Burnout Isn't a Time-Management Problem What High Achievers Keep Getting Wrong

August 19, 2026

You hit the goal. The promotion, the number, the launch. And the peace you were promised didn't show up. Then you set a bigger goal.Dr. Georgine Nanos sits down with Andrew Poles — a coach who has worked with more than 10,000 leaders across NASA, Netflix, Dell, Schwab, and Epic Games, and who left the corporate world to build his own practice (which hit six figures in six weeks).


He's also an ultra-endurance athlete whose forthcoming memoir, Over the Gate, is about what a brutal 100-mile mountain-bike race taught him about identity.


This is a conversation for every high achiever, and Kind Health Group sees a lot of them, who runs their life like a founder runs a company: pushing through exhaustion, mistaking productivity for peace, and quietly wondering why none of it feels like enough.


In this episode:

• Why burnout is not a time-management problem — it's a nervous-system and identity problem, and why working fewer hours won't fix it

• "Tunnels with no cheese" — how chasing worth through achievement guarantees you burn out

• The difference between your intrinsic value as a human being and your value as a professional, and why we're trained to confuse them

• Why the skill set that makes you a great solo performer is the opposite of what leadership requires — and why founders hit a wall

• Fear, from the neuroscience up: why "fear happens to you," and the only real choice is what you do next

• How a threat to your identity registers in the brain exactly like a threat to your life — and why that drives self-sabotage

• The childhood story behind Andrew's own "I can't do hard things" identity, and the race he took on to break it

• Why balance isn't a finish line you reach — it's a daily engagement with what actually matters to you

• How Dr. Nanos frames resilience with her own patients: life is 10% what happens and 90% how you respond


This is the Kind Revolution where science meets courage and medicine meets humanity.



👤 Andrew Poles — andrewpoles.com · Andrew Poles Performance Coaching · LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook

Meet the Author

About Dr. Nanos

You might also enjoy:


Podcast cover: “An Honest Conversation About TMS” with two doctors in business and white coats on a blue background
September 28, 2026
Dr. Georgine Nanos sits down with Kyle Hartfield, founder of iTalk TMS, a patient-facing advocacy platform he built because he could not stand a minute of the existing content about it.
Podcast promo with two doctors and title “Who Do You Want to Be When You Die?”
September 23, 2026
Dr. Georgine Nanos sits down with Dr. James Ross, who practices what he prefers to call holistic brain health.
Gloved hands holding a red test tube in a lab with colorful vials in a rack
September 21, 2026
Colorectal cancer is climbing 3% a year in adults under 50, and younger patients are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed at stage 4. A UC San Diego surgeon on why, and the two words that fix most of it.
September 14, 2026
Colorectal cancer used to be an older person's disease. It is not anymore. Dr. Nanos sits down with Sonia Ramamoorthy, they get into why it keeps getting caught late, and the answer is uncomfortable. The early symptoms are rectal bleeding and a change in bowel habits.