Dopamine, Drive & Peak Performance Neuroscience
How understanding your brain’s reward system can transform unsustainable hustle into lasting success
I’ve been building startups since I was in my senior year of high school. As a result, I got into a deeply-engrained pattern of intense focus and astonishing productivity that would sometimes last for months, others for years, but would inevitably end in a crash of some sort as my nervous system, adrenals and neurochemistry struggled to cope with the extended periods of high drive. I ended up achieving great things but it came at a cost—similar to the extractive nature of our economy today.
The pattern was eerily consistent: I’d get swept up in a vision—whether it was building Just Customs in my bedroom in Colorado, launching Goodery during the pandemic, or scaling ReFi DAO, hosting ReFi Podcast all while leading growth at Toucan. I’d work 12-14 hour days, fueled by coffee, exercise and intense determination—convinced that just a few more months of intensity would create the breakthrough I was chasing.
And often, it did. We’d hit milestones, release products, raise capital, generate press. But inevitably, the other side of this build cycle would come, just like the summer is balanced by the winter and the autumn by the spring. The crash would come after the peak. My relationships would suffer, my health would deteriorate, and worst of all, I’d often lose the very drive that had gotten me there in the first place.
For years, I told myself this was just what high achievement required. That successful founders were supposed to be obsessed, willing to sacrifice everything. But deep down, I knew something was wrong. The pattern was destructive, unsustainable, and getting worse with each cycle.
During my sabbatical, I researched solutions to these cycles that had often attenuated the most successful phases of my career. This led to breakthrough insights in understanding the neuroscience of peak performance as well as how nervous system regulation can cultivate sustainable leadership.
More recently, what I discovered over the last couple months has changed everything for me. The issue wasn’t willpower or work ethic—it was neurochemistry. And once I understood what was happening in my brain, I could finally build systems that worked with my biology instead of against it.
I’ve written this post as a deep dive for any other high performance achievers out there who have been battling to make a positive difference in the world while navigating the delicate nature of our organic living systems.
Part I. The Dopamine Trap: When Drive Becomes Dysfunction
For years, I believed my boom-bust cycles were merely evidence of exceptional drive that I hadn’t found a way to sustain yet. During the high productivity periods, I’d tell myself I was simply more committed than others, willing to do whatever it took to succeed. During the crashes, I’d blame whatever external factors seemed to cause the shift in my energy and productivity—market conditions, difficult co-founders, family stress.
The reality was far more complex and, ultimately, more hopeful.
I thought I was just a high achiever who occasionally pushed too hard and needed to learn better work-life balance. What was actually happening was that my brain’s reward system had become highly dysregulated after years and years of building, creating cycles of dopamine flooding followed by depletion that made normal motivation nearly impossible.
During my high intensity building phases, my brain was essentially flooded with dopamine—the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation, focus, and reward-seeking behavior. This created a feedback loop: the more I achieved, the more my brain craved achievement. Food became fuel. Relationships became secondary to my mission.
But here’s the crucial part: dopamine isn’t infinite. When you consistently deplete it through high-intensity work, late nights, and constant stimulation (caffeine, notifications, high-stakes decisions), your brain adapts by reducing baseline dopamine levels and decreasing dopamine receptor sensitivity.
This is why the crashes were so devastating. I wasn’t just tired—I was neurochemically depleted. My brain literally couldn’t generate motivation for weeks or months after an intense building phase. Activities that once felt exciting became meaningless. The vision that had once energized me felt hollow.
Traditional productivity advice made things worse because it addressed symptoms rather than root causes. “Just work smarter, not harder” doesn’t help when your reward system is fundamentally broken.
The Limbic Hijack: When Emotion Overrides Reason
The second piece of the puzzle was understanding how chronic stress affects brain function. During those intense building phases, I wasn’t just working hard—I was operating in a constant state of sympathetic nervous system activation.
