In academia, there’s always another benchmark. Another paper. Another deadline. Another “if I just push a bit harder” moment.
You start out thinking, “I’ll rest after submitting my thesis”. Then, it becomes “after I got my postdoc project off to a good start”. After that, “once I secure the funding”. Then, “after I’ve submitted the next paper”. But the finish line keeps moving, and rest and recovery keep getting postponed.
But what if excellence didn’t require exhaustion? Because what ultimately happens is that brilliance meets burnout. It’s time to reframe the way we work. I call this the life of an academic athlete.
On paper, Peter was the definition of success. A postdoc position at a respected institution, multiple co-authored papers, and a CV that was building fast. He was respected by his peers and praised by his supervisors. A steep academic career ahead of him. What nobody saw was how deeply Peter was struggling.
He didn’t rest. He didn’t pause. He carried the silent pressure of feeling he should always be doing more; after all, wasn’t everyone else?
If Peter took a break, he told himself, it would be seen as a weakness. That fear of being seen as uncommitted, of being “found out” isn’t rare. It’s the quiet driver behind imposter syndrome in academia. It’s also why so many brilliant researchers push themselves beyond what’s sustainable.
And that’s exactly where the analogy to professional athletes comes in. Because here’s the thing: no elite athlete performs at their peak all the time. They train hard, yes, but they recover just as seriously. They understand that without rest, performance crashes.
Table Of Contents:
- The Performance Pyramid: What Athletes Know That Academics Miss
- From Peak Performance to Sustainable Growth
The Performance Pyramid: What Athletes Know That Academics Miss
In 2001, performance psychologists Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz introduced the concept of the corporate athlete forexecutives who, like athletes, must sustain high performance over long periods. They proposed a layered pyramid to illustrate this model, where physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy work together in sync.
What struck me was how well this concept also applies to researchers in academia. Researchers aren’t just thinkers. They are performers. The stakes for succeeding in grant applications, publishing in peer-reviewed journals and earning recognition from peers and competitors are high. However, while athletes are coached on how to recover, academics are often left to figure it out on their own. And most never do.
In sports, stress is necessary. It stimulates growth. But it’s the recovery that Loehr and Schwartz call oscillation that builds capacity. Without it, even elite athletes break down. The same holds true for researchers. Early-stage researchers face staggering rates of burnout, anxiety, and depression. A 2023 observational study found that PhD students report significantly higher levels of stress and emotional regulation issues compared to their postdoctoral peers. These aren’t isolated cases.
In our trainings, as many as 3 out of 4 researchers reveal that they have either been in treatment for mental disorders, are actively looking for treatment or suspect they may need treatment.
As I wrote in our reflection on researcher mental health, burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a predictable result when recovery is missing from the equation. They’re symptoms of a system that equates chronic exhaustion with a prerequisite for excellence.
So what if we started training researchers like academic athletes?
That’s what we do in our training programs. And that’s what this piece is about: mapping the pyramid of sustainable high performance onto the reality of research life. Because burnout isn’t the price of brilliance, it’s the byproduct of imbalance.
Let’s start at the base of the pyramid.
The Physical Foundation: You Can’t Think Clearly If You’re Exhausted
At the base is physical capacity energy management, which involves sleep, nutrition, and exercise. In our resilience training for researchers, we start right here: with sleep and physical recovery. It’s shocking how many early-stage academics view rest as a reward or even a luxury rather than a necessity. But an athlete doesn’t skip recovery. It’s part of the training. So why do academic athletes ignore this foundational pillar?
When Peter joined our nine-week Resilience Training for Researchers, we didn’t begin by discussing mindset or productivity hacks. We started with the basics of his body.
That first week, he looked puzzled. “Isn’t this supposed to be about resilience?” he asked. Exactly, we told him. Resilience begins with energy. If your system is constantly running on empty, nothing else will stick.
The first port of call is almost always sleep.
