Why Success Makes Us Sick: A Neuroscience-Based Redefinition for Ambitious Professionals
“To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.”
Imagine a senior executive: high-achieving, well-compensated, and respected in their field. They have achieved what society defines as success: financial security, social recognition, and professional autonomy. Yet beneath this well-curated life lies a quiet unease. They struggle to rest, find joy, or experience a sense of meaning in their achievements. Gratitude journals and mindfulness apps offer temporary relief, but the dissonance persists: a life that looks successful but feels misaligned.
While this inner conflict is often pathologised as burnout or impostor syndrome, affective neuroscience offers a more precise—and more compassionate—framework. Human emotional systems, shaped over tens of thousands of years, evolved not for relentless productivity or self-optimisation, but for survival within small, socially cohesive groups. Our brains are designed to thrive in conditions characterised by emotional safety, reciprocity, meaningful contribution, and flexible autonomy.
Anthropological studies of foraging societies—such as the !Kung of the Kalahari—offer a striking contrast. These communities typically spend 15–20 hours per week on subsistence tasks, with the remainder of time devoted to socialising, storytelling, and rest (Kaplan et al., 2000). Their low incidence of chronic disease, high levels of subjective well-being, and strong community bonds reflect a lifestyle more consistent with human neurobiology. In contrast, the demands of modern work—long hours, constant availability, fragmented attention, and digital hyperstimulation—frequently require individuals to override their nervous systems to maintain professional and social standing.
This misalignment has tangible physiological costs. The concept of allostatic load, introduced by McEwen (1998), describes the cumulative burden on the body’s systems resulting from chronic stress. Unlike acute stress responses, which are adaptive in short bursts, sustained exposure to psychosocial stressors, such as work pressure, financial insecurity, and status anxiety, leads to wear and tear across multiple regulatory systems, including the immune, cardiovascular, and neuroendocrine axes (Juster, McEwen, & Lupien, 2010). Over time, high allostatic load is associated with increased risk of anxiety, depression, metabolic dysfunction, and cognitive decline.
Crucially, these stressors are not simply external. They are internalised through cultural narratives that equate self-worth with achievement and visibility with value. Contemporary success metrics—social media influence, rapid scaling, performative productivity—exploit the brain’s reward circuitry, particularly the dopaminergic SEEKING system described by Panksepp (1998). This creates an ongoing cycle of striving that often yields temporary satisfaction but fails to generate long-term fulfilment. As Lembke (2021) argues, the overactivation of reward pathways through modern stimuli—likes, promotions, purchases—can lead to a paradoxical decrease in joy and emotional regulation over time.
For many high-functioning individuals, this creates a subtle but persistent contradiction: they are outwardly performing well, yet inwardly depleted. They may find it difficult to experience rest without guilt, progress without pressure, or achievement without a lingering sense that something is missing. The emotional residue of this misalignment is not simply psychological; it is somatic. The nervous system registers the absence of relational safety, autonomy, and purpose as a threat, even if no clear danger is present.
This article explores the neuroscience of that contradiction. Drawing on research in affective neuroscience and stress physiology, it argues that modern definitions of success hijack evolved emotional systems and place unsustainable demands on the body. It then considers what a redefinition of success might look like—one that integrates ambition with emotional coherence, and achievement with biological sustainability. This is not an argument for rejecting excellence, but for pursuing it in ways that align with how we are designed to thrive.
For a deeper look at the emotional and physiological consequences of modern work, see Burnout and the Neuroscience of Purpose.
The Neuroscience of Modern Stressors
At the heart of human motivation lies a sophisticated interplay between reward and threat systems—networks within the brain that evolved to guide behaviour in ways that enhance survival and social cohesion. Affective neuroscience has identified several core emotional systems, including those responsible for fear, care, and the drive to seek novelty and resources (Panksepp, 1998). While these systems served essential adaptive purposes in ancestral environments, they are now continuously activated by modern conditions in ways that generate chronic dysregulation.
