When Your Soul Burns: The Psychological Cost of Entrepreneurship

Any way you look at it, owning your own business is expensive. Regardless, you probably dream of having one.

But are you really willing to pay the price?

Great! Then factor in anxiety, mood swings, exhaustion, failure, helplessness, and a bunch of other things that successful business people rarely talk about (it’s not for talking). Without a doubt, building something of your own is not easy.

The dark side of this venture is quite unpleasant.

Some entrepreneurs are willing to “pay” themselves and do it to get on the roller coaster of horrors that sometimes happens and lead them to the success of their business adventure.

By all measures of success, Bradley Smith runs an excellently performing business. He is the CEO of Rescue One Financial.

It is an American financial services firm that had sales of nearly $32 million last year.

It has also grown 1,400% in the last three years and is ranked number 310 on the Top 500 list of America’s most successful companies.

Most people certainly wouldn’t guess that in the past, Smith was facing financial bankruptcy and on the verge of a total mental breakdown.

In 2008, he was advising nervous clients on dealing with their debts.

His demeanor is very calm, but it hides something else….

Twice as many of them are in debt and can’t get out of the situation successfully either – they started their own debt settlement company. He took on a $60,000 loan, sold his Rolex watch, and bought the first premium from his job as a stockbroker. Painfully swallowing his ego, he took a $10,000 loan from his father at 5% interest, having also signed a promissory note.

Ironically, he was raised by him with maxims like “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and “Never do business with relatives.”

He tries to instill courage in his partners and employees, but his nerves cannot stand it. For those days, he remembers how, at dinner, he and his wife drank wine for $5 a bottle and hardly exchanged a word.

Things get even more difficult when they find out they are expecting their first child. Normally, this is wonderful news, but not at this time.

He spends sleepless nights staring at the ceiling.

Or he wakes up at 4 in the morning thinking about solutions and how to make the business profitable faster. After eight months of constant worry, Smith is finally making money.

In today’s culture, successful entrepreneurs are heroes. For many people, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have become undisputed idols.

However, most of them hide their demons.

Before appearing on the big stage of the successful, they went through moments of anxiety and a state of complete powerlessness, through despair, in which they saw no way out and thought that everything would collapse.

Until recently, it was unheard of for any of the brave heroes to admit such a thing. By no means did they allow themselves to appear vulnerable, but practiced impression management, as it is known among social psychologists, or “Pretend to be successful until you are.”

EnSite Solutions CEO Toby Thomas explains the phenomenon with a man riding a lion situation:

When people look at him, they think: “Well done to him, he succeeded!” What a brave man! Not everyone can do that!” And the man on the lion’s back thinks to himself: “How the hell did I end up on this lion, and what can I do so that it doesn’t eat me in the end?”

The moors to “own business”

Not everyone shares such experiences publicly.

The suicides of two famous startup founders, Jody Sherman (Ecomom) and Ilya Zhitomirsky (Diaspora), have shaken the US startup community and opened up a huge discussion about entrepreneurship and mental health.

What next?

More and more people in the business are starting to talk about their inner struggles and issues in an effort to remove the stigma around depression and anxiety that keeps sufferers from seeking help.

They use different channels and means to make the topic hot.

Sean Percival, former vice president of MySpace and co-founder of a children’s clothing startup, released a piece on his site in which he admitted:

With my own business and depression, I was on the edge and back to it several times within a year.

He urges people to write to him if they are going through such a period and actively encourages all desperate entrepreneurs to seek professional help at the US national suicide prevention hotline.

Brad Feld, a partner at Foundry Group, also started blogging about his depression. He struggled with the problem throughout his adult conscious life. The response to his articles is unexpectedly great – he receives hundreds of emails, many of them from business owners.

All of them are successful people with charismatic personalities, and they are trying to defeat the same enemy quietly. And they all don’t have the strength to talk about it.

They consider it a weakness, and they are ashamed.

What’s worse, in fact, is that they carefully hide it.

If you, too, have taken the risk of your own business, all this is probably familiar to you. Owning your own business is a stressful job that puts you in emotional turmoil.

According to a study by Harvard Business School professor Shikar Ghosh, three out of four new companies fail, and more than 95% of them do not realize their original plans.

