Escaping the Hedonic Treadmill: How to Rewire Success into Fulfillment

We spend most of our professional lives chasing the next thing. The next role, the next project, the next milestone that proves—at least for a moment—that we’re moving forward.

We call it ambition. Drive. Achievement orientation. It’s rewarded, admired, and, for a while, it works.

Until it doesn’t.

At some point, many professionals realize they’re still running hard—but they’re no longer sure why. The metrics of accomplishment no longer translate into meaning. The high fades faster each time, and what once felt like progress now feels like motion for motion’s sake.

That’s the moment when we start confusing a sense of accomplishment with fulfillment—and it’s one of the most important distinctions any professional can learn.

Why We Chase

There’s a reason the pursuit of achievement feels so intoxicating.
Biologically, it’s wired into us.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that fuels motivation and reward. It gets released not when we receive the reward, but when we anticipate it. That means our brains light up not at the finish line, but in the chase.

Every win—a promotion, a new client, a public compliment—creates a small burst of dopamine. It feels good, but it’s fleeting. And because our brains adapt, it takes a bigger win to get the same feeling next time. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill: the cycle of striving, achieving, adapting, and striving again.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with ambition. Early in our careers, the chase serves us well. It helps us build competence, stability, and reputation. But over time, those same patterns can start to work against us. We keep running because we’re conditioned to equate achievement with worth—and we rarely stop long enough to ask whether the finish lines we’re chasing still matter.

That’s not weakness; it’s wiring.
Achievement runs on dopamine. Fulfillment, however, depends on something else.

The Chemistry of Fulfillment

Where dopamine is about excitement, serotonin is about contentment. It’s the neurotransmitter of calm, connection, and satisfaction.

Achievement gives you the rush; fulfillment gives you the rest.
Dopamine pushes you forward; serotonin lets you know you’ve arrived.

Most professionals I coach live squarely in dopamine mode. Their minds are always scanning for what’s next. Even downtime becomes performance—“productive rest.” They’re experts at achieving but novices at allowing themselves to feel fulfilled.

And yet, fulfillment isn’t the opposite of ambition. It’s ambition with roots. It’s what happens when your effort aligns with your values—when you’re moving not just toward something, but from something deeper within yourself.

When the Ladder’s Against the Wrong Wall

I learned this lesson the hard way.

After decades in tech, I landed what I thought was the pinnacle of my career: an executive role at a fast-growing fintech. It was validation. Recognition. The external marker that said, You made it.

And for a while, it worked. The dopamine was strong.

But underneath, something felt off. The company’s mission wasn’t mine. The culture conflicted with my values. I found myself withdrawing from conversations that mattered because I couldn’t reconcile what I believed with what was being asked of me.

I was achieving, but not becoming.

It showed up as stress, tension, fatigue—symptoms I rationalized as “normal.” But they were signals. My outer success and inner alignment had drifted apart.

That gap is where fulfillment disappears. And when you stay in that gap too long, no amount of achievement fills it.

The Cost of Constant Doing

One reason it’s hard to break the cycle is that we live in a culture that worships busyness. The modern workplace runs on dopamine: notifications, deadlines, feedback loops. It’s designed to keep us reacting.

But there’s another network in the brain that doesn’t get enough credit: the Default Mode Network (DMN). It activates when we’re not doing—when our minds wander, when we reflect, when we connect past experiences into meaning.

That’s the space where fulfillment grows. It’s where we integrate what we’ve done with who we’re becoming.

When professionals tell me they feel lost or unmotivated despite success, it’s usually not because they’re underachieving. It’s because they’ve gone too long without giving their DMN any airtime. They’re over-indexing on doing and undernourishing the part of the brain that makes sense of it all.

If you’re always producing and never pausing, you might be winning the game—but losing the connection to why you started playing.

Fulfillment Is Not Laziness

A lot of high performers quietly fear that fulfillment sounds like complacency. “Am I supposed to just be content?” feels like a betrayal of ambition.

But fulfillment isn’t the end of ambition—it’s its evolution.

Psychologist Daniel Pink describes three drivers of lasting motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Achievement gives us mastery—the satisfaction of competence—but without autonomy and purpose, it turns hollow. Fulfillment happens when we balance all three.

You can still be ambitious. You can still chase excellence.
The difference is that you’re no longer trying to prove your worth—you’re expressing it.
That shift changes everything.

Rewiring the System

So how do you move from chasing achievement to cultivating fulfillment?
You start by retraining your attention—by rewiring the system that’s been optimized for motion back toward meaning.

Here are five places to begin:

1. Reflection Time
Build unstructured space into your week. No screens, no goals. Go for a walk, take a drive, sit quietly. Let your mind wander. That’s when your Default Mode Network activates and helps you integrate what matters.

2. Redefine Success
Ask yourself: What would success look like if no one else were watching?
Most professionals have internalized other people’s definitions of achievement. Fulfillment begins when you name your own.

3. Align with Values
Your values are the internal compass that give direction to your ambition. When your actions and values diverge, energy leaks. When they align, energy flows.

4. Practice Contentment
This doesn’t mean you stop growing. It means you train your brain to experience satisfaction now, not only “once I achieve X.” Serotonin rises when you recognize sufficiency in the present.

5. Serve a Larger Why
Fulfillment expands when your work contributes to something beyond yourself. Ask: Who benefits when I’m at my best? Purpose is rarely about scale; it’s about impact.

What Fulfillment Feels Like

Fulfillment isn’t flashy. It’s quieter than achievement, steadier than excitement. It doesn’t spike—it sustains.

It feels like showing up on Monday with curiosity instead of dread.
It feels like working from your strengths instead of your fears.
It feels like knowing you’re on the right path, even when the results haven’t caught up yet.

In coaching, I often see professionals rediscover that feeling after years of chasing. It’s not that they lose their ambition—they simply stop outsourcing their self-worth to the scoreboard.

They still set goals. They still achieve. But the energy feels different. They’re pulled by purpose, not pushed by pressure. That’s what it means to be rewired to win.

Arriving

When I left my executive role, I didn’t know what would come next. I only knew I was done chasing goals that weren’t mine.

Fulfillment wasn’t a lightning bolt—it was a gradual exhale.
It came from reconnecting with what had always driven me: helping good people win.

And that’s still my work today. Because the truth is, fulfillment doesn’t replace achievement—it transforms it. It turns success from something you collect into something you embody.

If you’ve been chasing the next milestone and still feel restless, nothing’s wrong with you. You’re running a pattern your brain was trained to run.

You can rewire it.
You can define success on your own terms.
You can achieve from alignment, not anxiety.

Because when your accomplishments flow from your values, the race finally becomes worth running—and, for the first time, you actually arrive.