One of the most central, and most misused, circuits is the dopaminergic seeking system, which governs the impulse to pursue novelty, reward, and information. In evolutionary terms, this system encouraged exploration, learning, and effort-based reward acquisition. Dopamine does not reflect satisfaction itself, but the anticipation of it—a distinction that often leads individuals to chase rewards that ultimately fail to deliver sustained wellbeing (Berridge & Robinson, 1998). In modern contexts, this system is increasingly manipulated by technologies, marketing strategies, and work cultures that exploit its sensitivity to intermittent reinforcement. Digital platforms, for example, are designed around variable reward schedules, the same principle that underpins slot machines, prompting compulsive checking, scrolling, and task-switching behaviours (Lembke, 2021).
This hijacking of the reward system does not simply affect attention or productivity; it has profound implications for emotional regulation. Repeated, shallow dopamine hits from email, notifications, or performative achievement can lead to a state of anticipatory arousal without genuine satisfaction. Over time, this diminishes the baseline sensitivity of the reward system, making it harder to experience pleasure from slower, more meaningful forms of fulfilment, such as deep work, relational presence, or personal growth.
Simultaneously, modern environments activate the threat detection system, centred around the amygdala, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal grey. These structures respond not only to physical danger but also to perceived social threat—exclusion, evaluation, uncertainty, or failure. Contemporary work settings are saturated with these cues: performance reviews, algorithmic metrics, precarious contracts, and the ever-present comparison culture fostered by social media. Neuroscientific studies have shown that financial insecurity, in particular, activates neural patterns similar to physical pain and threat, including amygdala hyperactivation and reduced prefrontal regulation (Gianaros et al., 2007).
The cortisol system, too, is persistently engaged under these conditions. Designed for short-term survival responses, cortisol becomes harmful when chronically elevated, impairing hippocampal function (affecting memory and emotional integration), weakening immune defences, and disrupting sleep (Sapolsky, 2004). As individuals attempt to meet escalating demands while suppressing emotional signals of exhaustion, their nervous systems remain in a state of low-grade activation, which Stephen Porges (2011), in his polyvagal theory of neuroception, refers to as a vigilant state, where safety is never fully achieved and restoration never fully accessed.
This dysregulation is not random. It is structurally reinforced by social systems that reward visible output and penalise rest or relational engagement. High-status professions such as law, finance, and medicine—those most associated with conventional success, also report the highest levels of depression, anxiety, and burnout (Peterson et al., 2008). The World Health Organisation’s classification of burnout as an occupational phenomenon (WHO, 2022) further underscores that this is not an issue of individual resilience but of systemic misalignment. Over time, these expectations are internalised, shaping self-concepts that equate worth with output and safety with performance.
What emerges, then, is a portrait of a nervous system pulled in opposing directions: urged to pursue more, faster, and louder by reward cues, while simultaneously registering those environments as emotionally unsafe and physiologically unsustainable. The long-term cost is not simply stress, but a gradual erosion of emotional coherence, relational attunement, and somatic integrity.
In such conditions, even perceived success becomes a threat to wellbeing, not because ambition is inherently harmful, but because the pathways offered for its attainment are fundamentally out of sync with our neurobiological architecture.
Allostatic Load: the Brain Keeps the Score, and the Body Becomes the Scorecard
The nervous system is not simply a mediator of thought or emotion; it is a regulatory interface between the external world and the internal state of the body. When a person’s environment repeatedly requires them to override emotional needs—whether for rest, connection, or meaning—the cost is not only psychological. It becomes physiological, accumulating over time in what is now widely recognised as allostatic load.
To understand this cumulative toll, we must first consider how the stress response is designed to function. The concept of allostasis, first articulated by Sterling and Eyer (1988), refers to the body’s ability to achieve stability through change, to dynamically adjust in response to stressors. This system is adaptive in the short term: heart rate increases, cortisol is released, and attention sharpens. However, when these responses are chronically activated, they begin to degrade the very systems they were designed to protect. McEwen (1998) termed this cumulative degradation allostatic load—the long-term cost of repeated or prolonged activation of the body’s stress response. It can be measured through a range of biomarkers, including elevated cortisol, high blood pressure, abdominal fat accumulation, insulin resistance, systemic inflammation, and shortened telomere length (Juster et al., 2010). These indicators reveal the biological toll of living in environments that consistently require emotional suppression, hypervigilance, and performance without recovery.
