The Mentally Healthy Entrepreneur: What You Need to Know

So thank you for joining me for this episode, we are going to talk about mental health and entrepreneurship. Now I recently read a study published in Entrepreneur Magazine, in which 72% of the entrepreneurs who participated reported problems with their mental health. 72%, that is a lot. Now there isn't probably anybody listening who doesn't know that being an entrepreneur is a high-stress lifestyle, particularly if you happen to be working in a startup. You are any part of startup culture and if you are part of the fast-paced and highly competitive tech space, but you do not have to be working in a tech startup to be affected by your mental health as an entrepreneur. So I'm gonna be covering a lot of territory in this episode, it's not going to be that long, but I think it's really important so please stay with me all the way to the end.

I'm gonna be referring to some really incredible people who are here to help all of us with our mental health as entrepreneurs, some of whom have been guests on this podcast and I'm gonna be linking you to other resources that you just may need now more than ever. So, I'm just jumping right in and here's the thing, if you are an entrepreneur, and I'm gonna define entrepreneur for the purpose of this episode very broadly. You may be a founder of a biotech startup. You might be a freelancer who has no help, you are doing all the things yourself. You may be a small business owner. You may run a virtual agency, you might be a consultant, you might be a coach, you might be an independent professional like myself. I'm using the term entrepreneur to define all of these areas because there are several things that all of us have in common. One of the most predominant ones, particularly for these last few years with the Covid Pandemic and everything related to it, is a sense of isolation.

Now, you do not have to be an entrepreneur to feel isolated because let's face it, everybody has been working from home for the last two, almost three years. But the type of isolation that I'm referring to that poses a significant risk to the mental health of entrepreneurs of all kinds is that most of us are living in a bubble. And what I'm referring to is, and this has certainly been true for me, so I'm not talking about anything that doesn't apply to me. It may apply to you to a little degree or to an extreme degree. And don't concern yourself with the fact that every single thing I talk about today may not be hitting you right between the eyes because overall, the mental health of entrepreneurs is significantly impacted by our lifestyle and I'm also gonna talk a little spoiler alert here for you. I'm also gonna talk about the fact that people who have issues with their mental health are more likely to become entrepreneurs. So there's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation here.

So isolation, most of us just simply do not have the time to have a social life outside of our business, especially if it's a startup, especially if it's in a highly competitive space, and especially if you are in the early stages. So if you feel isolated, it's because you are. If you feel that every conversation you have is about business, yours or others, that's because it's true, and that kind of isolation is absolutely a risk for your mental health and wellbeing. Every bit as much as if you were an elderly retiree who doesn't have friends or family nearby who doesn't know their neighbors, who no longer connects with former colleagues, that is a risk for poor mental health. So why would it be any different, for us, isolation is one of the key factors.

You know what else is a key factor for entrepreneurs struggling with their mental health is because many of us are hooked in hard to what is often referred to as toxic productivity, meaning we have to be busy every single moment of every single day, and that includes nights, weekends, and holidays in some way, shape or form for our business, or we feel guilty. We feel bored or we worry that we're falling behind and I have seen this with many of my clients, and I have also struggled with this myself. A lot of people start a business because they're overachievers and they eventually get tired of putting that much energy and effort into working for someone else. So they decide, hey, if I'm gonna work like a maniac, it might as well be for my own good. But one of the issues that sets us up for mental health struggles is the fact that most entrepreneurs don't have the best boundaries.

We not only don't have the best boundaries with other people, we often don't have the best boundaries with ourselves between what constitutes a workday? What constitutes a work week? When is enough enough? Most of us really struggle with this because we start to fantasize that if I step away for a minute, my competitor is gonna step in and pass me. So of course, we're always going to feel hooked and we're always gonna feel like there's more we can do, this is a really big risk factor for our mental health. You know what else is being overly identified with your business. Now, I am as guilty of this as you and everyone else, many of us refer to our business as our baby, and we really think of it as an extension of ourselves like we would a child this is dangerous.

