I’ve spent most of my career trying to figure out why we humans can survive a global pandemic, build rockets to Mars, and map the human genome – but can’t seem to get through a workday without twelve browser tabs, a dozen coffees, and the emotional resilience of a wet teabag.
A few weeks ago, I decided to go deeper and joined Missing Link’s Story-to-Stage Mentorship Program. It’s like therapy for people who actually care about ideas – the kind of people brave enough to wrestle their thoughts into something worth saying. And it’s brilliant. There’s an energy that comes from learning with others who still believe that communication can change things.
One of the talks we watched was by Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. He argues that happiness doesn’t follow success – it fuels it. And as I watched, it clicked: maybe the reason we’re all so knackered is because we’re fighting against our own wiring. So I did what any rational adult would do – I went down a dopamine and burnout rabbit hole so deep I could see my childhood from there.
(Shawn’s full talk is linked at the bottom of this blog. Watch it. He’s funny, clever, and makes Harvard sound like Hogwarts.)
Dopamine: The Fuel, Not the Finish Line
Dopamine is that glorious little molecule responsible for motivation, anticipation, and reward. It’s not about the pleasure itself – it’s about the chase. It’s the “what’s next?” chemical. Understanding dopamine and motivation is the key to unlocking dopamine and productivity, because when dopamine’s depleted, even simple tasks start to feel like punishment.
Back in the Stone Age, dopamine got us off our backsides to hunt woolly mammoths and make fire. Now it’s what makes you check your inbox 47 times an hour just in case someone replied “Thanks!” to your email.
The problem? Every tiny hit – every like, ding, and “You’re on mute” – floods your brain with little squirts of reward. And after each one, your brain slumps into a chemical hangover like a teenager after their first bottle of tequila.
We were wired for scarcity. Now we’re living in an all-you-can-eat dopamine buffet. And our brains are waddling out with sauce down their shirts. And that’s why we can tick off a to-do list all day and still feel strangely empty at night. That feeling is what psychologists call dopamine depletion – your brain’s way of saying, “I’m out of gas.”
The Burnout Moment
I’ve had two proper bouts of burnout in my career – the kind where your motivation dies quietly in the corner while you keep pretending everything’s fine. My first clue is always the gym. It’s my reset zone. My sanity factory. Where I find my personality. But when I start leaving there as miserable as I arrived – and it’s not because I’m doing burpees at 05:30 in the morning – I know the dopamine and burnout cycle has started. When even the gym stops giving me that endorphin hit, I know I’ve gone too far.
The weights feel heavier, the music grates, even the air feels stale. That’s when I know my motivation’s not dead, it’s just gone on strike. Your body starts to whisper: mate, we’re done here. And most of the time, nobody else hears it. They’re not even looking for it. Only you can.
You can’t inbox-zero your way out of burnout recovery. You can’t meditate your way out of it. You can only stop long enough to hear yourself think.
Burnout: When “Working Hard” Stops Working
“Work hard!” they said. “It builds character!” they said. Yes – and so does frostbite. Back in the day, hard work meant showing up at nine, leaving at five, and occasionally answering a telephone, or a fax, while someone literally walked over and handed you your mail. Today, we’ve upgraded to digital whiplash.
You’re knee-deep in actual work when your inbox pings. Then a Teams message pops up: “Hi — just checking you saw my email.” Five minutes later, a WhatsApp: “Hey, sorry, not urgent but…” At this point, you’re not an employee – you’re a human notification centre.
U.C. Irvine’s Gloria Mark found that the average knowledge worker switches tasks every 47 seconds and takes over 20 minutes to refocus. Twenty minutes. That’s like setting your hair on fire every time someone says, “Quick question.”
We’re not tired because we’re weak. We’re tired because our attention’s been hijacked. Dopamine and focus are directly linked – the more fragmented your attention, the less reward your brain associates with any single task.