Importantly, these costs do not arise only in contexts of extreme adversity. They accumulate silently in the lives of many high-functioning individuals, whose calendars are full but whose inner world feels hollow. What may appear on the surface as competence or ambition is often underpinned by persistent fatigue, emotional flatness, or low-grade anxiety—signs that the nervous system is no longer able to return to baseline. The brain keeps the score, and the body becomes the scorecard, registering the mismatch between what is expected and what is sustainable.
Chronic allostatic load has been linked to a host of long-term health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, and neurodegenerative decline (McEwen & Gianaros, 2011). It also impairs the very capacities that conventional success depends on: attention, creativity, empathy, and self-regulation. The prefrontal cortex—responsible for executive function, ethical reasoning, and emotional modulation—is highly sensitive to stress hormones. Under sustained load, its ability to regulate subcortical threat responses diminishes, leading to increased reactivity, impulsivity, and emotional exhaustion. This impairs not only short-term focus, but also the capacity for long-term planning, ethical discernment, and perspective-taking—skills essential to leadership and meaningful engagement.
This pattern often reinforces itself. The more depleted the system becomes, the harder it is to access the internal resources needed for rest, reflection, and repair. Individuals may double down on their efforts to succeed, pushing through exhaustion with stimulants, digital stimulation, or internalised pressure—thereby reinforcing the very patterns that are driving dysregulation.
In parallel with this physiological loop, cultural narratives also play a reinforcing role. This is often shaped by the implicit belief that exhaustion is evidence of importance, or that value must be constantly proven through productivity. Over time, these expectations are internalised, shaping self-concepts that equate worth with output and safety with performance.
The nervous system, however, cannot be persuaded by ideology. It responds only to lived experience, safety, meaning and connection. When these are absent, the brain begins to signal its dissent through the body. What begins as subtle dysregulation often progresses to panic attacks, autoimmune flares, emotional numbness, or a sudden collapse in vitality.
Allostatic load, then, is not merely a scientific concept. It is a lived reality for many in modern economies, especially those who have internalised the belief that self-worth is something to be earned through overextension. The question is not whether stress is present in high-performance cultures, but whether the cost of maintaining those performances is compatible with long-term human flourishing. Increasingly, it is not.
Mismatch: Evolved Needs vs. Modern Demands
Across the evolutionary timescale, success was defined not by accumulation or visibility but by one's ability to sustain meaningful relationships, contribute to the group’s survival, and live in rhythm with natural and social cycles. In small, kin-based communities, status was closely tied to generosity, reciprocity, and emotional intelligence. The environments in which our nervous systems evolved were slow, relational, and highly attuned to the present moment.
Today’s environments are radically different. We live in a cultural landscape defined by abstraction, acceleration, and algorithmic visibility. The social scaffolding that once protected human beings from chronic threat, close-knit relationships, shared rituals, extended rest, and embodied community life has been gradually replaced by fragmented schedules, digital overstimulation, precarious work, and constant evaluation. This shift is not simply cultural; it is neurobiological. It represents a profound mismatch between our evolved emotional circuitry and the demands placed on us by modern institutions.
The nervous system is designed to orient toward safety through proximity to others, a sense of agency, and an ability to make meaning from one’s contributions (Porges, 2011). Yet contemporary success models often demand behaviours that undermine these very sources of regulation. Instead of connection, they reward competition. Instead of embodied agency, they promote compliance with disembodied goals. Instead of intrinsic purpose, they offer external metrics. The result is an internal dissonance that may not always be consciously registered, but is continuously processed by the nervous system as a subtle form of threat.