Entrepreneurs juggle multiple roles and face multiple stumbling blocks—losing customers, disputes with partners, heavy competition, and everyday problems. And by the way, they must also provide the salaries of the staff. In fact, traumatic experiences accompany them all the time in all kinds of situations.

Everything becomes even more complicated because they cannot keep up with the pace as they neglect their health. They eat too much or too little, don’t sleep enough, and lack physical activity.

They go straight into an intense startup mode where they push their own limits and literally torture their body.

This naturally also triggers frequent mood swings….

After all, you’ve read so far, it’s hardly surprising that entrepreneurs experience more anxiety than their employees.

According to research, 34% of them suffer from anxiety, which is 4% more than the employee result, and 45% are stressed, which is three percentage points above the employee data.

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But it’s more than just stress that pushes them to the brink. Many of them share that they have innate personality traits that make them more prone to mood swings.

It is not at all unexpected that:

Energetic, motivated, and creative people lean towards both sides – they have an entrepreneurial spirit but also fall into strong emotional states.

It is these conditions that include depression, despair, feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness, loss of motivation, and suicidal thoughts.

Yes, to be among the stars means to bear this disadvantage as well.

The same incredible inclinations that lead entrepreneurs to success can sometimes quickly “eat” them.

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, say entrepreneurs are susceptible to the dark side of obsession. They conducted interviews with such people as part of a study on entrepreneurial passion.

Many of the questions involved reveal a clinical obsession, including strong feelings of despair and anxiety that have the potential to lead to serious problems.

In support of this is the thesis of John Gartner from Johns Hopkins University Medical School. In his book On the Verge of Hypomania: The Relationship Between (Little) Insanity and (Big) Success in America, he argues that hypomania, which is often overlooked, is probably “responsible” for some of the strengths of entrepreneurs but also for their weaknesses. Hypomania, which is the mild version of mania, often occurs in close to manic-depressive states.

This is how Gartner describes the situation in a nutshell:

“If you’re a geek, you think you’re God. If you are a hypomaniac, you think that you are a gift from God and that you should be invested in just like technology. We’re talking about different levels of megalomania but with the same symptoms.”

Gartner says that there are many hypomaniacs in America and, therefore, many entrepreneurs because the national character has developed in the course of immigration processes. And it adds something very key to the reasons behind the famous entrepreneurial spirit:

Americans are a people who, so to speak, have made a selection for themselves. Immigrants have extraordinary ambition, energy, drive, and tolerance for risk, which makes them seize every opportunity to create a better future. These are biologically based character traits. When you populate the entire continent with such people, you get a nation of entrepreneurs.

Although they possess incredible motivation and innovative thinking, hypomaniacs are much more at risk of depression than other ordinary people.

Depressive states can be activated by setbacks but also by all sorts of other things that slow down the momentum of hypomania.

“Hypomaniacs are like border dogs – they have to run. If you lock them in a room, they will gnaw the furniture, go crazy, and rage. They just have to be constantly busy with something, active, swamped with work”, says Gartner

It’s darkest before dawn or how to endure

No matter how mentally resilient a business owner is, major setbacks can undermine their confidence and ruin them quickly. A spectacular failure can also happen to the experienced.

In 1992, Mark Voeppel founded Pinnacle Strategies, a consulting company, and in 2009, the phone just stopped ringing.

Pressured by the financial crisis, his clients are more worried about their survival than optimizing their business.

His sales dropped by 75%, and he was forced to lay off quite a few people. He also sells some of the assets – cars, jewelry, anything he can get money for. His confidence plummets.

As an executive director, he has built up to others and to himself the image of the master of the universe, and suddenly that image crumbles.

Voeppel literally digs into his home. He hardly goes out; anxiety overwhelms him, and he loses his energy and desire to fight in business. He begins to overeat and naturally gains weight.

From time to time, he returns to one of his favorite activities in the past, which brings him relief – playing the guitar. Regardless of everything, however, it continues to develop new services.

He still lives in the hope that his company will continue to exist to sell them.

In 2010, his customers slowly started to return.

The company signed the largest contract in its history with an aerospace manufacturer, and this is thanks to a white paper he wrote during the crisis.