We see it again and again: researchers sacrificing sleep in the name of productivity. Late-night writing, early-morning experiments, weekend marathons in the lab. Sleep becomes optional, almost indulgent, something you’ll “get to later.” But the science couldn’t be clearer: sleep is non-negotiable for sustainable performance.
Did you know that most professional athletes have sleep coaches who help them adjust their sleep routines in the lead-up to major competitions? Some even train themselves to sleep more during intense periods because they understand that recovery is essential to performance. Not recovery after performance as performance.
Academics, by contrast, tend to do the opposite. They stretch their days longer, normalise exhaustion, and ignore the toll it takes. It’s not just about fatigue. Sleep debt affects everything, including memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and even your immune system. Over time, your sharpness blunts, and burnout creeps in quietly.
That’s why the very first thing we work on in our resilience training is reclaiming physical energy through sleep, movement, and nutrition.
Not as a checklist. Not as a New Year’s resolution. But as daily and weekly habits, small adjustments which embed recovery into the rhythm of your life. Things like setting a wind-down alarm at night, taking a walk between meetings, or building in short, nourishing meals instead of relying on coffee and leftovers.
Peter started small. He committed to going to bed 30 minutes earlier. He began walking to work once a week. And he packed real food, not just sugar-fueled survival snacks for lunch.
The changes were subtle, but the shift was powerful. Within two weeks, his afternoon brain fog started to clear. His anxiety didn’t vanish, but it stopped spiking every time his inbox pinged. And for the first time in months, he felt like he was catching up not just with his work but with himself.
This isn’t about becoming an athlete in the traditional sense. It’s about realising that your body is part of your performance system. And if you don’t make time for rest and recovery, it will eventually force you to stop.
Staying Composed: Building Emotional Strength from the Inside Out
Peter wasn’t just tired, he was tense. His shoulders ached come afternoon – physical signs of stress he once wrote off as “just a long day”. That low-grade, background hum of stress had become so normal to him that he barely noticed it anymore. Until, of course, something tipped him over, such as an offhand comment from a colleague, a slow reply from a collaborator, or a missed deadline. Suddenly, he was spiralling, not because the situation was dramatic, but because his emotional reserves were threadbare.
This is where the next layer of sustainable performance comes in: Composure.
In the Resilience Training for Researchers, we recognise Composure as the ability to stay grounded under pressure. Not to eliminate stress but to meet it with steadiness. And that begins with understanding what’s happening beneath the surface.
The first building block is Emotional Literacy, also known as emotional granularity. It’s about being able to tune in to your internal state and name what you’re feeling in real-time. Not just “I’m stressed,” but “I’m sad,” “I’m lonely,” “I’m excited.”
Why does this matter? Because there’s a direct, evidence-backed link between the richness of your emotional vocabulary and your mental well-being. The more precisely you can name what you feel, the more capacity you have to process it, regulate it, and respond intentionally.
But here’s the catch: most researchers aren’t taught to do this. We’re trained to analyse, to think critically, to power through. Emotions are often seen as distractions or, worse, liabilities. And so, many of us get stuck in vague discomfort, not quite sure what’s wrong, and unable to course-correct.
That’s where Peter began. We gave him a simple tool: an emotions diary. Nothing fancy, just a few minutes a day to check in with himself. What am I feeling? Where do I feel it in my body? What happened? What was I thinking? Over a few weeks, patterns began to emerge. He noticed that tight-chested anxiety often followed lab meetings. That a wave of discouragement would hit mid-afternoon. And that sometimes, he actually felt joy, but it was fleeting, and he barely acknowledged it.
With emotional granularity as the foundation, we moved into Emotional Agility, the skill of responding constructively to emotions rather than reacting on autopilot. Think of a boxer in the ring: agile, alert, moving with the punches. That’s what agility looks like in the emotional landscape. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel knocked off balance. It means you don’t stay there.
Peter learned to recognise early warning signs (such as a clenched jaw, a short fuse, or a sudden craving for distraction) and built small rituals to reset. A breath. A step outside. A quick voice note to himself. And slowly, the emotional outbursts that once hijacked his days became manageable waves.