The limbic system, particularly the amygdala, was constantly scanning for threats: competitors launching similar products, investors not responding, team members who weren’t performing. This kept my brain in survival mode, where short-term thinking dominates and long-term planning becomes nearly impossible.
When your amygdala is activated, it literally hijacks cognitive resources from your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for executive function, emotional regulation, and rational decision-making. This is why, during those intense periods, I’d make decisions I’d later regret, struggle to maintain relationships, and find it impossible to “just relax.”
The limbic system operates on a simple principle: survive now, optimize later. It’s why startup culture’s emphasis on urgency and crisis can become addictive—it creates the neurochemical conditions that feel like productivity but are actually stress responses.
Understanding this was liberating. I wasn’t weak or lacking discipline. My brain was doing exactly what it evolved to do under perceived threat conditions. The problem was that modern startup building creates chronic threat conditions that our neurochemistry isn’t designed to handle.
The Neurochemistry of Motivation: Beyond Willpower
Dopamine: The Misunderstood Molecule
Most people think dopamine is the “pleasure chemical”—the neurotransmitter that makes us feel good when we accomplish something. This misunderstanding leads to terrible advice about motivation and productivity.
Dopamine isn’t actually about pleasure. It’s about prediction and pursuit. Specifically, it’s released when your brain predicts a reward is coming, not when you actually receive it. This is why the anticipation of success can feel more motivating than success itself.
There are two types of dopamine release that matter for understanding peak performance:
Tonic dopamine is your baseline level—think of it as your neurochemical foundation for motivation, focus, and general well-being. When tonic dopamine is healthy, you wake up naturally curious about the day ahead. Tasks feel manageable. You can focus without forcing it.
Phasic dopamine is the spike you get when pursuing or achieving something. This is the rush you feel when closing a deal, launching a product, or hitting a major milestone. It’s designed to be temporary and sharp.
Here’s where the problems begin: Our modern productivity culture is built around constantly chasing phasic dopamine spikes while systematically depleting tonic dopamine. We celebrate all-nighters, back-to-back meetings, constant notifications, and “crushing it”—all of which flood the system with artificial dopamine spikes.
Your brain adapts to these constant spikes by reducing both baseline dopamine production and receptor sensitivity. This is the neurochemical basis of what we call “burnout.” It’s not just tiredness—it’s the inability to feel naturally motivated by normal activities.
The devastating part? Once your tonic dopamine is depleted, even massive achievements feel empty. I remember closing a significant funding round after many months of sprinting and feeling... nothing. I remember selling Goodery back in 2021 and feeling depleted and bored… The thing I’d worked months to accomplish registered as barely a blip in my consciousness. I was bored and realized that what I was chasing after wasn’t actually rewarding.
The Prefrontal Cortex: Your Executive Function Center
While dopamine provides the fuel for motivation, your prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the steering wheel. It’s responsible for what neuroscientists call “executive function”—the ability to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks.
Executive function has three main components:
Working memory: Holding and manipulating information in your mind. This is what allows you to follow complex project plans, remember context between meetings, and make connections between disparate pieces of information.
Cognitive flexibility: The ability to switch between different concepts or adapt to changing rules. This is crucial for pivoting business strategies, managing competing priorities, or thinking creatively about problems.
Inhibitory control: The ability to override automatic responses and resist temptations. This governs everything from staying focused during boring tasks to avoiding reactivity in difficult conversations.
Here’s the critical insight: chronic stress systematically impairs all three of these functions. When your brain is flooded with stress hormones like cortisol, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex decreases. Your working memory shrinks. Your ability to think flexibly diminishes. Your impulse control weakens.
This creates a vicious cycle. Impaired executive function leads to poor decisions, which creates more stress, which further impairs executive function. It’s why during those intense building phases, despite working harder than ever, the quality of my thinking often declined dramatically.
I’d make reactive decisions after investor meetings. I’d lose track of important details in product development. I’d get short with team members over seemingly minor issues. My brain was working harder but functioning worse.