In 2012, the company’s revenue jumped to $7 million, sales by 5000% compared to 2009.

Voeppel did not expect such a turn! Today, he says he’s tougher; he’s weathered the tough times. He shares:

I identified too much with my work.

Then, I failed. And suddenly, I discovered that my children still loved me, and so did my wife and dog.

For many entrepreneurs, the wounds of such battles never fully heal. So is John Pope, CEO of  WellDog, an energy technology company.

In December 2002, in his bank account, there was exactly $8.42. He is 90 days late on the car lease and 75 days late on the mortgage. The IRS has filed a case against him.

The home phone, cell phone, and cable TV are all cut off. The gas company also cut off the gas supply to his home. His company is awaiting a wire transfer from Shell as a 380-page contract has been signed after months of negotiations.

And Pope is frozen in anxious anticipation. Fortunately, the money arrives, and the company, as well as Pope are saved.

After the situation, Pope makes a list of the ways his actions brought him to the financial brink. He says he will always remember them, and they are an earring in his ear. After that, the company managed to peel off the bottom.

For the period 2010 – 2013, considering the post-crisis times, an incredible growth of more than 3700% was noted. The Pope himself, however, had a hard time overcoming the effects of the storm and tells:

That feeling of overstretching still lingers, like I’ll never be able to relax. After such a horrible experience, one ends up with a very serious confidence problem.

You have the nagging feeling that every time you think you’ve built up some security, something will happen, and it will be shattered.

Sometimes, he finds himself overreacting to minor misunderstandings, a behavior pattern that reminds him of PTSD.

He realizes that the real problem is much smaller than the extent of his emotional reaction.

And that this is the result of the scars of the crisis he went through.

And the cure is….

Have you ever felt empty?

You feel nothing; melancholy has enveloped you, and you see no meaning…

Actually, it’s not that scary. Consider the following interesting paradox related to our notion of emptiness:

The Daodujing states that when the clay is molded around the void, it becomes a pitcher that can hold water. The water from the pitcher is poured into a cup, which is also sculpted around the void.

The very room in which all this takes place is four walls closing the void.

Do you understand? Sometimes, by relying on something that does not exist, we get something useful in practice.

And although starting a company is always a crazy endeavor, with highs and lows, business people can prevent situations where they lose control of their lives. Mental health specialists recommend that a person first pay attention to his loved ones and not allow businesses to take him away from contact with people.

When someone is struggling with depression, relationships with friends and family are the most powerful weapons.

The other important thing is not to be afraid to ask for help when you see symptoms of distinct anxiety, PTSD, or depression. Experts advise entrepreneurs to limit their financial commitment.

It is well known that when it comes to assessing risk, entrepreneurs are blind to a degree comparable to driving in the opposite direction. The consequences are not only for the bank account of the brave businessman but also raise stress levels tremendously.

Therefore, every business adventurer should carefully consider the limit of their own funds that they are willing to invest and allow their friends and family to invest only as much as they can afford to lose. Consistent health care should not be missed – regular exercise, healthy eating, and enough sleep. This is how an identity that is separate from the person doing business is cultivated.

Psychiatrist and former entrepreneur Michael Freeman, an expert on mental health and entrepreneurship, says:

“Build a life centered on the belief that your value as a person is not equal to your net worth. Part of your identity should be other dimensions of your life.”

Here’s what that means in a nutshell:

Whether you’re taking care of your family, doing charity work, building airplanes in your backyard, or going to Latin dances on the weekends, it’s important to feel successful in areas outside of your work.

The ability to reframe failures and losses helps leaders maintain good mental health.

Michael Freeman suggests two basic rules:

✅ Instead of telling yourself that you have failed, that your business is a failure, and that you are a loser, look at the situation from another perspective:

He who does not try does not make mistakes. Life is a continuous process of trial and error. Don’t look at experiences with such a magnifying glass.

✅ Be open about your feelings; don’t hide your emotions, even in the office. Some would object to this, BUT:

When you’re willing to be honest with your emotions, you can connect on a deeper level with those around you.

When you deny yourself from what is really important to you, others notice it. It is a leader’s ability to show himself vulnerable that makes him that much stronger.