14 ms·

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 cert

by asim 5y ago

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.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>Routines and habits don't always help. 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.
- ekanes 5y ago
  No, you’re guaranteed to suffer. All of the biggest companies start this way. I’m not saying this is great for you, or even that it’s required to do big things, but to say you’ll fail isn’t true. This suffering is a function of your startup’s rate of growth.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >All of the biggest companies start this way. 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.
    - pydry 5y ago
      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.
jakey_bakey 5y ago
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.
- maccard 5y ago
  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.
  - blueprint 5y ago
    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.
simonswords82 5y ago
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.
- vector_spaces 5y ago
  > parent's 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
belter 5y ago
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: "Jeff Bezos 1997 Interview": https://youtu.be/rWRbTnE1PEM https://youtu.be/rWRbTnE1PEM 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.
javajosh 5y ago
> 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. :)
- leaflets2 5y ago
  > 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. But is that going to cause less stress or more
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  > 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.
yobbo 5y ago
> 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. Stress tolerance is relative.
mtberatwork 5y ago
> 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.
- blueprint 5y ago
  > 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.
  - mtberatwork 5y ago
    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.
    - blueprint 5y ago
      You just did. Awaken yourself.
      - leaflets2 5y ago
        S/he wrote: > Give a pause to though That's very different from what you wrote: > repress your thoughts (I suspect you have to me extremely odd ideas about what meditation is, and why try it. I wonder if you'd actually like it)

by asim 5y ago

AussieWog93 5y ago

>Routines and habits don't always help. 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.

ekanes 5y ago
No, you’re guaranteed to suffer. All of the biggest companies start this way. I’m not saying this is great for you, or even that it’s required to do big things, but to say you’ll fail isn’t true. This suffering is a function of your startup’s rate of growth.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >All of the biggest companies start this way. 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.
  - pydry 5y ago
    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.

jakey_bakey 5y ago

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.

maccard 5y ago
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.
- blueprint 5y ago
  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.

simonswords82 5y ago

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.

vector_spaces 5y ago
> parent's 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

belter 5y ago

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: "Jeff Bezos 1997 Interview": https://youtu.be/rWRbTnE1PEM https://youtu.be/rWRbTnE1PEM 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.

javajosh 5y ago

> 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. :)

leaflets2 5y ago
> 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. But is that going to cause less stress or more
dwaltrip 5y ago
> 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.

yobbo 5y ago

> 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. Stress tolerance is relative.

mtberatwork 5y ago

> 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.

blueprint 5y ago
> 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.
- mtberatwork 5y ago
  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.
  - blueprint 5y ago
    You just did. Awaken yourself.
    - leaflets2 5y ago
      S/he wrote: > Give a pause to though That's very different from what you wrote: > repress your thoughts (I suspect you have to me extremely odd ideas about what meditation is, and why try it. I wonder if you'd actually like it)