Working deeply with AI creates a mental crash I'm learning to navigate. Pre-AI, a solid 6-hour sesh meant 1-2 meaningful cycles of work. A cold start + a messy middle + the dopamine hit of finishing something. Done. Now I'm running 50-100 of those cycles a day. Each one has the same emotional weight: ramp up, grind through the hard part, feel the rush when it works. Repeat. That's 100x the tax on your nervous system. Huberman talks about the pain of learning - how the brain actually experiences cognitive load as discomfort. Working with AI stacks that discomfort 100 times by dinner. The end-of-day crash is real. I'm still figuring out what "deep rest" means when you've compressed a month of mental cycles into a single afternoon.