2026 is not about overhauls.
It is not about extremes.
And it is definitely not about detoxes, six week challenges or all-or-nothing resets.
In this episode of Stay at the Top, I share a different approach. Upgrades.
Small, intelligent, intentional adjustments that compound over time. Sustainable high performance is not built on intensity. It is built on repeatability. And upgrades work because you are not starting from scratch. You are refining what you are already doing.
In this episode, I walk you through four powerful daily upgrades that will strengthen your physiology, stabilise your energy and protect your performance for the long run.
In this episode I share:
- Why upgrades outperform overhauls
- The difference between adding load and reducing friction
- How standardising your morning stabilises your body clock
- Why wake time matters more than a 5am routine
- How to build a predictable morning anchor
- The overlooked power of plant diversity for gut health
- Why consistency and diversity both matter
- The risk factor of prolonged sitting
- How to use movement pulses across the day
- Why exercise does not cancel out sedentary time
- How to design a sleep environment that works with your biology
- The three elements of a sleep sanctuary: cool, dark and quiet
- Why small upgrades compound into long term resilience
Key Quotes
“Sustainable high performance is not built on intensity. It is built on repeatability.”
“Your morning is the foundation of your day.”
“Overhauls are out. Upgrades are in.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess Spendlove (00:16.27)
2026 is no longer about overhauls. It’s also not about extremes. We are at the end of the era of the detoxes, the six-week challenges and the all-or-nothing resets. No thank you. This year, we are all about upgrades. Now, this means it’s not a dramatic change. It’s not about reinventing yourself or your life. It is about upgrades.
These are small, intelligent, intentional adjustments that deliver huge compounding return on your investment over time. Now that investment can be time, it can be energy, can be health, and it can be performance. Because sustainable high performance is not built on intensity. It is built on repeatability and consistency. And the best bit, upgrading is so much easier than starting
something new or embedding a new behaviour. Because when you try to start from scratch, essentially you’re relying on motivation, cognitive effort and sometimes identity shifts. Whereas upgrades, they work differently because what you’re doing is you’re tweaking or adjusting something you were already doing. And when you do that, you reduce friction instead of adding load. And the best thing is you’re preserving
momentum, you’re preserving a level of what you’re already doing, all you’re doing to that is upgrading it and that is why these things stick.
And that is why these things deliver huge return on investment over time. So today I’m going to walk you through four simple yet powerful daily upgrades that you can make that will compound across your physiology, your energy and your cognitive performance. Now, the way I’m going to step through today’s episode is like the same arc or the same format of your day. So that way you can pick the upgrade
Jess Spendlove (02:27.216)
that works best for you.
Jess Spendlove (02:50.774)
Alright, let’s get straight into it. So upgrade one is all about standardizing your morning. I have a question for you. Is your morning predictable? Or another way I like to frame it is, is the foundation of your day, which is your morning, the same?
Or does it shift depending on meetings or travel or how late you’ve worked or how tired you feel? Does it change from all of these different variables? Because if you can keep the structure of your mornings consistent, especially your wake time,
and the first few behaviors that you do following on from that, the benefits are endless. And one of the main drivers to that is it stabilizes your body clock. And this internal body clock is linked with so many, like a.
is linked with so many physiological benefits that cascade out into giving you more energy, better mood, overall improving your wellbeing and your performance both today and for the long run. The best thing is with your mornings, the most important thing to know is your mornings are really the most predictable part of your day. So your mornings are really your sacred time. Now I say that
with the caveat of depending on the life stage you’re at. So my mornings are not always sacred time right now with Millie and whoever’s looking after her and whoever is the primary carer at that time. And maybe that’s the same for yourself. Maybe you have children or even pets. Maybe the morning isn’t completely on your time. But for the majority of people, the morning, even with those factors, is the most predictable part of the day.
Jess Spendlove (04:41.895)
I say that is it’s really before you get into your day. It’s really before everybody else’s competing demands and curveballs and traffic and whatever other chaos is about to hit. It’s before all of that happens. So when I talk about it being the most predictable part of the day and the importance of standardizing your morning, let me just clarify what I am NOT talking about here. I am NOT talking about you
needing to get up at 5 a.m. if that does not work for your life.