Now up to a point it's amazing like, and I think this is true of every single thing you're going to hear me say today everything is fine, maybe even beneficial, necessary up to a point. It's the beyond that point stuff that puts us at risk and we tend to be very poor at identifying where the point lies. Like where is the line that should not be crossed, we don't see it and we often resist when those close to us point it out. It can be really, really, really addictive when you are starting your own business. And I think it's one of the reasons why so many of us become serial entrepreneurs because we really love the startup phase. We overly identify with our business, we become obsessed with our business, infatuated with our business and we don't wanna spend any time with anything or anyone else but our business. It can be very much like falling madly in love in a brand new relationship and if you're a serial entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

We get overly identified with the business it's the only thing we wanna think about. The only thing we wanna talk about, the only thing we wanna spend time with, and even when it starts to make us miserable and just a little bit cray cray, it's really hard for us to pull ourselves away. So you see how those three things kind of, they're like a little cluster, you know, isolation, toxic productivity and overly identified with the business. Something I am seeing more and more in the last few years is family structures where the female entrepreneur is the primary breadwinner, the sole breadwinner, or full intents and purposes, the financial head of household and which I think is phenomenal and amazing. But what's also true is that these female heads of household founders are also doing the lion's share of the child rearing and social networking and household management. So, it's literally two full-time jobs, but you're only getting paid for one, and if you're early stage, you're really not even getting paid for that.

This can be an absolute path to burnout, I don't care how strong you are, I don't care how little sleep you think you need, I don't care how exciting you find the whole thing, burnout is gonna happen. It's not an if it's a matter of when, and you know many of us, no matter what path to entrepreneurship we happen to have taken like I said before, there's a lot of chicken or egg stuff here. I mean, what kind of people become entrepreneurs? Why would anyone want to work like 80 hours a week for an unstable, unpredictable income when they could work half that and know exactly what they're gonna earn each week. I mean, people who become entrepreneurs are definitely cut from a different cloth. And what's also true, and I'm not gonna get heavy into statistics because you can look all that stuff up on your own, I will link to some reputable studies in reputable sources, but I don't wanna get caught up in the numbers because what I really wanna do is sort of paint the bigger picture of what are the mental health risks of entrepreneurship.

Why are people with certain mental health conditions drawn to become entrepreneurs? How do we know the warning signs and what the freak do we do about it, this is my gift to you for Mental Health Month. I'm not gonna get caught up in a lot of statistics and research, but with respect to the chicken or egg, it's true, and I have read this multiple, multiple times, that people who have diagnosed or suspected mental disorders are more likely to become entrepreneurs. I didn't make this up, it is not my opinion. It is actually factual and has been validated by a number of reputable sources. I have a lot of thoughts about it, I have a lot of personal experience and experience working with clients over many, many years, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that many of us who are entrepreneurial have ADHD traits.

We may have the actual diagnosis as I do, and many of my clients do, or we may have the traits, but we either never got around to getting diagnosed or our traits don't impair us enough to qualify for the diagnosis. But in order to be successful as an entrepreneur, a lot of the traits of ADHD, it's like a hand and a glove. So, a lot of people with these traits are very much drawn to entrepreneurship. What's also true is if you happen to have ADHD, you're probably more likely to have an unstable work history because you either quit every time you got a little bored or you got fired because you don't have a filter, and you just let some things fly that would've been better off kept to yourself. This is especially true in the earlier years of our career when we haven't learned a lot of self-restraint and why there are times when it's really good to just keep those lips firmly pressed together, no matter how much you wanna tell somebody off.

So if you have ADHD, you're more likely to be an entrepreneur. Now, you may not have ADHD, but you may have other traits that lend themselves well to being an entrepreneur. And I recently recorded an episode of this podcast about all the incredible people who are what I call accidental entrepreneurs. These are the folks who never intended to have their own business, who never saw themselves as being entrepreneurial, but they ended up needing to start their own business because they aged out of a glamor industry. They got pushed out of a job and simply couldn't find another. Or they're in their fifties and it's so much harder to get a job, even get an interview, even get a response to your freaking email.

