The Hamster Wheel We Call Success: Why Your Brain is Addicted to Stress (And Capitalism is Your Dealer)

A reality check from someone who's spent two decades watching smart people destroy themselves in slow motion.

Let me tell you about Sarah. She's 34, earns six figures, has a corner office, and hasn't taken a real vacation in three years. She checks emails at 11 PM, works weekends "just to stay ahead," and genuinely believes that if she stops moving, everything will fall apart. When I suggested she might be addicted to stress, she laughed. "I'm not addicted," she said, "I'm just responsible."

Sarah isn't alone. She's part of a growing epidemic of people who've confused motion with progress, busyness with importance, and exhaustion with virtue. After nearly twenty years of sitting across from people like Sarah, I've come to understand something that might surprise you: we're not just burned out. We're literally addicted to the very thing that's killing us.

Your Brain on Capitalism: A Love Story Gone Wrong

Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: stress feels good. Not the crushing, soul-destroying kind that keeps you awake at 3 AM, but the initial hit of it. That surge you feel when your phone or watch buzzes with an "urgent" email, the adrenaline rush of a looming deadline, the dopamine hit of checking another item off your endless to-do list.

Your brain doesn't know the difference between being chased by a bear and being chased by a deadline. When stress hits, your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (fancy words for your internal alarm system) floods your body with cortisol and adrenaline. Your dopamine pathways light up like a Christmas tree. For a brief, shining moment, you feel alive, important, needed.

The problem? Your brain starts craving this state. Like any good drug, stress builds tolerance. You need more chaos to feel normal, more urgency to feel engaged. Before you know it, you're mainlining crisis and calling it productivity.

I've watched brilliant people create problems just to solve them, generate emergencies just to feel heroic. They've become stress junkies, and they don't even realize they're high. And who am I kidding? This was me.

The Shame Game: How We Learned to Hate Rest

But here's where it gets really twisted. While your brain is getting hooked on stress, our culture is teaching you to be ashamed of anything else. When was the last time you told someone you spent the weekend doing absolutely nothing without feeling the need to justify it? When did you last take a sick day without guilt, or leave the office on time without explaining yourself?

We've created a society where your worth is measured by your output, where "I'm so busy" has become a humble brag, and where rest is treated as a moral failing. We've turned productivity into a religion and made ourselves the sacrifice.

This isn't an accident. It's the result of what I call "capitalism's greatest magic trick": convincing us that we are our work, that our value as humans is directly tied to our economic output. We've internalized the boss so completely that we don't need external supervision anymore. We police ourselves, push ourselves, shame ourselves into compliance.

20 something years ago, while working in the film industry in Vancouver, BC, my best friend, who worked with me, turned to me and said, “All we do is work, and I’m not interested in living to work. I need to work to live.” And I argued how wrong that idea was with him.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault called this "entrepreneur-of-the-self." I call it psychological warfare dressed up as personal responsibility.

The Toxic Cycle: When Stress and Shame Have a Baby

Stress addiction and capitalist shame fornicate to create the unholy offspring of toxic productivity. And it works like this:

You feel shame about not doing enough, so you ramp up the stress. The stress gives you that dopamine hit, temporarily relieving the shame. You feel productive, important, valuable. But the high doesn't last. When you inevitably crash, the shame returns with a vengeance. "See?" it whispers. "You're not doing enough. You're not enough."

So you reach for more stress, more busyness, more chaos. The cycle deepens.

I've seen this pattern destroy marriages, friendships, health, and sanity. I've watched people mistake chronic activation for passion, confuse anxiety for ambition. They're running on a hamster wheel, convinced they're making progress because they're moving so fast.

The Culture of "Never Enough"

The truly insidious part is how normalized this has become. We celebrate overwork, glamorize exhaustion, and treat self-care like a luxury instead of a necessity. We've created a culture where saying "no" feels like failure, where boundaries are seen as weakness, where burnout is a badge of honour.

The World Health Organization has officially recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon, but we're still treating it like a personal failing. We're prescribing individual solutions (more yoga! better boundaries!) to systemic problems. It's like telling someone to think positive thoughts while their house is on fire.

The Withdrawal Nobody Talks About

Here's what happens when stress addicts try to slow down: they feel like garbage. The dopamine crash is real. Without the constant stimulation of crisis and urgency, they feel flat, restless, anxious. Their brains, accustomed to operating in crisis mode, interpret calm as danger.

I've had clients describe weekends as "depressing," vacations as "boring," and meditation as "torture." Their nervous systems have forgotten how to exist in a state of peace. They've rewired their brains to mistake chaos for safety, busyness for purpose.

Recovery requires rewiring these patterns, and that's uncomfortable work. It means sitting with the withdrawal, tolerating the discomfort of not being "productive," and challenging the voice that says rest is selfish.

The Mindfulness Industrial Complex

Before you think this is another article telling you to meditate your way out of systemic oppression, let me be clear: this isn't about individual solutions to collective problems. Yes, mindfulness can help. Yes, therapy is valuable. Yes, you need to set boundaries.

But let's not pretend that personal wellness can fix a system designed to extract maximum value from human beings while giving back as little as possible. We can't self-care our way out of exploitation, and we can't mindfulness-app our way out of economic anxiety.

The real work involves recognizing that your stress addiction didn't develop in a vacuum. It developed in a culture that profits from your exhaustion, that benefits from your inability to slow down, that needs you to believe that your worth is tied to your productivity.

The Unabashed Truth

Here's what I tell my clients, and what I'm telling you now: You are not a machine. You are not a resource to be optimized. You are a human being who deserves rest, peace, and the radical act of existing without constantly proving your worth.

The system that taught you to be ashamed of rest is the same system that profits from your stress addiction. It needs you running on empty, because exhausted people don't question, don't organize, don't demand better. They just keep running on that hamster wheel, convinced they're climbing the ladder of success.

Your exhaustion is not a character flaw. Your need for rest is not weakness. Your desire for a life beyond constant productivity is not selfish. It's human.

Breaking Free: The Real Work Begins

Recovery from stress addiction isn't just about learning to relax. It's about fundamentally challenging the beliefs that got you hooked in the first place. It's about recognizing that a system that requires you to sacrifice your well-being for productivity is not a system worth preserving.

Start small. Practice disappointing people. Say no without explanation. Take breaks without earning them. Rest without feeling guilty. These aren't just self-care practices; they're acts of rebellion against a system that needs you depleted to function.

And here's the thing about rebellion: it's contagious. When you stop participating in the cult of toxic productivity, you give others permission to do the same. When you model a different way of being, you crack open the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there's another way to live.

The hamster wheel will keep spinning whether you're on it or not. The question is: are you brave enough to step off?

Remember this: in a world that profits from your self-doubt and exhaustion, choosing peace is a radical act. In a system that measures your worth by your output, insisting on your inherent value is revolutionary. In a culture addicted to more, faster, better, the simple act of saying "enough" is the most subversive thing you can do.

You don't need to earn your rest. You don't need to justify your peace. You don't need to prove your worth through your exhaustion.

You just need to remember that you're human. And humans, contrary to what capitalism would have you believe, are not machines designed for endless productivity.

They're miraculous beings deserving of joy, rest, connection, and the revolutionary act of simply being enough, exactly as they are.

Now get off that damn hamster wheel. The world needs you whole, not depleted. And frankly, so do you.

- The Unabashed Counsellor

You can read more articles on my Substack: https://substack.com/@unabashedcounsellor