A lot of people advocate for self help through diet, exercise, meditation, taking time off, etc. While these all have their place, at a certain point and a certain level of stress you stop being able to do it. You end up cutting short during a workout because your brain won't switch off. The lack of sleep starts to affect all your cognitive function and then the diet starts to slip and before you know it you're eating like crap again.
At the best of times these routines of habit are just an escape from the stress or covering the actual problems related to not just running companies as a founder but actual all roles in life that require your ultimate sacrifice of mind, body and soul.
The diet, exercise, holidays and whatever else only go so far. Talking to other founders only goes so far. They're also struggling but it's hard to make time for each other. We're all busy just staying afloat. What we don't really talk about is the fact that you are more than your startup, that your life and identity is more. Part of that means other experiences or trauma earlier in your life could be magnified by the stresses of running a startup. The people starting companies already have to be a bit delusional.
The reality is it's excruciatingly hard and yet also still a first world problem because you have to be ultra privileged to be in a place that you're even thinking of starting a startup.
My last point here. Routines and habits don't always help. There has to be more. To ensure the stress and sacrifice are manageable at that level it can often also help to seek external council from a CEO coach, a therapist, etc. Your investors are not going to be helpful here, neither are your friends, family or other founders. You have obligations to all of them and you can't use them as a dumping ground. So seeking external guidance at a certain point is a must.
> While [diet, exercise, meditation, taking time off, etc] all have their place, at a certain point and a certain level of stress you stop being able to do it.
It certainly can feel like that, but it is not true. You are able to do it. The key is to recognize that you are overwhelmed, you no longer have control over your attention, and your first priority is to stop and recover that control.
If you operate without control over your attention, you will start making mistakes at higher frequency, and mistakes cause more mistakes, which cause more stress, in a cascade of mistakes. The brain is caught in a cycle of helpless reaction. It requires discipline to step away and regain your focus because every fiber of your being tells you "everything is important right now". This false belief is the root of much suffering.
The feeling of being overwhelmed is characterized by two things: a lack of clarity (a big picture where specific steps are unclear and who's relative importance is unclear), and a lack of focus (constantly thinking of the other steps when you're executing one). You are like a chef trying to do their job with a dull knife because they don't feel they have the time to sharpen it. This forces the chef to improvise ad hoc techniques to succeed with what is effectively a new, worse tool with which they have no practice. Improvisation is laudable and useful, but it's also stressful, high-risk.
Never accept that you are too stressed to deal with your stress - that's just the stress talking. :)
> Never accept that you are too stressed to deal with your stress
What are you supposed to do then?
How do you "not accept"?
> stop and recover that control.
Let's say there's a severe security issue in the software you've shipped. The production servers are down, at the same time, bad luck. And you've promised to ... something, on Monday. And dinner with your girl/boyfriend in the evening, or you've promised the kids [...].
(Or replace the above, with something more applicable in your case?)
What would you do?
One thing could be to power off all you servers and software (to temporarily stop the security problem), and take a few days off, email auto responder.
> It certainly can feel like that, but it is not true. You are able to do it.
Maybe the phrase "able to do it" is muddling things here...
People can exit a situation because it is no longer serving them well. Maybe the realized they now care less about that goal relative to other things, compared to before. Maybe their needs aren't being met.
Life is dynamic and complex. In general, there is nothing wrong with deciding to not do something anymore
Obviously, specific situations will have many specific factors. People might be disappointed. There may be significant impacts. Perhaps you made a serious commitment. These factors can all be considered. And still, sometimes the right decision is to move on and do something different.
I think you've muddled things with a poor quote. I wasn't speaking in general, I was speaking of particular behaviors that reduce stress. The point of my comment was to encourage those who feel that they can't pause to gather themselves. I wasn't talking about quitting or changing careers.
Good post but there are a couple of points I don't completely agree with:
> The people starting companies already have to be a bit delusional.
I do agree with this point!
> you have to be ultra privileged to be in a place that you're even thinking of starting a startup.
Not necessarily. I started my businesses in a shed in my parent's garden and got in to £20k of credit card debt. That's not really privilege, I put everything I (didn't have) on the line!
> Your investors are not going to be helpful here, neither are your friends, family or other founders.
I actually think other founders who are level or ahead of you in their startup are fantastically useful
Edit: Listening to the comments below about how I don't recognise my privilege - I totally get it - of course I do understand that relative to somebody who did not have a garden shed or a credit card to get in to debt with I was privileged. I'm not a total idiot nor am I ignorant that this is a form of privilege. It's just not Mum and Dad gave me a trust fund with £500k in it to go set something up - it's all relative and I appreciate my version of privilege was sufficient that I could take the first steps. Something that others won't enjoy, hence I am objectively privileged.