If that does work for your life and if you’re getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. keep doing you. But if you hear this and you think gosh this is another version of someone telling me I need to get up at 5 a.m. and have a 10 step protocol that is not what I’m saying. What I am talking about is your morning or your start of the day and creating a stable predictable and consistent foundation for your day. Now depending on who you are and
what that might look like for everyone, it is the time you wake up. And with that, you really want to standardise it within a 30 minute window. Gosh, if you can get up at the same time every day, your body clock will be loving you. It will be thriving and it will be regulating itself to get the best out of that. But if not, even within a 30 minute window is a really great starting point.
And then what I’m talking about are what are the behaviours you do after that? Do you move? Do you hydrate? Do you meditate? Do you eat? Again, I’m not saying you need to do all of those things, but just start reflecting on what does your morning look like? What time do you wake up? What are the set of behaviours or your morning stack or your morning routine? What does that currently look like? And then do you repeat that each day? Because the benefit of predictability
Jess Spendlove (06:42.743)
is that it creates physiological stability. And physiological stability drives energy, it also preserves energy, and then it sets on a flow of behaviors into motion, and these behaviors help protect your performance over time. And so whatever that is for you, whether that’s light exposure, hydration, a high protein breakfast, movement, in any of which order, think about what does my morning
look like? Have I standardized it or is there an opportunity here for me to create an anchor with my morning so that my foundation is serving as a consistent starting point for every single day?
And so if this is the upgrade as you move through this episode that presents as the best opportunity for you, then what I want you to do here is I want you to think about your morning and choose one anchor. Now that anchor might be fixing your window, that might be fixing your wake window time within 30 minutes or maybe even closer. Maybe it’s within a 15 minute window or even the same time. And then once you’ve locked into that, then maybe start
to layer one consistent behaviour after that.
You know, I guess that’s what we call habit stacking. So have that set wake time layer on the next behavior, which I often talk about as your domino habit. What is that thing that is kickstarting your day and driving that momentum? Is it hydration? Is it light exposure? Is it moving your body? Is it meditating? Is it journaling? Is it reading? Whatever it is for you, that is totally fine. But it is about creating stability and consistency to leverage that momentum.
Jess Spendlove (08:33.199)
So this is not necessarily about you adding more right now, it is about clarity, it is about refining, and then you might layer on. So for upgrade one, that’s what we’re talking about there. The second upgrade I wanted to talk about is plant diversity. Now protein, it gets a lot of airtime on this podcast, and rightfully so.
But there really is another P word that needs the same amount of attention and love and focus and that is plants. Now to clarify when I’m talking about plant foods, if you’re not sure, it’s anything that’s grown from the ground. So that is fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, lentils, legumes, herbs and spices.
Jess Spendlove (09:31.936)
Now I know another thing I talk about a lot on here and I really believe it is an underlying principle to driving energy, wellbeing and performance. And I talk a lot about consistency.
the importance of consistency from the time you start your day, which I’ve just touched on, to when you have your first meal, to the gaps of those meals, to the number of times you eat each day, to the composition of those meals and something I call all the elements, which if you’re tuning into this and you haven’t heard me talk about that before or you need a refresher, highly recommend you go back to any of the nutrition episodes. But in essence, all the elements is the way I talk about the
key components of how to build a meal. They are protein, are carbohydrates, colours and healthy fats. So we want all of these type of consistency. It’s really important to driving energy, wellbeing and performance and it also helps us get more on autopilot and it also helps us use less energy and cognitive bandwidth making these decisions. You know another way I like to talk
about it is it’s like an operating system. You want to build your own daily operating system that governs you, that helps make these decisions so that you’re being proactive and you’re being consistent. That is a universal principle and I’m not going back on that. But I guess when we talk about plant diversity, it is another layer to that. And when we’re thinking about specifically the nutrition element here, so yes we want to start eating at the same time each
and we want to have those same number of meals and snacks and we want to have all the elements but the composition of what those elements are made up of we want them to change. We want diversity and one of the biggest traps that I see with high-performing people is that they go on nutritional autopilot. So what I mean by that is you find a breakfast that works, you stick with that. You find a salad or a sandwich bar that you like and you stick with that.
Jess Spendlove (11:45.448)
have the same thing every day. You have a snack and it feels efficient and it works and you can have it in your handbag or have it in the fridge at work or have it in the fridge at home so you stick with that. And then every single night you know Monday night you have this and Tuesday night you have that and it’s all set. And maybe most of what you’ve done there is that level of consistency which I talk about. But when you’re eating the same thing and you’re on nutritional autopilot and then you repeat that daily, weekly, monthly
Yes, the consistency element is powerful, but what you were lacking there is diversity. And when we don’t have enough diversity, we are limiting the adaptation of our microbiome.