Anthropological studies reinforce this view. Research on foraging societies consistently shows that these communities exhibit low levels of chronic stress, strong communal bonds, and shared responsibility for child-rearing, food acquisition, and elder care (Kaplan et al., 2000). These communities offer a living example of what coherence between environment and neurobiology looks like. Their concept of time is cyclical and relational rather than linear and transactional. In contrast, Western industrialised societies have become profoundly task-oriented, with time sliced into units of output and performance. Even leisure, increasingly, is optimised for display or self-improvement.
Social media compounds this mismatch by simulating social engagement while bypassing the nervous system’s deeper relational cues. Likes and notifications activate the brain’s seeking circuitry but offer no real co-regulation—no tone of voice, facial expression, or embodied presence. This creates what might be called maladaptive foraging: constant searching for novelty and approval without the physiological nourishment of safety and belonging. Over time, these behaviours contribute to emotional burnout, self-alienation, and a growing sense of futility, even among those who appear to be thriving.
This misalignment is not a flaw in individual psychology but a reflection of structural conditions that are at odds with human neurobiology. Many of the behaviours now considered necessary for professional success, constant availability, hyper-responsiveness, and competitive vigilance, would have signalled danger or social rupture in ancestral settings. The nervous system has no reference point for Slack alerts, quarterly KPIs, or algorithmic visibility. It continues to interpret these signals through the lens of survival, triggering stress responses that were never meant to be sustained indefinitely.
When these survival circuits are activated chronically, they reshape the internal landscape of the self. Emotional bandwidth narrows. Interoceptive awareness, our ability to sense what is happening inside the body, becomes blunted. Relationships begin to feel like demands rather than sources of refuge. The disconnection is not just from others, but from one’s own inner experience.
To live in this state is to be perpetually misattuned, not because something is broken, but because the environment is fundamentally incoherent with the system it is acting upon. Affective neuroscience and stress research reveal that sustained well-being does not emerge from success as currently defined. It arises when a person’s environment supports the nervous system’s need for safety, agency, and meaning. Until success is redefined to reflect those needs, individuals will continue to pay a hidden physiological price for their visible achievements. It is not the human being who is failing to thrive, but the definition of thriving itself that requires re-examination.
Redefining Success: Coherence over Performance
If the conventional definition of success is misaligned with our neurobiology, then the solution is not simply to strive less but to strive differently. Redefining success does not require rejecting ambition, productivity, or high standards. Rather, it involves examining whether the current forms of striving are compatible with emotional sustainability, nervous system health, and a meaningful life. The challenge is not one of willpower, but of alignment—ensuring that the architecture of how we live supports the internal conditions we need to thrive.
Emerging research in affective neuroscience and behavioural health offers promising evidence that when individuals live in coherence with their biological needs—connection, autonomy, mastery, and purpose—the stress response shifts from chronic activation to adaptive modulation. Cortisol levels stabilise, heart rate variability improves, and executive functioning returns (Thayer et al., 2012). These physiological changes do not just enhance well-being; they strengthen the very capacities that sustainable success depends on: discernment, creativity, empathy, and long-term thinking.
This redefinition must begin at both personal and structural levels. On an individual level, it requires interrogating inherited metrics of value: Is achievement still defined by visibility and scale, or by depth and integrity? Is time treated as a commodity or as a vessel for presence and contribution? It involves noticing where success feels energising and expansive, and where it feels extractive. These are not rhetorical questions—they are somatic ones. The nervous system is the first to register whether one’s daily life is a context for flourishing or survival. This process often requires breaking free from societal conditioning to reconnect with your internal values.
Practical shifts might include designing one's calendar to include spaciousness rather than scarcity, privileging relational and restorative activities alongside output-driven tasks. It could mean reconfiguring professional goals to reflect contribution over consumption—an orientation that is associated with increased meaning and reduced depressive symptoms (Klein, 2017). It might also involve integrating intentional recovery into daily routines, not as a counterbalance to stress, but as a core leadership practice. This kind of calendar and energy alignment is central to developing self-trust.