Having parents who are presumably supportive and can provide you with room and board and space to play around with your ideas makes it difficult to take the rest of the sentence seriously. In particular, lots of folks who support children, disabled spouses, ailing parents, and people with bad credit because they've been poor all their lives wouldn't have been able to do what you did
I don't generally find conversations around privilege to be useful since almost everyone is privileged compared to somebody else, and almost anything can be framed as privilege, so the term is very easily weaponized. At the same time, I think it's important to have awareness about the ways in which one can be privileged to someone else -- at least the large ways -- and parents can often be a very large way.
Not because you should feel guilty, but because it's very easy to lose sight of certain terms in the calculus of one's success, particularly the ones involving luck or help from others because it might feel like they minimize the contribution from your skills and blood/sweat/tears/creativity/appetite for risk/other stuff that you might be proud of. Mainly I think this stuff is important because I think self-awareness is important, and because I've found it helps with understanding and having more compassion for other people. That's all
Yes this was my insight into the comment also. To have parents is to have a safety net. That is often a privileged place to be that most people don't really understand. My parents are gone but I had savings that operated as my safety net and that was my place of privilege because most people do not have savings.
The most successful founders in the world had one of the two above if not more such as real wealth. Starting a company is a huge privilege but one that also requires an understanding that it ultimately becomes self sacrifice. To your employees, to your customers, to your investors. You get to chase your desires but must face the reality that you will only succeed if those are in service to others.
> Having parents who are presumably supportive and can provide
This is huge. I used to be very active in a sport that tends to attract rich people. Having myself grown up very poor, it was my fist window of visibility into that segment of society. I was always surprised by how many kids (in their 20s) were running startups as founders.
On one hand, they were living the full sacrifice. Taking no salary, living in a cramped apartment with cofounders, working so hard. So if any of them made it (I lost track), they did work for it and sacrificed.
But until I got to know them a bit better I always wondered how they're able to take on so much risk? What if it didn't work out? Having grown up poor I've always been hyper-aware of financial risk of every decision so I couldn't understand this.
The answer is that for them there was no risk. It was always a variant of "Dad is paying my apartment and food and gave me four years to give this a go, if it doesn't work out I'll shut down the startup and he'll hire me into his company".
I suspect a key word in the phrase GP was reacting to is "ultra". Is it some level of privilege to have parents lend you an outdoor shed's worth of space for your startup while you go $30K into credit card debt? Sure. Is that "ultra-privileged"? I don't think so.
It's all relative. Compared to many that is "ultra" privileged. I'm almost 30 and I can't even access a line of credit for 30k of debt because of stuff that happened earlier in life without having my parents as a safety net. So everything I have done on my own has been just after work using money that could be going to rent, savings, investments, new technology, etc.
I also have a high level of privilege because my upbringing allowed me to have unmetered access to a computer at 14 landing me a good programming job when I dropped out of college. So from the perspective of someone who didn't even have the opportunities I had, looking into the life of someone who started a company from a shed while living in their parent's house, it would appear "Ultra" Privileged. (I have plenty of friends from where I grew up that didn't even have support from their parents when they were 14-16, working after school to pay rent because their parents either died, or were too deadbeat to consistently make rent)
People who get financial help their parents are ultra ultra privileged then?
Ultra means extremely. You were saying that simonswords82 was extremely privileged. In the US, (edit: Europe) having parents and a garage is somewhat common, though, I think.
Alternatively you could say that you were unprivileged, and he privileged (without ultra).
I've been running a business for 25 years. On the outside it would appear I am self taught, self funded and built it all myself. I don't like to argue privilege in most cases but as I get older I have to say I do recognize things I had access to that gave me the ability to do this, where someone with the same drive simply could not. Back in the 90s as a teenager my parents bought a family computer (which would have been thousands), got access to the internet which at some point was long distance phone calls only, and kept it after I ran up a phone bill in the hundreds of dollars. I also built my business on open source software. We all build up from others work. Not everyone has understanding parents, some perhaps would have internet cancelled, or worse for running up such a large bill. My parents were not at all wealthy at the time. We don't control the cards we are dealt and I think arguing privilege is a lost cause. What we should do is if we get to a point where we can do it, try help give more opportunities to everyone.
Guessing you are in Europe though? Credit is pretty freely handed out in the US. At some point you have to ask for lower limits if anything. Getting .5-1x your yearly salary in credit card limit by 30 isn’t hard in the US, for example.
And 20k GBP will buy a lot more in your EU country than in the UK.
You know that your startup doesn’t need to target the US/UK/English speaking world right? You can launch a service or product in your EU country and, similar to the cost of living difference, your capital requirements will be much smaller.