And so really what you’re wanting to do here is to retain the structure, all of those things I spoke about, timing and number and composition while having a layer of diversity. And research has shown us that when people move to a more plant rich, high variety diet, your gut microbiome becomes more diverse. The integrity of your intestinal wall is stronger and that is a really important part of having healthy gut health.
And all of this also feeds into so many levels, so many levels and layers of our wellbeing and our performance. Because gut diversity is not just about digestion. It is about how that impacts our inflammation and our metabolic health. And it even impacts things like our mood and our anxiety via the gut brain access. And so focusing on your gut health and focusing on the diversity
element and in particular the diversity of plants in your diet every single day and week. Well this is about future proofing your performance. This is really about this internal resilience and your overall well-being and the key here is understanding that there are two ideas which are true and which are really important to delivering outcomes today and also tomorrow and for
Jess Spendlove (13:58.56)
years to come. And that is you do want consistency, you want that structure, that is really important to your energy. And if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, I talk a lot about that there. But layering on from that and focusing on today’s episode, and the upgrades that you can make to future proof your performance, we really want the diversity piece, because this is about optimizing your gut microbiome and the makeup of the gut bacteria.
within that microbiome. And so, you know, an example of how you might upgrade this point if this is the one that speaks to you, it might be looking at the breakfast that you take or the lunch that you buy or the snacks that you have. How can you change that up? If you’re buying your lunch each day or most days, well, simply can you just buy a different option? You know, if you’re Fish Bowl or Cali Press’s best customer, can you just change
up your favourite bowl? Or if you’re making and taking your lunch, excellent, meal prep, here for that. How can you change that up? Can you buy a different salad mix? Can you add some chickpeas on top? Can you sprinkle some nuts and seeds? Can you add a piece of fruit? Can you buy some mixed berries instead of just blueberries? There are so many different ways you can do this and I guess the mindset here or the takeaway for this specific upgrade is
to look at what you’re currently doing, how much are you diversifying it and then what is the opportunity there for you to do that. And even if you start with one meal and you switch it out or you have the mindset of how can I add one new plant food to each meal or each snack, you’re already shifting this significantly.
Jess Spendlove (15:59.48)
The third upgrade that we’re focusing on here today is about movement pulses across the day. Now, when I talk about your day, what does it look like? How much are you moving across the day? Or do you just sit? Do you sit in the car or on the train and then you sit at your office and then you’re on meetings all day or you’re doing project work and then you hardly get outside and your step count looks terrible? If that’s you and even if your morning has started with
a solid 30, 45, 60 minute workout, then what we wanna be thinking about here is that sitting and the amount of sitting we do each day is even separate to how we look at exercise. Now exercise is 100 % a very important pillar for your health and your wellbeing and your performance both now and in the future. But.
We actually even need to put that aside because regardless of how much you train and how fit you are and what your mornings or your lunchtimes or your afternoon looks like, what I’m talking about here is what does your day look like and how much are you sitting across the day because there’s some…
Because what we know from research is that prolonged sitting is associated with so many different disease risks and chronic disease risk profiles, including an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And this is independent of how much exercise that you’re doing. So we know that sitting is its own risk factor. And so what we need to be doing is looking at ways that we can break up the amount of time that we sit each day.
And if you listen to the podcast, you’ve heard me talk about brain breaks. So if you’re taking them, excellent, but we can double down on this even more. Now, is there an opportunity for you every 45 to 60 minutes to get up and do some sort of movement? Now, depending on where you are and what’s possible, know, maybe if you’re working at home or if there’s a quiet space, can you do 10 air squats? That’s all it takes to really break this cycle because this is about engaging large muscle groups
Jess Spendlove (18:16.783)
which get things moving. The other option is you could go for a three minute walk, whether that’s around your floor, whether that’s up and down the stairs, whether that’s around the block, whatever works for you. But what we are doing here is we are breaking up the sitting because sedentary time is now treated as its own risk factor.