So they just decided, well, if nobody wants to hire me, then I'm gonna start a business. It's also true that many of us who have mental health issues. And the top five that are highly correlated with entrepreneurship, ADHD, as I've mentioned, anxiety, depression, substance abuse. Those are all very, very common, and sadly, what is increasingly common is suicidality among entrepreneurs. There have been several very high profile entrepreneurs who have unalived themselves in the last few years, and I remember reading about these cases at the time and thinking, I wonder if this would've happened if she was a teacher or a stay-at-home mom. It's undeniable that working for yourself is in many cases, much more stressful than working for others. What's also true in these modern times is that the concept of job security is really kind of a quaint, throwback to a bygone era.

People are realizing that if they actually wanna start a business, they're not going to be taking risks that are that much bigger than working in certain industries where there's all kinds of mergers and acquisitions going on, and things are constantly being outsourced and entire categories of employees in the thousands are being let go from one day to the next. So the notion of betting on yourself, that used to be like, you'd have to be crazy to do something like that. Well, in certain industries, you'd have to be crazy to think that you've got job security working for an employer. But whether you are a serial entrepreneur, an accidental entrepreneur, something that I see that affects our mental health is that many people just don't wanna have a boss.

They don't want to have a boss. They don't wanna be told what to do, how to do it, when they have to come in, when they can take a lunch break, how long that lunch break, all of this nonsense, and especially women who tend to have lives that are more complicated, have more roles and more moving parts. But you know, if you happen to have a diagnosed mental condition, it might be anxiety, it might be depression, it might be bipolar, it might be ADHD, you might be OCD, you might have an eating disorder. You might struggle with addictive behavior, substance dependency, all of these things are very common in entrepreneurship. But if you are a woman and you became an entrepreneur because you don't wanna have a boss, that doesn't necessarily mean you want to be the boss, even the boss of yourself in some cases. And something I have learned over and over and over with many of my clients, they started a business because they didn't wanna have a boss.

They have a lot of inner conflicts about being a boss and frankly about being an authority figure, because let's face it, ladies there are great many of us who have had terrible experiences with authority figures all the way back to childhood, and oftentimes very few mentors. So this is something that if we are unable to work this through, like I'm the boss now and deal with all of the baggage that we might have around that boss role, around that authority figure role, the inner conflict alone can absolutely fuel anxiety and depression and really make your life and your business quite unmanageable. Another reason why many entrepreneurs struggle with their mental health is because when we are talking about the kinds of businesses that are looking for funding. Women don't get the money, a very small percentage of female founders are able to secure funding compared to men.

There's been very little change in this regard, so this is a source of stress because oftentimes if you're looking for funding before you can get angel investors or any kind of buy-in from people who are not part of your friends and family circle, you first have to demonstrate that you have exhausted all of your friends and family potential. They wanna know that someone has backed you, someone has thrown in with you, someone thinks you can make it, and you've been in the game long enough that maybe they're willing to throw you a few thousands, millions, depending on the business, but women are still not able to compete for funding on anything resembling a level playing field that is a huge source of anxiety and stress for female founders and significant compromise to their wellbeing and their mental health.

I've mentioned this previously, but women who become entrepreneurs still tend to carry the majority of the household and child rearing responsibilities. So very stressful job, toxic productivity, difficulties stepping away from work, over identification with the business, and you gotta clean the toilet and change the diapers. There's no way that isn't going to compromise your mental health. Now, completely apart from entrepreneurship a statistic that I have quoted a number of times is that something like 40 something percent of women over the age of 40 in the US are on antidepressants, which means that if you are a female entrepreneur, you are probably on antidepressants too. Ultimately, we are the ones that have to be responsible for correctly assessing our bandwidth, for creating and implementing healthy boundaries, and for keeping our eye out for symptoms leading to burnout.