The Reward Prediction Error: Why We Chase Ever-Higher Highs
The final piece of the puzzle is understanding how your brain learns to predict rewards—and what happens when those predictions go wrong.
Your brain is constantly making predictions about future rewards and adjusting your behavior based on whether reality matches expectations. When you expect a certain outcome and get something better, you experience positive “reward prediction error”—a burst of dopamine that reinforces the behavior that led to the unexpected reward.
This system evolved to help us learn and adapt, but it creates problems in modern achievement-oriented environments. Here’s why:
Success becomes addictive: Each achievement raises the bar for what feels rewarding. The funding round that once felt incredible becomes the new baseline. Now you need a bigger round, more press coverage, a larger exit to feel the same satisfaction.
Hedonic adaptation kicks in: Your brain adapts to each new level of success, requiring ever-increasing achievements to generate the same neurochemical rewards. This is why many successful founders report feeling empty despite objective success.
The comparison trap: Social media and startup culture create constant exposure to others’ achievements, making your brain constantly recalibrate what “normal” success looks like. Your reward prediction system becomes based on external rather than internal metrics.
I experienced this firsthand building ReFi DAO. What started as excitement about creating the first network society became an obsession with distributing more and more funding to local nodes, which ended up significantly depleting our own operating capital and led to laying off most of the core team. The work itself—the thing that had originally motivated me—became secondary to the dopamine hits from external validation.
This is the neurochemical basis of what researchers call “hedonic adaptation”—the tendency to quickly return to baseline happiness despite major positive events. It’s why founders often report feeling empty after achieving long-sought goals.
Breaking the Cycle: A Different Way Forward
Understanding the neuroscience behind these patterns was yet another step towards helping me overcome them. But knowledge alone wasn’t enough. I needed to rebuild my relationship with work, achievement, and motivation from the ground up.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to optimize my way out of the problem and started working with my brain’s natural systems instead of against them. This meant designing my life and work to support healthy dopamine function, protect executive function under stress, and create sustainable motivation patterns.
The transformation didn’t happen through willpower or productivity hacks—it happened through understanding and respecting the fundamental biology of motivation, focus, and executive function. I didn’t need to become less ambitious or driven. I needed to become more intelligent about how drive and ambition actually work at the neurochemical level.
The result has been a complete shift in how work feels on a moment-to-moment basis. Instead of the intense bursts of energy followed by bouts of depletion, I now experience what I can only describe as a “calm, sustained determination”—the ability to work with full attention and energy without an underlying anxiety or looming crash.
Most importantly, I’ve discovered that sustainable performance isn’t just more humane—it’s more effective. When your neurochemistry is balanced, when your executive function is strong, when your motivation comes from intrinsic rather than extrinsic sources, you can maintain high output indefinitely without the boom-bust cycles that plague so many high achievers.
The choice isn’t between peak performance and balance. The choice is between unsustainable performance driven by dysregulated neurochemistry and sustainable excellence rooted in biological wisdom.
For any founder or high performer reading this who recognizes these patterns in their own life: you’re not broken, and you don’t need to sacrifice your health for your ambitions. You just need to understand how your brain actually works—and design your life accordingly.
Resources and Further Reading
Scientific Research
Volkow, N.D., et al. (2011). “The dopamine motive system: implications for drug and food addiction.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Arnsten, A.F. (2009). “Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Mather, M. & Thayer, J.F. (2018). “How heart rate variability affects emotion regulation brain networks.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences
Books:
“Dopamine Nation” by Anna Lembke
“The Upward Spiral” by Alex Korb
“Mindset” by Carol Dweck
“The Willpower Instinct” by Kelly McGonigal
Disclaimer: This article discusses general principles of neurochemistry and personal research as someone interested in peak performance, wellbeing and longevity. I am not medical professional. Always consult qualified healthcare practitioners before making changes to supplements, medications, or health protocols.