Maintaining Your Mental Health – Entrepreneurship comes with a lot of perks. You’re able to follow your passions, set your own schedules, and hopefully make a lot of money. However, the business owner’s lifestyle is hardly all sunshine and roses — especially when you’re in the startup phase.
Man Struggling with mental health
Along with all of the other stresses and strains that come with the activity, launching a business can also take a toll on your mental health. Let’s go through a quick breakdown of some of the more common mental health concerns for entrepreneurs as well as some suggestions for how to manage them.
Ways to maintain your mental health
Common Mental Health Battles for Entrepreneurs
Mental health is a growing concern in modern life. The pressure of living in an information-heavy, informed, and technological age can be a heavy burden for the human mind.
When you decide to start a business, you only add to many of those mental strains. For instance, it’s easy to feel stressed out by an excessive amount of responsibilities. Modern business owners have a growing list of things to do.
This starts with basic things like creating products or honing services that you specialize in, but it doesn’t stop there. Even if you’re operating a brick-and-mortar service, as a business owner you must go above and beyond to find success. You need to create a digital presence, offer customer perks, maintain stellar customer service, and generally ensure that you’re offering a superior product to an audience of well-informed consumers.
The stress that comes with this pressure can take its toll on the mind. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg, too. Anxiety can creep in as you fret over things like hiring the right staff, managing vendors, or paying the bills. Depression can even sneak into the picture as you begin to feel isolated from loved ones or become sleep-deprived.
There are plenty of things threatening the mental health of an entrepreneur. The good news is that there are ways to safeguard against the detrimental effects of these threats to one’s mental health.
Ways to Maintain Your Mental Health During the Startup Phase
Here are a few of the best ways to protect your mental health as you go about chasing your business dreams.
Separate Work and Personal Life
One of the top reasons entrepreneurs struggle is due to an inability to separate their personal and professional lives. This is already a struggle for many professionals during the new remote-friendly era of work. Even salaried workers have had to learn how to work from home and still keep a line of demarcation between business and pleasure.
As an entrepreneur, this struggle is even more pronounced. You may have to wear many hats. Along with leading your company, you might serve as the accountant, head of product development, manager, marker, and many other roles. This can lead to an endless stream of responsibilities that keep you tethered to work at all times of the day and night.
If you want to maintain some sanity as you build your business, create clear boundaries between your work and personal lives. You can do this in a variety of ways, such as:
- Turning off notifications when you’re off the job;
- Creating priority lists to remind yourself about non-work-related items of importance in your life;
- Dedicating an area where you can focus on work — and then leave it behind when you’re off the clock.
Putting your foot down and delineating the difference between the work and personal halves of your life, can help you maintain a healthy mindset.
Practice Healthy Thinking
One of the best ways to strengthen your mind against poor health is by proactively developing positive patterns of thinking. This includes a variety of healthy mindset activities, such as:
- Gratitude: The ability to see the best in something and feel genuinely grateful for what you have cannot be overstated. It can help you maintain the right perspective no matter what’s going on around you.
- Thankfulness: Going hand-in-hand with gratitude is thankfulness. The ability to express thankfulness for the goodness in your life is a powerful tool that can help you avoid slipping into negative thought patterns.
- Self-awareness: Assessing the condition of your mind, body, and soul is a critical part of long-term success for an entrepreneur. If you’re low on sleep, feeling stressed, or generally discouraged, you must be able to recognize that fact and act on it accordingly.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the ability to be in the present. From assessing your own needs to being aware of those of your loved ones, if you can practice mindfulness, it can help you stay positive and healthy in your mind.
Practicing healthy thinking isn’t something you can turn on and off. It takes practice and patience to develop. You can use things like cognitive distortions to help you identify unhealthy patterns of thought.
The process doesn’t stop even once you’ve improved the way that you think, either. It’s important to return to this concept regularly to ensure that you’re maintaining that positivity as you go along.
Get Enough Sleep
Before you roll your eyes and think “that’ll never happen,” read the title once more. We’re talking about enough sleep. Not plenty of sleep. Not an abundance of sleep. Just enough. If that’s too much to ask, you should seriously reconsider if you should own your own business.
Getting enough sleep is a growing concern in the business world. In fact, when asked, more than a quarter of employers already offer apps to support sleep and relaxation to their employees. There’s a reason for the investment. Poor sleep costs U.S. companies hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
As your own boss, it’s important to invest in getting enough sleep. Seven hours is typically recommended as a minimum threshold for adults.
It’s also important to think about the quality of sleep that you’re getting. Anything from backaches to stress can impact your sleep. If you’re struggling to get good sleep, practice some of that self-awareness and find ways to improve your slumber, such as:
- Avoiding caffeine in the evening.
- Getting a quality mattress, such as a cooling mattress to offer a cooler sleeping environment.
- Practicing physical therapy that is tailored to help relieve stress.
- Creating space in your home to work out regularly.
Safeguarding Your Mental Health as a Business Owner
There are many ways to guard your mental health as you launch your business. Good sleep, healthy thinking, and setting boundaries are great ways to get started.
Whatever you specifically do, though, the important thing is to find ways to watch out for your mental health as you go along. That way, whenever the pressures of being a business owner begin to build, you have ways to manage the situation and maintain your mental health over time.
