Performance expert Jessica Spendlove spent years helping elite athletes recover and build resilience – while running herself into the ground. Here’s what burnout taught her.
For more than 15 years, I’ve worked with Olympic medallists, premiership-winning teams, special forces operators and senior leadership teams. I help them manage their energy, recovery and resilience. Yet for much of that time, I was running myself into the ground.
If you spend your days supporting someone else’s performance, you’ll recognise the pattern. Your role exists to help another person become more effective, more organised and more capable of performing at their best. The focus is almost always outward. I did that for athletes. You do it for executives.
I loved my work but I put everyone and everything before myself. I also believed my capacity was bigger than most, so I kept saying yes.
Then I got sick. Persistent fatigue became repeated colds and flu. The warning signs continued for years but I ignored them. Eventually, the whispers became screams. What followed was 12 to 18 months of specialists and searching for answers as I struggled to function at even a fraction of my usual capacity. Years operating in the red, combined with Covid, had created the perfect conditions for my body to say enough.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was supporting high performers to recover and protect their energy while applying only a fraction of those principles to myself. That experience fundamentally changed how I think about performance. Here’s what it taught me:
Put your own oxygen mask on first
For years I believed putting everyone else first made me better at my job. What I eventually learnt is that when I started putting myself first, I became better at looking after everyone else.
My energy improved and my decision-making improved. I had more patience, more perspective and more capacity. Looking after yourself isn’t selfish. It’s one of the greatest contributions you can make to the people who rely on you.
If you operate unsustainably, it’s a matter of when, not if
I ran at full pace for years before my body forced me to stop. I told myself I was coping, the fatigue was normal and this was simply the price to pay for the opportunities I’d been given.
I was eating well and exercising regularly but my sleep was compromised, my recovery was non-existent and my stress was through the roof. The load accumulated until my body had enough. Success and sustainability are not the same thing. I learned that the hard way.
Your body signals long before it screams
The signs showed up long before I was forced to stop. Repeated illness I blamed on a busy season. Sleeping through an alarm, which I never do. Fatigue that a weekend away would fix for a day or two before it returned. I read each one in isolation instead of recognising the pattern.
High performers are exceptionally good at overriding those signals. It’s useful in short bursts and dangerous over months and years. Learning to respond before the system forces a shutdown was one of the hardest shifts I had to make – and one I now teach every day, because the people most at risk are often the ones most practised at pushing through.
Recovery is not the reward for hard work – it is the work
This was my biggest blind spot. In elite sport and the military, recovery is where the adaptation happens; when the body manages stress and comes back stronger. I knew this and taught it. Yet I treated recovery as something I’d earn later, once the work was done. The work was never done.
When I survey audiences before I speak, fewer than one in ten people are strategic about recovery. Most still see it as lazy, a luxury or a reward.
What changed everything wasn’t a week off. It was building small, repeatable moments of recovery into every day – what I now call brain breaks. Two or three stimulant-free breaks to downregulate before stress accumulated.
A few minutes of breathwork between back-to-back meetings. A lap around the block before my mid-morning coffee, without checking my phone. A 10-minute meditation in the afternoon. It’s much simpler than we think.
The leaders and athletes who sustain high performance over years are not the ones with the most endurance. They’re the ones who treat their own health and recovery as non-negotiable, regardless of the demands around them. That starts with you.
- Jessica Spendlove is a keynote speaker, podcast host and author of For the Long Run: Build Your Daily Operating System for Energy, Recovery and Wellbeing (Wiley, July 2026) jessicaspendlove.com
