for Organizations

The same principle works for entire organizations. Researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed 339 independent studies involving more than 1.8 million employees and found strong links between employee wellbeing and productivity, customer loyalty and staff retention [7].

Imagine if work was a place where, when you go there, you get healthier and you’re able to perform to your true potential. That’s the workplace Healthy High Performance helps build.

My Living Laboratory: 7 Marathons, 7 Continents, 7 Days

I test all of this on myself. This November, my daughter and I will attempt to complete The Great World Race: seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. We’ll be dealing with jet lag, broken sleep and a marathon every day with almost no time to recover in between. The only way through is to build capacity carefully in training, recover deliberately between races and pay close attention to what my body is telling me. I’ll share what I learn, including my data, later in this series.

Where to Start

You don’t need to overhaul your life. As I wrote in The Ripple Effect, being just 1% better every day is like compound interest for your body and mind. Pick one thing and start there. In the next article, I’ll go deeper into the demand-capacity gap: how to measure yours and which levers build capacity the fastest.

1% TIP: THE DAILY DEMAND-CAPACITY CHECK

Okay, team, here’s your first step. Each morning, before you open your email, rate two things on a scale of 1 to 10: how big your demands are today, and how much capacity you have to meet them (how rested, energized and clear-headed you feel). If your demands beat your capacity by 3 points or more, book one recovery break before lunch. Go for a 10-minute walk outside, do 5 minutes of slow breathing, or eat lunch away from your screen. Jot your numbers down. After a couple of weeks you’ll start to see your patterns, and you’ll be able to close the gap before it wears you down.

References

[1]           B. S. McEwen, “Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators,” N. Engl. J. Med., vol. 338, no. 3, pp. 171–179, Jan. 1998, doi: 10.1056/NEJM199801153380307.

[2]           World Health Organization, “Burn-out an ‘occupational phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases,” May 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases

[3]           J. A. Hawley, M. Hargreaves, M. J. Joyner, and J. R. Zierath, “Integrative biology of exercise,” Cell, vol. 159, no. 4, pp. 738–749, Nov. 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.10.029.

[4]           H. P. A. Van Dongen, G. Maislin, J. M. Mullington, and D. F. Dinges, “The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation,” Sleep, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 117–126, Mar. 2003, doi: 10.1093/sleep/26.2.117.

[5]           Y. Li et al., “Impact of healthy lifestyle factors on life expectancies in the US population,” Circulation, vol. 138, no. 4, pp. 345–355, Jul. 2018, doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047.

[6]           B. Singh et al., “Effectiveness of physical activity interventions for improving depression, anxiety and distress: an overview of systematic reviews,” Br. J. Sports Med., vol. 57, no. 18, pp. 1203–1209, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2022-106195.

[7]           C. Krekel, G. Ward, and J.-E. De Neve, “Employee wellbeing, productivity, and firm performance,” Saïd Business School Working Paper 2019-04, University of Oxford, 2019.