Burnout builds when you ignore stress signals and skip recovery. Modern tech acts as a dopamine factory that hijacks your brain like gambling, and reaching for your phone to relax actually raises cortisol, trapping you in a scroll cycle that amplifies stress instead of easing it.
So, you have a tough meeting and you follow that up with a difficult conversation with an employee. And you follow that up with your kids screaming at the kitchen table at each other. And you follow it up with after, after, after. No recovery. You don't listen to your body. You ignore the signs and you just keep plowing through until you feel that stress bottom out. If you put many days like that together, it's a recipe for burnout. And in the book, I talk about a third kind of stress, pervasive stress or 21st and a quarter century stress is what I call it. This idea that technology is adding to our stress in a way that we hadn't even imagined, drawing you in, in ways that we can control or not. But the interesting thing about these devices is that they are designed to hook the neural pathways in our brain in the same way that gambling and addiction does. And so I call them little dopamine factories, little dopamine machines, and that dopamine is one of the happy hormones. So for feeling stressed, here's an interesting thing. We'll often reach for the device as a little calming mechanism, which will then increase our cortisol sometimes, which is a stress hormone. And then we'll be looking for other ways. And it's often through the cycle of scroll, repeat, scroll.
