The lie behind “just keep showing up”

Hustle Culture has infiltrated Substack

There’s a particular kind of fatigue that comes from working for too long on the wrong thing.

You know it’s wrong from the start because you feel it. That sense of dread, the need to force yourself to just get it done. It drains your energy and leaves you exhausted.

It builds slowly. First as frustration. Then guilt. Then a quiet, dull ache that becomes accusatory quickly and you start asking questions like “What’s wrong with me?”

You’re doing everything right. You’re showing up, staying disciplined, ticking all the boxes. But the more committed you become, the further away it all starts to feel and instead of questioning the strategy, you question yourself. You tell yourself you just need to be more focused, more disciplined.

…and so you push harder.

You wake up earlier. Cancel your plans. Cut out rest. You start treating your body like a machine and your emotions like a weakness to overcome. You double down on performance, even as your energy starts to bleed at the edges.

And still nothing moves. The ideas don’t land. The posts don’t resonate. The work feels hollow, mechanical. Like you’re going through the motions of someone who used to know what they were doing. Someone who used to be lit up by the very thing that now just makes them feel exhausted.

That’s when you know you’ve entered the Discipline Spiral. The part of you that once reached for creativity now reaches for control. And without even realising it, you’ve begun to orbit the very problem you were trying to escape.

It’s a misdiagnosis of the problem.

Until you understand how this spiral forms, neurologically, emotionally and evolutionarily, you’ll keep reaching for the same tools that made it worse. You’ll keep punishing yourself for not being able to thrive under pressure, when pressure was never the source of your best work.

This letter is about seeing the spiral for what it is: not a discipline issue, but a signal. A signal that your system is out of sync with your values and goals, and that forcing it will only take you further away.

1. The Roots of the Spiral

The discipline spiral begins with misalignment. We grow up believing that success is a matter of willpower. That those who win are those who can push harder, last longer, ignore the noise and silence their doubts. Discipline becomes a kind of moral virtue, something you either have or you don’t have. Something that separates the serious from the unserious.

But beneath that cultural narrative is a quieter truth, one that neuroscience has spent decades revealing: motivation is not manufactured, it’s metabolised.

I am not a neuroscientist but it’s a field that really interests me and I find it very useful to explain my own patterns of behaviour. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for focus and decision-making, is designed to work with your biology not override it.

When you’re clear on what matters, when your goals are congruent with your internal values, your brain releases dopamine before the reward arrives. This is what creates momentum. It’s not the reward itself, it’s the feeling of moving in a direction that feels meaningful.

But when your goals are driven by fear, like the fear of failure, the fear of being left behind or the fear of not being seen, your system detects the threat. Your stress response kicks in. Cortisol rises. Your window of tolerance shrinks. You start oscillating between over-efforting (not sure of that is a word) and collapse. You become the problem you’re trying to solve.

The Stoics warned us of this over 2,000 years ago. Seneca wrote: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” The spiral lives in that imagination. In the fantasy that if you could just control yourself a little more, you’d finally break through.

But it’s never about more control, it’s always about less friction because the deeper cost of the spiral is not burnout. It’s self-alienation. You start treating your body like a liability, your emotions like the enemy, and your energy like a machine that should always be running.

You forget what it feels like to want to create. You forget that your best work came when something inside you lit up, not when something outside you demanded performance.

This is the quiet tragedy of so many people, not that they lack discipline, but that they use it to override signals they should have listened to.

Signals like:

• I need rest.

• This doesn’t feel right.

• Something in me is changing.

• I don’t know what I believe anymore.

And instead of honouring those signals, they doubled down on output. They follow the dominant narrative which is to “just keep showing up” and be consistent. But they forget that consistency without clarity is just repetition. And repetition without meaning is erosion. Not just of motivation, but of self, and when you start eroding your sense of self that’s when things really start to spiral rapidly.

2. Why the Spiral Feels Safer Than Stopping

It seems irrational from the outside. Why keep pushing when it’s clearly not working? Why double down when the very thing you’re doing is what’s burning you out?

But inside the spiral, it makes perfect sense, because even when it’s exhausting, the discipline spiral offers something we’re biologically wired to crave:

Predictability.

It’s not just a to-do list. It’s a coping mechanism, a shield against uncertainty, and most importantly it’s a way for us to feel like we’re in control. When we keep doing, it quiets the deeper fear, that if we stop everything might fall apart or that we’ll become irrelevant.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Our nervous system evolved for survival, in the ancestral environment, uncertainty often meant danger. Predictable patterns, even painful ones, offered safety. Familiarity signaled survival, in other words better the devil you know.