I suppose that, over simplified, a startup in the US or UK can choose whatever to target in the whole world, whilst a startup in a poorer country might afford to target only poorer countries? (as its first step)
Massive agreement here. All the people talking about meditation and exercise being a great way to manage your mental health have clearly never had problems with their mental health.
I was perfectly fine doing that when I was 21 and had no stresses in my life. But between running a startup and having baby, somehow when other unexpected financial or relationship stresses hit you, you're going to have a rough time mentally.
Anecdotally, there has never been a situation where _some form_ of exercise and mindfulness has made my situation worse, but it hasn't always helped.
My reading of these posts isn't that "exercise and mindfulness will heal you". Anyone expecting that is naive, but like many things it's a tool to help.
> you're going to have a rough time mentally.
A rough time is a spectrum, and there are things you can so that are likely going to make things worse, just as there are things you can do that are likely to help.
Suppose you took a narcotic whenever you felt pain. Once you have taken the narcotic you would not be aware of the pain. In fact you might naturally go to the narcotic whenever you have pain as a means of avoiding the pain. You may even lose the ability to tell when you are feeling pain or where it's coming from because all you have to do is take the drug.
Meditation means different things to different people.
For many people it is a tool of repression, avoidance, and dissociation.
Now before you tell me that this is not a healthy way to practice I want you to acknowledge that everyone is merely using the terms mindfulness or meditation when they can mean different things, and it's important to remember that we don't automatically have a bias towards the correct understanding of things, and perhaps there's even a bias towards the worse practices of meditation, in a similar way that it's easier to fall down a hill than it is to climb up it. Entropy, as well, tells us that things tend to fall apart if they are not constantly maintaining themselves.
It's easy to dismiss what I say. but that'd be very typical of someone who doesn't want to hear it because they'd like to avoid what's really going on with themselves.
> Suppose you took a narcotic whenever you felt pain. Once you have taken the narcotic you would not be aware of the pain <...> You may even lose the ability to tell when you are feeling pain or where it's coming from because all you have to do is take the drug.
It's easy to get lost in anecdotes sometimes.
Sometimes (physically or mentally) the pain is too unbearable to handle to actually face up to what is wrong, and you need an aid. I've struggled with nerve pain for most of my adult life, and it comes and goes in waves, and when it comes, I know it's there, I can feel it, and I konw what I need to do to resolve it, however I'm unable to walk/sleep/<insert other daily activity here>. Using appropriate pain relief to let me be able to deal with the root of the problem is a great approach, and the exact same thing applies with mental health.
> It's easy to dismiss what I say. but that'd be very typical of someone who doesn't want to hear it because they'd like to avoid what's really going on with themselves.
I'm not dismissing what you say because I don't want to hear it, I'm dismissing it because you're not offering any suggestions, simply "it doesn't work for everyone", "it can be a crutch" or "You're doing it wrong". It's helpful to have a meaningful discussion on these topics, but muddying the waters with "actually no, in this case..." doesn't really help anyone.
100% agree. I’ve found it useful to process and actually feel what is going on, so I can do what I need to do.
When it’s bad, it’s hard to do because those things hurt.
Recognizing that, helps. And helps process things too. But it’s the opposite of pain relief. It’s understanding and working on the cause, which is rarely easy.
It doesn’t sell either, and only self reinforces on the long scale, if one can see it.
> When it’s bad, it’s hard to do because those things hurt.
Sometimes you know it hurts, but you need to keep going anyway. OP replied to me with the metaphor of physical pain, which works great in this case. If my trapped nerve hurts, I _know_ the root cause of it by now, I don't need it to keep stabbing me in the back for 2-3 weeks while I work on fixing the root cause.
Similarly for mental health, exercise (in particular) provides you with that capacity to handle things. If a person is under serious stress financially, they _know_ they're struggling. If exercising 2-3 times a week can help them keep that stress under control so it doesn't destroy a relationship in the process, that definitely seems like a worthwhile use of time (rather than "feeling" the stress).
in cases of mental health issues it's not sufficient to just exercise or work or sleep and eat right but to have means of processing things internally ... but exercise is massive because it has giant effects on brain chemistry and inflammation similar to what sleep does and it is what you'd be doing , generally, if you did have those means of processing things in place. (at least get to the point where you sweat.)
That's exactly my point. Using a "crutch" for want of a better word to avoid being in that state is the correct use of a crutch.
If you can't muster the executive function to perform basic tasks, you definitely can't handle the root cause of whatever is pushing you over the edge.
> At the best of times these routines of habit are just an escape from the stress...
No, not an escape. Amongst the many benefits, exercise, meditation, etc are a means (but not the only means) to quiet the mind and give a pause to thought. They force you to focus on the present moment and not to dwell in the past or future. Humans are incredible prediction machines but generally not all too accurate. Too much time spent thinking about the past and future without balance of the present creates needless suffering. None of this is new and has been known for millennia.