Jess Spendlove (18:48.577)
And so the simple actionable takeaway here is what is the opportunity for you? Is it the air squats? Is it the lap around the floor? Is it up and down the stairs? Is it around the block? This is really about shifting away from this idea of we just get in and we get our exercise done and then whatever happens for the rest of the day. And it is looking about ways to break up our sitting across the day. Because what this is doing, this is about metabolic regulation and what metabolic regulation
translates to is more stable energy, fewer afternoon crashes, better cognitive clarity and this is about performance in the day but what it is doing long term it is reducing our risk factor for these chronic diseases that I’ve just mentioned before around our cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other forms of disease. And so if this is the opportunity for you, the upgrade that you can make here is think
about exercise snacks or pulses that you can embed in your day. So what I’ve been doing since reading some of the literature on this recently is I have a clock on my desk, I set it for 60 minutes and it goes off. And the option that I am going for, particularly when I’m at home or if I’m in the office and I’ve got my own dedicated room, are the air squats. Now I haven’t quite gotten to the point of just doing my air squats anywhere and if you
can, you do you, but…
If you like me and you’re like, okay, I can only do this when I’m in a little bit of a private space. Maybe it is the walk around the block and that’s my other go-to. So I’ll just do a short lap around the block every hour, just a couple of minutes. Or the option for you, like I said, it might be around your floor depending on how big your office is or it might be up and down the stairs. So this isn’t about some extensive training plan. This isn’t about dedicating a heap of time. This is about a circuit breaker for your day.
Jess Spendlove (20:51.969)
This is about sitting less consistently and it is about breaking it up and spiking that. It is about breaking it up. It is about breaking up long periods of sitting with very short bouts of activity.
And the fourth upgrade that I wanted to talk about is a sleep related one. And I’ve spoken particularly recently a lot about consistency around wake time. I’ve touched on it a little bit here in terms of standardizing your morning. And I also been talking a lot about standardizing the time you go to sleep. But what I want to talk about here and it really gets overlooked is your sleep environment. Now,
Getting a good night’s sleep is really an intentional activity. It is about designing your environment and designing your behaviours around optimising what’s going to help you get to sleep and what’s going to help you stay asleep.
And the first point of this is looking at your bedroom and thinking, what are all the activities that I do in here? Now, there really should only be two. There should be sleep and there should be intimacy. If your bedroom is a movie theater, if it’s a restaurant, if it’s a snack station, you really need to change that because your brain starts to associate that environment with all of those things. Whereas what you want to do is you want to shift that
And so your brain recognizes that this is my bedroom and all I do in here is sleep and then I’m also intimate. So that is the first thing. The next thing, which is the upgrade I really want to talk about are three key factors for how to optimize your sleep environment or what I like to call your sleep sanctuary. Those three things are, it should be cool, it should be dark and it should be quiet. Now the cool element is particularly interesting.
Jess Spendlove (22:55.893)
because what we’re looking to do here is support the body’s natural drop in core body temperature that happens right before we go to sleep. Now there are a few ways that you can do this and some of them are a little bit counter-intuitively. So one of the easiest ways and probably the most accessible for everyone listening is having a warm shower or a warm bath around 60 to 90 minutes before you go to bed.
Now if you’ve got access to a sauna and you can have that at night one to two hours before, well that is a fantastic option for you. But I realise that’s not necessarily accessible for everybody. I’m really lucky I have a sauna in my building. I live in an apartment complex. I mean there’s pros and cons to this. I’m constantly weighing them up but the amenities is a really big pro. And there’s normally a male and a female sauna but the female sauna is out at the moment. It’s getting worked on.
And as someone who uses that sauna regularly like at least I would say three to five times a week I am really missing this so much But when it comes to sleep, I do have a hot shower every night. That’s part of my sleep landing protocol So one of again like the easiest way and most accessible way for people is likely the shower or the bath and the benefit of whether it’s the shower the bath or the sauna depending on the obviously duration
and the temperature, but the biggest benefit is that by heating up the skin and allowing for what we call peripheral vasodilation, what happens is that means that when you get out of that environment, your core body temperature actually drops faster. And so it heats and then it drops. And that drop helps mimic the drop.
by about one degree in our body temperature that helps us get to sleep. And so there is some research out there showing that this can actually help with the time it takes us to get to sleep as well as our overall sleep. And so maybe that’s the entry point for you or the upgrade. The other factor when it comes to the temperature element is the temperature of the room. Now the research suggests between 16 to 19 degrees Celsius, give or take a few degrees, because there’s obviously an individual
Jess Spendlove (25:19.887)
nuanced factor as well, but having the room nice and cool really does help. Also, it really does help you get to sleep.