If you are lucky enough to have someone in your life who's minding those things for you, who's managing those things for you and who is saying, Hey, I'm concerned about your mental health, you are in a very rare and exclusive minority because again, most of us surround ourselves with other people who are living in the same kind of lifestyle. We are in these echo chambers. We are in these bubbles. So nobody wants to be the one who says in your mastermind, Hey, I'm concerned about your mental health, I'm wondering if you're not doing too much. In most places that would sound like a threat or an accusation, or even a putdown. You know what else is true about entrepreneurship that can make it really, really difficult to manage our mental health and to even recognize when we need some kind of help is that the brain responds to stress regardless of its source in the same way.

So when most of us talk about stress, we're thinking about distress. We're thinking about the bad kind of stress, we're thinking about the, you know, next round of funding didn't go through, or the beta failed, or we lost an important source or whatever, whatever, whatever. Something didn't work out the way we wanted it to or something that we were looking forward to didn't come through. Happens all the time, and you kind of have to just keep moving even though you're dealing with that distress well, guess what? The brain experiences just as much stress when we succeed beyond our wildest expectations, isn't that bizarre? You could be having the worst day, the worst news, the worst setback, and your brain will register the same amount of stress if you suddenly had a complete windfall.

It's the magnitude of change compared to baseline. So whether things got really bad or really good, it doesn't really matter which direction. What matters is the delta of change from baseline to where we are now. So surprisingly, when you sign a big deal, you get a fantastic round of funding. You have all your entrepreneurial dreams suddenly coming true. Well, nobody's thinking she's at risk for a mental health breakdown right now, but you may very well be because your brain doesn't really register the difference. So if things go much worse than you expect, or much better, chances are your mental health may be at risk, and there may be something that you need to do.

Now, I have spoken many times on this podcast about the impact of what I call the unholy trinity of procrastination, perfectionism, and people pleasing and why these are such common behaviors for just about all female entrepreneurs along with imposter issues, rejection, sensitivity, and frankly just not having had as much life experience dealing with taking risks, experiencing failure and developing resiliency as our male counterparts. Now, what does all this add up to, a greater likelihood that we are going to suffer from anxiety and depression, challenges with confidence, guilt, shame, and attempts to manage unrealistic expectations that fuel all of the above. I mean, women categorically, and of course there are exceptions, but women as a category compared to men simply have less experience with dancing, with failure and not taking things so personally.

Now a concept that I have been studying recently that is from a different context, I think applies equally well. Here I came across a British woman, a British journalist on TikTok, her name is Rose Hackman. She recently published a book called Emotional Labor. I've heard that term before, I believe Seth Godin uses the term emotional labor, and I started thinking, what is she talking about now. She is a feminist and she predominantly talks about the unpaid emotional labor of women in heterosexual marriages and the toll that it takes. But as I continued to listen to her content and I started reading her book, Emotional labor by Rose Hackman, and I will link to it in the show notes, I started realizing that the same is true for women in entrepreneurial businesses.

Let's think about it this way, unless we're selling a product, we're selling a service, and many of the businesses that I work with and the entrepreneurial women that I work with are in a service-based business. They have creative services, professional services, coaching, consulting, physicians, attorneys, you name it. The emotional labor that women tend to do in their own business takes as much of a toll as the emotional labor that women do in a heterosexual marriage, and what am I referring to? It's all the soft skills that most of us have become maybe not super skilled at, but we know how to do them and the soft skills, the emotional skills, the emotional labor in a service-based business that tends to fall to women affects all of these areas, scope of work, negotiation, customer service, customer complaints, marketing, sales, onboarding, user experience.

