I’ll echo this. I always thought I was particularly sensitive to caffeine and so went without it for years until recently. I’ll find that I’m not able to sleep for 12-14 hours after initial administration, and I rarely have more than 50mg in a day. I notice effects mostly wearing off around 20 hours after administration usually.
I do wonder, as some commenters stated, how much the natural accumulation of adenosine throughout the day interplays with this, though, in addition to the dopaminergic and serotonergic effects on mood modulation. I would imagine if one is elevated into a state of higher nervous system arousal, there could be feedback effects long after the direct adenosine receptor antagonism dwindles in efficacy.
I think you’re getting at something here, but I’d frame it a little differetly, notably that the learning from the experience of low morale could be that continuing hard work for hard work sake is not the answer to improving your conditions.
I think many of us are conditioned to want to “do our part,” especially if you find yourself to be a particularly value-driven person. Unfortunately one only need a cursory understanding of game theory to know if your strategy (“work harder when times are tough to improve material conditions”) is predictable, it will be exploited or, to put it more generously, “priced in” to labor models.
There’s a halfway decent book on this called “Exit, Voice, or Loyalty,” and I think at its root, low morale is a signal that Loyalty and/or Voice are not being respected, and an Exit might be the necessary reframe to preserve correlation between effort and outcome.