So this could be even though this upgrade is around cool, dark and quiet, maybe you’re thinking about your environment from how can I make it cool? Do I have air-con that I can cool my room down to help do that? You might have seen the eight sleep technology, which is like a mattress protector and it is really built around this idea of your core body temperature dropping as you go to sleep and then starting to rise when you
I realize that might not be possible for everybody but it’s something for you to look into and I particularly recommend it for my women navigating perimenopause and menopause when we’re dealing with the hot flushes and all of these elements because this level of cooling technology can be really supportive and help us override that but also work with our biology to help us get to sleep. The second factor is dark. Now this one’s probably pretty self-explanatory it’s about having your
room as dark as possible. And so with that just assess the environment you know is my room dark or do I need to use an eye mask you know that’s the that’s the kind high level assessment but what you also want to think about is your light exposure leading up to sleep. So the 60 to 90 minutes before or even longer as the sun starts to set what lights can you dim so you’re starting to align with your circadian rhythm so you’re starting to produce that
melatonin which is the sleepy hormone which helps us get to sleep. So you can assess both of those things the period before but in particular the environment that is what I wanted to specifically talk about here your sleep environment. Is it cool? Is it dark? And is it quiet? Which is the third one. Now for me this is my most sensitive trigger. Well they’re all very important and because I’ve been focusing on this for a long time I really notice when
Jess Spendlove (27:29.225)
one of them is out, in particular the noise and the temperature, but all three are very important. But the noise one is definitely a high sensitivity for me. One, the season of life with my 14 month old, so she’s 14 months old as of today. But two, as I mentioned, I live in an apartment. I actually live right in the city. It’s amazing. I love it for so many reasons. But when it’s busy, when there’s a lot of things on, know, New Year’s, vivid, I’m
right near all of that, very noisy. Or if there’s like a concert or anything at the opera house.
it really the noise factor is something that I do need to consider. And so for me, there’s two things that I really do in this space to elevate or improve that. One is a white noise machine. And I really never valued how important this was until I had Milly and until we had a white noise machine and until we started using that. But the second one I’m using earbuds. Now there are a lot of different options out there and I’ve tried so many, a lot of them really irritate my ear canal,
I highly recommend that you play around with what works for you. The ones that I found that I particularly like are called the Quieton 4 noise cancelling and there’s a few reasons I really like them. One, how comfortable they are and how well they fit in my ear and you can customise the size which is really important. But the second thing is that they block out the noise. There is a noise cancelling element. And now I’ve actually got the most recent version, the Quieton 4.
and I also had the Quiet On 3 and the upgrade that’s happened with this latest model is incredible. I’ve used them when I travel on planes or when I’m in hotels or when I’m away or like I said if there’s a really noisy…
Jess Spendlove (29:23.325)
if there’s a lot of noise going on outside my apartment, I don’t use them every night simply because I have a 14 month old and you know some nights I need to wake up and attend to her but in those environments where I do really need to focus on the noise or if I’m away for work which isn’t all that often at the moment or if I’ve been away for travel or on a plane I’ve used them there and I have found them to be amazing. So to recap today’s episode and the four
upgrades, what you can do is you can look at your morning and how standardized it is. You can look at your plant diversity and as much as you want to retain the consistency of the number of meals and the structure of the meals and the timing of the meals, what you do want to have is an element of diversity. So you’re optimizing your gut microbiome. The third upgrade was movement pulses across the day. Regardless of what your exercise looks like,
in that exercise portfolio and if it’s nice and diversified, amazing, of course that is fantastic. That is adding so much benefit to your energy and your wellbeing and your performance now and for the future. But what I’m talking about here is a separate risk factor. How long are you sitting each day? Can you be getting up and moving every hour? And the two movement options I gave you, which seem like the easiest entry point to me, if you come up with something
different, let me know. But it is air squats or a quick walk around the block or up the stairs in your building. And the fourth one I’ve just touched on is really looking at that sleep environment and designing it so it works for you. Making it cool, making it dark and making it quiet.
Team, that’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’d absolutely love to know the upgrade that you’re focusing on because as I said, 2026, the overhauls are out and the upgrades are in. This is about sustainable performance. This is about elevating your energy now, today, tomorrow, and for the long run. And so with that, that’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’ll be back again next week with another solo episode helping you not only reach the top, but sustain.
Jess Spendlove (31:43.136)
stay there with some simple upgrades that are science-backed. I’ll see you all then.