sliding puzzle, chocolate pudding, and the 2:43am alarm your body keeps sending

There’s a very particular kind of exhaustion that no one warns you about.

Not the "everything is on fire and I’m fighting for survival" exhaustion.

That one, at least, makes sense. The chaos is visible. The numbers are scary. The inbox is a masterclass in existential dread. Of course your body is waving red flags.

I’m talking about the exhaustion that shows up when, at least on paper, everything is finally working.

For entrepreneurs, that might look like:
The revenue is up. The clients are great. The team is solid.

For 9-to-5ers, that might look like:
The promotion. The dream office. A new car.

From the outside, it looks like you’ve cracked the code.

And inside, you feel like you’re slowly sinking to the bottom of the pool, smiling for the camera while your lungs are burning. 

You close your laptop on a "good" week.
The dashboard says you had your best month yet.
Everyone around you is genuinely happy for you.

And your body is quietly whispering, "We cannot keep doing this."

Sometimes it’s not even whispering.
Sometimes it’s the 2:43am wake‑up call. 

Heart racing.
Mind scanning for fires that aren’t actually there.
Nothing in your inbox is on fire. No emergency texts. No dramatic plot twist.

But your nervous system is ringing the alarm anyway.

On paper: success.
In your body: danger.

That gap is disorienting, especially if you’ve spent years telling yourself that once you "got there"—once the offers were dialed in, the systems were smoother, the revenue was more consistent—your body would finally relax. 

You did what you were supposed to do.
You worked the plan.
You got to "there."

And somehow, you feel worse. 

There’s no more "once I hit X, it’ll calm down" to hide behind.
You’re at X.
And it sure as shit is not calm. 

That’s the part almost nobody talks about: the season where the external success arrives… and your internal experience quietly starts to fall apart.

And that's not just an opinion. Research shows high performers are uniquely prone to this "everything looks fine" stage of burnout. Here, chronic stress and perfectionism erode well‑being long before obvious signs of "failure" show up on the surface.¹

If this is resonating, I want to name this clearly for you: 

This isn’t you "being bad at success."

This is what it feels like to succeed inside systems that were never designed with your actual capacity, nervous system, or body in mind.

Burnout research increasingly emphasizes that chronic stress is a systemic and design problem—driven by workload, lack of control, and cultural expectations—rather than a sign that individuals "just can’t handle it."²

Most of us are taught to build businesses like machines:

We’re praised for being efficient.

We’re celebrated for "hustle," for squeezing more from the same 24 hours, for being endlessly available to the algorithm, the clients, the inbox.

The unspoken rule is: if the results look good, the system must be good.

So when your body starts throwing alarm bells out at 2:43am right at the moment the results finally look good, it’s very easy to make it a personal failing. 

🚀 If the launch went well and you’re exhausted…
Maybe you’re just not cut out for this.

🗓️ If the calendar is full and your brain feels like static…
Maybe you’re secretly ungrateful.

👥 If the team is happy and you’re fantasizing about disappearing…
Maybe you’re the problem.

That’s the story extraction systems tell us to keep themselves running.

Because if you believe you are the problem, you won’t question the blueprint.
You’ll just try to upgrade yourself to match it. 

More discipline.
Better morning routine.
A new stack of productivity tools.
One more layer of optimization.

Meanwhile, your body has stopped filing polite complaints.
It’s screaming at you in the only language it has.

But here’s the tough pill to swallow: success that’s built on extraction—of your time, your attention, your health, your sense of enoughness—can absolutely "work" for a while.

It can work beautifully, even.
From the outside and from the inside.
Metrics go up.
Testimonials flow.
Waitlist grows. 

It just usually comes with a hidden countdown.

Sometimes the business hits the wall first.
Things start breaking.
You can’t keep up with the demand created by the very systems that were supposed to make things easier. 

Sometimes you hit the wall first.
The nightly wake‑ups that start to become insomnia.
Your baseline becomes "wired and tired."
You’re technically keeping all the plates spinning… but every day costs more than the one before. 

From the outside, this still looks like success.

From the inside, it feels like standing in a beautiful, well‑decorated room where the oxygen level is quietly dropping.

And because nothing is "wrong" in the obvious ways—no massive failure, no dramatic collapse—it’s easy to gaslight yourself out of listening.

"Who am I to be this tired when so many people would love to have what I have?"
"If I complain about this, it’ll sound ungrateful."
"I just need to get better at handling it." 

But your body isn’t confused.

It can feel what the business is built on.

Naming this pattern isn’t an invitation to lower your standards, burn everything down, or decide you "just can’t handle" big, beautiful things.

It’s not about wanting less, working less at all costs, or opting out of ambition.

It is about telling the truth about the infrastructure underneath your success. 

You can hold the same goals with a different blueprint.
The same ambition with different support.
Things will look different, sure, but different isn't bad.

The problem isn’t that you care deeply, or that you want your work to matter, or that you’re proud of what you’ve built.

The problem is when the only way you know to maintain that success is to quietly extract from the parts of you no one else can see.

So when your body wakes you up at 2:43am and refuses to give you a clear, logical slide deck about why… it’s not being dramatic.

Studies on insomnia and stress show that chronic hyperarousal (aka your acute stress response) often surfaces as 2–4 a.m. wake‑ups. This is driven by an early cortisol surge and a sensitized stress response system, even when nothing is "objectively wrong" in the moment.³

It’s your body doing its best to say, "Something about how we’re doing this isn’t sustainable, even if the results look great."

I often share "audits" as the weekly exercises, and so far this year I've intentionally focused on listening audits.

Because when we think "audit," we usually think spreadsheets and metrics and optimization: revenue, conversion rates, open rates, all the ways we prove to ourselves that the machine is working. 

Those numbers definitely matter. _{^{(We aren't going to be living outside capitalism anytime soon.)}}
But they don’t tell you the whole story.

There’s a quieter audit running underneath your dashboards—the one your body is running in the middle of the night.

Instead of trying to shut that down or out‑optimize it, I want to invite you to continue to get curious about it. 

Not to fix everything overnight.
Not to design a brand new business model this weekend.

Just to stop asking your body to hold this alone in the dark.

If you’re in this strange season of success‑adjacent exhaustion—especially the kind that shows up as middle‑of‑the‑night brain spirals—I’ve put together a gentle exercise this week that's aligned with similar recommendations by therapists and organizational psychologists.

The goal is to help reduce rumination and look beyond the surface to the less visible indicators of strain. 

What you’ll need:

How it works:

You’re not looking for the most dramatic individual worry.

You’re looking for the pattern underneath.

👉 Is it all about capacity? ("I can’t keep this pace.")
👉 Is it all about control? ("If I stop watching every dial, it’ll all fall apart.")
👉 Is it about performance? ("If I’m not constantly on, I’ll let everyone down.")
👉 Is it about safety? ("If this slows down, it all disappears and I end up back where I started.")

The patterns are information.

It’s data about the operating system your success is currently running on.

Extraction, optimization at any cost, perfectionism, people‑pleasing, something else entirely.

You don’t have to have the new blueprint ready yet.

Noticing what your 2:43am brain is protecting you from is the first step in deciding what kind of sustainable support structure you actually need if you’re going to keep building from here.

At the end of the day, external success without internal sustainability isn’t failure. But it is a ticking clock.

If you’re reading this from inside the "everything’s working but I’m not" season, you’re not broken and you’re not ungrateful.

You’re just bumping up against the limits of a way of working that was never built for a human nervous system long‑term.

The good news—and I promise there is good news—is that you don’t have to go back to the beginning to change that.

Your 2:43am self is just making sure you don’t ignore the memo.