This isn’t about becoming invincible. It’s about becoming aware. Because you can’t work with what you won’t name, and you certainly can’t shift what you refuse to feel.
If you’d like a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what this work looks like in action, you can read a post series about her experience with the Resilience Training for Researchers from one of our tutors, Meret, right here.
Mental Clarity: Training the Researcher’s Mind
By the time we reached the third layer of Peter’s pyramid, the change was already visible. He wasn’t just sleeping better or feeling calmer; he was thinking more clearly. And that’s the next essential ingredient for any academic athlete: sharp, sustainable cognitive performance.
In the concept of a corporate athlete that inspired this framework, this mental layer is where focus, decision-making, and critical thinking take centre stage. For researchers, that translates into the heart of the job: problem-solving.
Here’s the truth: research is a marathon of complex thinking. It’s about sitting with ambiguity, untangling problems without clear roadmaps, and sticking with questions long after the excitement wears off. Just as athletes train their muscle memory, academic athletes must train their mental clarity and cognitive stamina.
In our model, this cognitive capacity encompasses two key domains: Problem-Solving and Perseverance.
Problem-Solving is where the rubber meets the road. It’s the ability to drop into deep work, structure a challenge, stay with it, and filter out distractions, both external and internal. This part is where Composure, the emotional layer below, is so foundational because you can’t stay focused if your inner critic keeps interrupting you.
Peter saw this shift in his own work. Where he used to procrastinate endlessly, now he caught himself early: “That’s just fear of imperfection talking.” And he acted anyway. Slowly, one deliberate step at a time, he rebuilt his confidence to handle complex intellectual challenges.
We teach researchers to frontload thinking to ask better questions before diving in. “What exactly am I solving for? What do I already know? What assumptions am I making?” These are mental rituals that enhance clarity, minimise wasted effort, and sharpen the mind for optimal academic performance.
But we also know that raw brainpower isn’t enough. That’s where Perseverance comes in. Not the blind grit of working harder and longer, but the smart kind of realistic Optimism paired with Adaptability. It’s seeing setbacks as solvable, not defining. It’s letting go of rigid approaches and trying new strategies when the old ones don’t deliver.
That’s what separates sustained performers from those experiencing burnout: not IQ, but how they respond when things don’t go to plan. (And let’s be honest, when do things ever go to plan in research? Half the job is chasing dead ends, troubleshooting code that worked yesterday, and repeating an experiment for the fifth time because your cell culture decided today was not the day.)
In Fast Forward, our seven-week training for Personal Productivity and Project Management, we teach the tactical layer of this mental training. Time management, prioritisation, and focus are all underpinned by one question: how do you protect your energy for the work that matters most?
Peter called it a game-changer. “Before, I always felt reactive. Now I feel like I’m running the race on purpose, with direction.”
That’s what it means to think like an academic athlete. To train your mind not just to perform but to perform sustainably.
Purpose: The Inner Drive That Keeps You Going
At the top of the pyramid lies the invisible driver of sustainable performance: Purpose (Loehr referred to this layer as “spiritual capacity”). In our model, we define this not as something lofty or abstract but as the quiet, unshakable sense of meaning that helps you push through challenges. Without it, everything below physical energy, emotional balance, and mental clarity starts to wobble.
For Peter, this was the final shift. He’d always been hardworking, even resilient at times. But something had been missing: a reason beyond the next deadline or the next line on his CV. Like so many early-career researchers, Peter had lost touch with why he started this path in the first place.
Purpose, in our framework, has two drivers.
The first driver is Confidence, but not the loud, showy kind. This is the deep, grounded trust in your ability to face difficult problems and emerge stronger. It’s the inner voice that says, “I’ve done hard things before. I can do this too.” It grows when we reflect on our progress, however small, and recognise patterns of growth. Not about boasting but about remembering.