And so, the spiral persists because it’s known.

Modern psychology has another term for this: trauma looping. We cling to the routine of over-efforting because it protects us from the vulnerability of not knowing who we are without it. We identify with the hustle, the output and performance, because stopping would mean confronting a much deeper question:

What if I’ve built all this on a foundation I no longer believe in?

And that question terrifies us. Because it’s not just our work that’s on the line, it’s our sense of self.

That’s why the spiral isn’t broken by doing more, or even by stopping. It’s broken by turning towards the fear we’ve been running from. By asking the questions we’ve postponed. By listening, patiently, to what the exhaustion is trying to say.

Because discipline, real discipline, isn’t about pushing through. It’s about choosing the right path to begin with. And sometimes, the bravest, most disciplined thing you can do… is stop.

3. What the Spiral Costs You

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio once described the self not as a fixed identity, but as a process of continual mapping between the body, the mind, and the environment.

When those maps are distorted by, for example, habitually overriding your internal cues to meet external demands, your sense of self begins to fray. Not all at once, but incrementally. Until one day you look back at your work and don’t recognise the person who made it.

This is the deeper cost of the spiral. You become efficient at the wrong things. You optimise for survival instead of alignment. And in doing so, you risk succeeding at something that brings you no real satisfaction. The applause come, but it lands on a version of you that no longer feels present.

This isn’t just a creative crisis. It’s an existential one, and it’s why breaking the spiral requires more than rest. It requires returning to your original signal. The one buried beneath all the noise. The one you forgot how to listen to because the world taught you to shout instead.

You cannot build something meaningful from a place of self-abandonment. And you do not need to sacrifice your integrity in order to be seen. There is another way.

4. The Way Out

The exit from the discipline spiral really begins with self awareness. In neuroscience, this is known as the interoceptive turn, the ability to sense and interpret the signals from within your own body. Most people live in a constant state of sympathetic arousal: the brain flooded with cortisol, locked in threat detection, trolls, negative comments, always scanning not for insight, but for cues on what to mimic. You cannot build something original in that state.

So the first task is regulation. Your nervous system must learn that your work is not a threat. That your voice is safe. That expression does not mean exile. This means pulling back from volume and performance and returning to presence.

Here’s what that looks like:

I. Stop punishing yourself with productivity.

Before you add more goals or optimise your workflow, ask: “What am I trying to prove?” Cut the forced schedule. Give yourself one hour to write what you actually want to say, not what you think you need to do to grow.

II. Trade discipline for rhythm.

Discipline is brittle. Rhythm is resilient. Instead of dragging yourself to your desk every day at 6am, find the tempo that matches your actual life. Rhythm flows from attention, not control.

Build a cadence that you can live with, not one that performs your ambition back to you. This might mean 2Hours on a Sunday morning, an hour of work on Monday morning. Half an hour on Tuesday evening. No time on Wednesday…etc.

III. Let desire back in.

What do you want to make? Not what should you make, or what might go viral, but what actually pulls at your curiosity? In cognitive psychology, intrinsic motivation activates deeper pathways for learning, memory, and creativity. You’re not more serious because you suffer. You’re more effective when you care.

IV. Protect your attention like it’s a muscle.

Because it is. Dopamine-driven behaviours like checking stats and chasing notifications exhaust your capacity for depth. This is not a moral failure. It’s neurochemistry. Your creative state needs a clean signal. That means fewer inputs. More silence. More walks. More thought.

If you were deep in the dopamine economy this will be very difficult. There will be a period of intense discomfort but if you stick with it, things will get a lot easier and more sustainable.

V. Create a system that builds your identity, not just your audience.

This is where most advice falls apart. The focus is always on reach, growth, scale. But if you don’t know who you are, an audience won’t fix that. Build a habit not just of output, but of inquiry. Write Notes not only to get attention, but to sharpen your thinking. Publish letters not to impress, but to clarify. Make work that reflects who you’re becoming, not just what you’ve done.

This is not about giving up, or stepping back it’s about recalibrating and getting free. Once you feel that shift, when the work begins to nourish you again instead of drain you, you’ll wonder why you ever got locked in this spiral at all.

Until then protect your signal.

Ben