If you think about it, the emotional labor that women do incorporates all of those areas in a business, and they're kind of expected of us that we do those things. If a woman is abrupt or someone says, so I know your offer says this, this and this, but I was thinking I'd also like most women are not gonna say, it is what it is, take it or leave it. They may want to, I have certainly wanted to, but most of the time we are going to go through the emotional labor of demonstrating our value, explaining whatever it is that this potential customer doesn't recognize about why we do things the way we do them and all of that is uncompensated effort. It also sets us up for having a lot more stress in our business when a customer is dissatisfied, even if we know intellectually they're entitled, they're delusional, they're manipulative, they're exploitative.

We still often tend to take it personally and feel bad about it, and many of the women that I know find it very, very difficult to simply say no, and not justify, rationalize, or overexplain. That is all emotional labor and we end up working much harder for both the sales and the non-sales than perhaps we might wish to, all of which eats up our bandwidth and pushes us further towards mental health problems. So all of this is to say we have a problem, we have a legitimate problem, and not just a few of us, most of us that the majority of us, 72%, so what can we do? Well, you've heard me say this before and you will no doubt hear m say it again.

Number one is self-awareness, and I would say self-awareness and self-acceptance are neck and neck because paying attention to ourselves and recognizing I'm hurting, I'm struggling, I am anxious af, I'm depressed. My ADHD symptoms are off the chart. I can't sleep. I have somatic problems, I've got heartburn, I've got back aches. You know, I can't remember the last time I saw the inside of the gym, but I keep paying my membership fees cuz I think somehow that means maybe one day I'll go back. All of this is really, really common and even though you're probably thinking, yeah, well, how the hell am I supposed to get to the gym if I can't even keep up with my accounts receivable? Because you have to, nobody but you can make your mental health, your wellbeing, your self-care priority.

Nobody can and I promise you, nobody will. Not your partner, not your kids, not your business partner, not your team, certainly not your clients. Nobody on social media is gonna say, Hey, cut yourself some slack, give yourself a break. Your wellbeing, your mental health cannot afford to be an afterthought because burnout is real. It is an ever present risk, and I gotta tell you, even though it's not necessarily easy to maintain your mental health, it's much less effortful to maintain it than to try to get it back once it's been lost. And I can tell you from having had several episodes of major depression in my life, that is the truth. Now, I know it probably sounds like a lot. I know you're probably thinking Diann for criminy’s sake, I am so overextended. How the hell am I supposed to improve my mental health? I mean, I'm supposed to find the time and I get it.

Start with one area, one area, and I would strongly recommend that area is sleep. Most entrepreneurs are sleep deprived, and without banging the drum too much, I will tell you there's a reason why sleep deprivation is the most common form of torture worldwide. It's very effective and it doesn't cost anything. You don't have to buy any torture implements. All you have to do is keep somebody awake. And the truth is, if you keep somebody awake or you deprive them of sleep, or you only let them sleep for a few minutes or an hour, an hour and a half at a time, and you wake 'em up within as little as 72 hours, they're gonna start to fracture mentally, emotionally.

You can literally induce a psychotic break in the majority of people by keeping them awake for three days straight. And if they happen to have bipolar disorder, they are going to be in a full blown episode, manic or depressed if you do that. You know, most people think that when it comes to mental health, there's us and them, we're mentally healthy and they are not. But I gotta tell you, from having been a therapist for many, many years, and having a family that is full of humans who have a variety of different mental health conditions, the line between us and them is a lot more fragile than you think. They are us. We are them. If you're lucky enough to be a person who doesn't struggle with mental health conditions, has never struggled with mental health conditions, and you are a serial entrepreneur, you are a rare, rare beast indeed.

We need to get enough sleep, we simply must. Now, if you are fortunate enough that you can work with your natural rhythms and you can do things like get up when it's a good time for you, take naps, create a split shift in your business the way I have in mine. I work two different periods of time in the day and I structure my work around my natural rhythms. Now, this is a privilege I have earned by being at the stage of life that I am. If I still had young kids at home, I would not be able to do this. But I'm at a stage of life now where I can orchestrate my work sprints better around my natural rhythms. If you have the ability to do that, by all means do so.