The second driver is Motivation, and here, we draw a line between extrinsic and intrinsic sources of motivation. Extrinsic motivation is prevalent in academia: publish or perish, win a grant, secure a keynote slot at the next conference. These are fine, but they’re fragile. When your paper gets rejected or your project stalls, they don’t sustain you.
What does? Intrinsic motivation, i.e. that quiet force rooted in what matters to you. The sense of wonder that got you hooked on your field in the first place. The belief that your work could, even in some small way, make a difference. We help researchers reconnect to that. We ask them: “Why did you start this journey? What do you still care about?”
When Peter reflected on this, he said, “I realised I love questions more than answers. It’s the act of chasing something unknown that lights me up.” That moment changed how he saw everything, from his long hours in the lab to how he handled setbacks. He wasn’t just working toward a job title. He was living in alignment with a deeper, personal why.
And that’s the final layer of the academic athlete: The grounded purpose that anchors you when effort alone won’t carry you through. When doubt creeps in, or the experiment fails yet again, and you start to wonder, “Is this even worth it?” your purpose whispers, “Yes. You got this. Keep going.”
From Peak Performance to Sustainable Growth
Here’s the thing about being an academic athlete: it’s not just a clever metaphor. It’s a call to reframe how we think about success in research.
Because if peak performance is the goal, then sustainability is the method. It’s not about squeezing in one more hour, skipping one more meal, or pushing through one more all-nighter. That kind of endurance might get you to the next paper, but it won’t get you through a career.
Academic athletes don’t just train hard. They train smart. They build strength deliberately. They rest as part of the plan. They stay tuned in to their energy, emotions, focus, and a more profound sense of purpose.
That’s what this pyramid is all about. It’s a shift from survival mode to intentional, grounded performance. One where we stop seeing recovery as a luxury or weakness and start treating it as what it really is: a non-negotiable foundation for doing our best work.
Peter’s story might seem exceptional. But it’s not. It’s repeatable. We’ve seen it again and again in our resilience and productivity trainings. When researchers build these layers (physical, emotional, clarity, and purpose), they don’t just feel better. They perform better, for longer periods, and with greater joy.
So maybe it’s time we stopped glorifying the grind. Perhaps it’s time we started training like what we already are: athletes of the mind with a future worth protecting.
Nobody becomes and academic athlete overnight
You can’t change the way researchers think about performance in themselves, their field, or their future with a 2-day workshop. You can’t undo years of internalised pressure, perfectionism, or impostor syndrome with a couple of motivational slides. This kind of shift requires change.
If we want to raise a generation of academic athletes who not only survive but thrive in the system, we need to go deeper. We need to change how they think. How they work. How they take care of their minds and bodies. And most of all, how they see themselves.
That’s what we built our two flagship programs to do.
Fast Forward is our seven-week training on project management and personal productivity designed specifically for early-career researchers juggling impossible to-do lists and unpredictable demands.
The Resilience Training for Researchers is a nine-week journey that rebuilds the foundation, starting with sleep and recovery and moving into the deeper work of Composure, Purpose and more.
These training programs aren’t add-ons. They’re not “nice to have.” They’re the bedrock for sustainable, long-term performance.
So, if you’re leading a graduate school, overseeing researcher development, or responsible for training programs, and you’re serious about preparing your researchers not just to publish but to last, then we should talk.
You don’t just want short-term engagement. You want researchers who last and lead. Book a call with me, Nadine Sinclair, and let’s build the kind of training that future-proofs your research culture.
Because real change isn’t a download, it’s a decision. And it starts here.

Dr. Nadine Sinclair
Nadine is a trusted advisor to corporate and academic leaders and one of the Managing Directors of Mind Matters. Before embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, she was a project manager with McKinsey & Company. A scientist by training and at heart, she conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Nadine brings close to 30,000 hours of experience in managing projects for research institutions, research foundations, pharmaceutical and biotech companies (including many Fortune 500) and governments. She continues to build her expertise with over 1,000 hours of project management each year. As a neuro leadership expert, she bridges the gap between science and business practices, leveraging the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioural economics to create breakthroughs for her clients.