So maybe “working hard” isn’t about hours or hustle anymore. Maybe it’s about building an actual moat around your focus – because without one, the dopamine bandits will burn your castle to the ground. And then HR will send you a survey asking how engaged you feel.
That’s the new discipline. That’s the new grit. And that’s how you stop the wind from turning against you.
The Dopamine Rebellion
Here’s the good news: people are fighting back. Not with yoga retreats and scented candles – with actual pain. On an episode of The Diary of a CEO Podcast with Steven Bartlett, Dr. Anna Lembke explains how we’ve overloaded our reward systems with artificial hits – sugar, screens, and the smug satisfaction of finishing a Netflix series before the credits roll.
So what’s the fix? Apparently, suffering. Ultra-marathons. Ice baths. Events where you pay real money to crawl through mud while someone shouts motivational obscenities at you. The global ice bath market alone is worth roughly $350 million and climbing toward $500 million by 2030 (Brass Monkey, 2024). That’s half a billion dollars’ worth of people voluntarily turning themselves into frozen fish sticks.
Why? Because pain resets the system. Dr. Lembke calls it hormetic stress – manageable discomfort that builds resilience. It’s why those long, painful gym sessions can leave you calmer and clearer than any coffee or reward ever could. And then Dr. Lembke drops the truth bomb that explains pretty much everything wrong with modern life:
“We’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort… we’ve reset our pleasure-pain threshold to the side of pain.”
She’s not wrong. We’ve been so overstimulated that even focus feels like suffering. We confuse ease with happiness.
Modern work feels harder not because it changed – but because we did. Dopamine at work is constantly hijacked by quick hits instead of deep reward. So yes, maybe the ice bath craze isn’t madness. Maybe it’s the new meditation, a reminder that discomfort isn’t the enemy. It’s the cure.
Burnout’s Three Faces — and Why Dopamine Might Be the Antidote
After my second burnout, my wife handed me the HBR Guide to Beating Burnout. It breaks burnout into three villains: Value Misalignment – when what you do and what you believe don’t match. Untenable Workload – when your pace exceeds your pulse. Routine Over-qualification – when you’ve outgrown your role but are still grinding it out anyway.
Each one drains dopamine in a different way. When your dopamine’s out of sync, you don’t just lose motivation – you lose meaning. Everything feels like slogging uphill in slippers. And it’s not laziness – it’s misalignment. It’s like trying to push a VW Polo to 300 km/h. The car’s fine. You’re just on the wrong track.
So instead of pushing harder, maybe the smarter move is to re-align – find work that earns your dopamine honestly. When dopamine and happiness align with what you value, effort becomes energy. That’s the moment the wind shifts. Hello, positive-reinforcing dopamine, you beautiful thing, you.
From Burnout to Flow
We’ve all heard the phrase “in the zone.” That’s flow – when time disappears, you forget to blink, and your productivity suddenly makes everyone else look like they’re buffering. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that flow happens when your challenge is about 4% beyond your current skill – just enough to stretch you without snapping you.
Dopamine is the ignition, not the engine. It sparks focus, anticipation, and drive – and when mixed with endorphins, norepinephrine, and serotonin, it turns effort into energy. It’s that rare moment when your brain stops screaming “Are we there yet?” and quietly hands you the steering wheel.
When your work hits that balance of clarity, challenge, and meaning, dopamine and productivity align perfectly. You stop forcing progress. You get pulled by it. That’s when work stops feeling like a grind and starts feeling like momentum.
Because the goal was never to work harder. It’s to work smarter – to design your days around how your brain actually functions, not how someone else thinks you should.
Closing Note
We can’t out-hustle our biology – but we can make friends with it. Pay attention to what energises you, what drains you, and where the wind starts pushing from behind instead of against your face. That’s the signal that you’re aligned. Because that’s when work stops feeling like survival. And starts feeling like purpose. And that’s what takes it from working hard to working smart.
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