Read more about how a value-led approach is supported by purpose as an antidote to conditioned striving.
Consider a senior leader who begins structuring their week around deep work, creative restoration, and relationship-building, rather than constant availability. They reduce meetings, integrate movement breaks, and reframe output not as proof of worth but as the byproduct of presence. What emerges is not a loss in performance, but a recovery of vitality. Their nervous system recalibrates, not through effort, but through alignment.
Systemically, redefinition means moving away from metrics that quantify only output, such as GDP, productivity, or revenue, towards indicators that reflect human flourishing. Policies that prioritise mental health, social cohesion, and ecological integrity are not peripheral to economic success; they are preconditions for its longevity. Experiments in biophilic workplace design, four-day workweeks, and social prescribing have shown measurable improvements in both well-being and performance (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007; Icelandic Directorate of Labour, 2021). These are not indulgences—they are corrections to a system that has become physiologically and culturally unsustainable.
For more on how Human Design supports this model, read the flourishing-first framework.
Redefining success also requires confronting the narratives that equate suffering with significance. The idea that meaning must be earned through struggle, or that burnout is the tax on impact, is not only outdated, it is biologically untenable. As VanderWeele (2017) argues, true flourishing is not merely the absence of illness or the presence of achievement, but the integration of health, meaning, virtue, and close relationships. When success is measured this way, it no longer demands the sacrifice of wellbeing—it becomes the expression of it.
This is not an abstract or idealistic proposal. It is a biologically informed invitation to reimagine the terms under which we pursue fulfilment. When individuals, organisations, and societies begin to align success with the actual conditions under which human nervous systems flourish, the distinction between personal integrity and professional efficacy begins to dissolve. Ambition, in this light, becomes not a force of depletion, but a channel through which coherence, creativity, and contribution are realised.
Conclusion: A Nervous System Aligned Vision of Fulfilment
The pursuit of success is not inherently misguided, but the prevailing definition of success has become increasingly incompatible with human physiology, emotional integrity, and long-term well-being. Affective neuroscience and stress research reveal what many intuitively know but struggle to articulate: that outward achievement cannot compensate for inner depletion, and that chronic misalignment between external expectations and internal needs carries a cost that is both personal and systemic.
We are living in a culture that rewards the overextension of nervous systems, celebrates dysregulation as drive, and mistakes productivity for purpose. Yet beneath the surface, the body and brain are quietly registering the incoherence. The data are not just clinical or economic; they are lived, measured in burnout, anxiety, relational fracture, and the quiet question that often follows even the greatest success: Is this all there is?
Redefining success is not a rejection of ambition but a recalibration of its purpose. It invites us to pursue excellence not in defiance of our biology, but in alignment with it. To orient our goals not solely around performance, but around coherence. To build lives and systems that do not require recovery from themselves. When we make this shift, from performance to presence, from extraction to sustainability, we do not lose drive; we reclaim direction.
Redefining success is not always easy, especially within systems that continue to reward dysregulation and self-abandonment. Yet it is often those in positions of influence who are best placed to model a different kind of ambition: one that nourishes rather than depletes. As this redefinition takes root, individually and collectively, it has the power to reshape not only how we live but how we lead, design, and build.
The nervous system does not lie. It does not respond to status, titles, or narratives. It responds to safety, purpose, connection, and rhythm. When success is redefined by these principles, it no longer demands that we choose between achievement and aliveness. It becomes a natural expression of both.
This is not sentiment—it is affective neuroscience in action: success becomes sustainable only when it is biologically coherent. The task ahead is not simply to change how we perform, but to remember how we are designed to live—and to allow that remembrance to shape what we strive for next.
Recommended Reading List
Klein, N., 2017. No is not enough: Resisting Trump’s shock politics and winning the world we need. London: Allen Lane.
Lembke, A., 2021. Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. London: Headline Publishing Group.
Panksepp, J., 1998. Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Porges, S.W., 2011. The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Sapolsky, R.M., 2004. Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping. 3rd ed. New York: Henry Holt.
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