Another thing I would strongly recommend for maintaining or restoring, protecting your mental health as an entrepreneur, get out of the freaking echo chamber please. You owe it to yourself to make the effort to interact with some people in your life who are not fellow entrepreneurs. You might think you don't have anything in common with them, they're boring, they don't get it, and so on and so forth. But when everybody you surround yourself with is another stressed out, toxically productive entrepreneur, that's gonna compromise you, there's no way it wouldn't. Because we are affected by the people we surround ourselves with and to that point, I strongly recommend that you choose your support networks carefully. Support networks you say, huh? Yeah, I know, you're probably not doing that either. Over this past year, I pulled out of all kinds of different group programs and I went all in on just a couple that I very carefully vetted because I believe every one of us needs safe spaces.

If you need medication and you have access to the resources to get it, hey, it doesn't fix you. It doesn't cure you, but it's a very helpful tool, especially if you are depressed and if you're bipolar. I don't have to tell you, you need medication and you need it for life, and if anybody wants to debate me on that, hit me up in the DMs or send me an email. Permission has to be granted to yourself by yourself. Hey, we're all afraid of failing. We are all afraid of missing opportunities. We are afraid of losing. We are afraid of loss. We're afraid of our competitors passing us by these are powerful forces, but they also cause us to live in a chronic state of fight or flight, and the more time we spend in fight or flight, the less capable we actually are of making good decisions in our business and life. So you can consider this episode a permission slip signed by yours truly saying your mental health matters and do what you need to do to secure it but ultimately you need to give yourself that permission.

So I said I was gonna give you a couple of names. I have already mentioned Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman. You should absolutely check her out, very smart lady, very well spoken and she really got me thinking on all these levels about all the many ways that women work and aren't compensated for it, and what a toll it takes on all of us. The two other people I wanted to remind you of are Nicole Lewis-Keeber, who has been twice on this podcast. Nicole is a licensed clinical social worker, coach, speaker. She has Love Your Business school and Do No Harm and her body of work, her thought leadership, her expertise is on the intersection between entrepreneurship and trauma. I have learned so much from Nicole, including how many, if not the majority of people who are entrepreneurial have a trauma history. I'm not gonna steal her thunder, check out her work. You will learn a ton and probably blow your mind a little bit.

And the other person is Shulamit BerLevtov, she is a Canadian, therapist who works with entrepreneurs. In fact, her handle is the entrepreneur's therapist so there are people who are uniquely qualified to help you, whether the issue is trauma, whether the issue is therapy. Maybe you need an accountability partner. Maybe you need somebody to help you make the decisions to do what you know you need to do to secure, to protect your mental health, not just May mental health awareness month, but June, July, August, and all of the other months as well. You may be able to make some progress in your business, in your life without minding your mental health, but it's only a matter of time before just winging it when it comes to that, is no longer going to be enough, and if you're thinking, okay, okay, Diann, all right, I get it, enough with the lecture, I'm definitely gonna take care of my mental health, but not right now because I have to do this first or that first like I'll do it when I reach a certain revenue number. I'll do it when I fill a certain position on my team. I'll do it when I have a team. I'll do it when our profit reaches a certain margin. I'll do it whenever, whenever, whenever, whenever.

Okay, listen, can I get real with you? I mean like I haven't already been real with you. Okay, there's no good time. There's no better time. There's no best time to take care of your mental health. There's only now, you do not have to wait for your next round of funding. You do not need to wait until some magical, mystical thing occurs because like I said before, it takes a whole lot less effort to prevent a mental health crisis or a breakdown than it does to recover from one. And if it's not perfectly obvious already, you're worth it. Okay, I think you heard me loud and clear, if you wanna talk about this more, if you have questions, you have concerns, you have comments, or you just wanna spitball on this topic of mental health and entrepreneurship, you know where to find me, LinkedIn and Instagram, and of course you can also email me diann@diannwingertcoaching.com. Please take care of you, it matters.