> None of this is new and has been known for millennia.
This is a lie. It has not been taught for centuries to quiet or attempt to repress your thoughts. What a terrible thing to propagate. There are different kinds of meditation. The problem is, you already know exactly what you're doing with the style you're practicing. Talk to a good therapist instead and they'll tell you to sit with your feelings, not attempt to quiet them. For a very important reason.
Who ever mentioned anything about repressing thoughts? Quieting the mind does not mean repressing feelings. Observe the thoughts when they arise, but do not judge. This is nothing new.
And just by a vague guess, chances are I have far more experience with meditation and meditators than you do. Now are you going to open your mind, doubt your thoughts, and confirm, or are you content to simply quiet them and move onto the next victim?
> at a certain point and a certain level of stress you stop being able to do it
You're assuming that stress tolerance is at a fixed level in all humans, and that everyone who still "maintains sanity" must have lower absolute stress.
I would argue that if you're putting yourself under so much long-term stress that you can't maintain healthy habits at all, you're basically guaranteed to go insane and fail.
Do they, though? I feel it's more instinct people have that sacrifice leads to reward, when in fact the people who suffer the most for too long drive themselves into a ditch.
Yeah, I dont think this is true either. It's a mix of a belief in the intrinsic effectiveness of the frugal protestant work ethic and credulity of the successful founders who hitch themselves to it when they write their origin story.
As you mentioned, many of the suggested techniques can only take you so far. And it's a problem of the privileged enough to think about a startup.
I find that one thing that can help, and that I would use both as self-help or as an investor judging a possible founder, is the amount of what I would call
"lucid self-awareness".
Is the founder able to phrase to others clearly what he is good on and why, and why the journey is worth taking, in more details than just: We should try or is where is the opportunity. Also is the founder also to detail where are the challenges and how can we overcame these.
At the personal level or at the corporate level. Warning signs would be explanations at the corporate level of the type: We have a certain runaway and we will work really hard. That is a plan running on statistical luck.
A positive explanation would be: We think we will not run out of runway because we have 10 paying customers and at the rate we are acquiring customers, we cover
expenses in 6 months.
At the personal level a warning sign would a behavioral pattern of overtime, overconfidence, depression, anxiety or irritability. Believe on the existence of an opportunity, relying on other founders deliverable without being able to articulate what they will be able to achieve, or for example not being able to clearly articulate what is your plan for failure.
As stress is mostly a symptom of lack of control, the founder able to articulate what parameters he can control, and what not under their control and what can be done to manage that, would engage in more appropriate stress management.
At the personal founder level, one example would be being able to articulate that: We don't have enough funds right now, and my other co-founder was just arrested and one of my VCs is really working for one of my competitors.
So I know where in 3 to 6 months I can get additional funds, even the objective is not guaranteed. I analyzed my co-founder legal problems and are likely to only affect his personal life. I have a plan not to share any more internal data with this VC or I will feed just standard info.
It's maybe not about the stress level, but about the existence or not of a plan to manage that stress level.
Although there might be a lot to criticize about Amazon, I always found, that this interview from 1997, is a good example of the lucid self-awareness, we should look for in a founder, and what might help manage stress:
Of course Jeff Bezos worked at an investment fund, so I am sure in case this Amazon thing had gone nowhere he had already a well fought failure plan.
So in shorter words, you are crossing a shark infested ocean, in a small raft, so make sure you prepare well. From your satellite phone, to your life raft, to provision, to navigation aids. If you are sail out and can still see the cost but you are already under stress, it's normal, but maybe reexamine the preparation you did before the journey, get back to port while you can.
Try later.
At the best of times these routines of habit are just an escape from the stress or covering the actual problems related to not just running companies as a founder but actual all roles in life that require your ultimate sacrifice of mind, body and soul.
The diet, exercise, holidays and whatever else only go so far. Talking to other founders only goes so far. They're also struggling but it's hard to make time for each other. We're all busy just staying afloat. What we don't really talk about is the fact that you are more than your startup, that your life and identity is more. Part of that means other experiences or trauma earlier in your life could be magnified by the stresses of running a startup. The people starting companies already have to be a bit delusional.
The reality is it's excruciatingly hard and yet also still a first world problem because you have to be ultra privileged to be in a place that you're even thinking of starting a startup.
My last point here. Routines and habits don't always help. There has to be more. To ensure the stress and sacrifice are manageable at that level it can often also help to seek external council from a CEO coach, a therapist, etc. Your investors are not going to be helpful here, neither are your friends, family or other founders. You have obligations to all of them and you can't use them as a dumping ground. So seeking external guidance at a certain point is a must.