Mental health in startups | Hacker News Reader

Mental health in startups

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82 pointsjd_routledge33 comments

Hi,

I just wrote a piece about mental health in startups.

This is something that has been covered by a few others in the past, but I still don’t think it is talked about enough.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I am trying to raise awareness and getting people to talk about their struggles more and more.

If you think that this is a topic we should be talking about more please could you like and share my post around?

Also if you know of any other great resource on the topic please can you share it with me?

Thanks so much, James

I would argue many of the mental health issues you describe in your post can be found in more traditional corporate environments as well when the mindset you bring as an employee to your job is one of extreme ownership and personal investment from the standpoint of time and effort.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, but yes, of course. The same issues can be found everywhere.

It isn't just startups themselves that cause these issues, there's a predisposition. My cofounders way back when could handle the pressure just fine.

I'd recommend anyone who is experiencing mental health issues to talk to a therapist. CBT is good for panic, and psychotherapy is good for anxiety and depression (imo.)

To me it seems like a mindset issue rather than a predisposition - having gone through it.

Employment is mostly about taking on the burden of someone else's stress and handling it. When your stress becomes too much the employer hires peers and perhaps gives you some minions to make things better.

If you were never taught how to manage stress and your family hasn't ingrained stoic values into you (because they themselves were never taught them) then the body is going to become overwhelmed, give up and switch into protective mode, also known as burnout, anxiety, depression, breakdowns etc.

I think it's both. I mean, just look at the variance in response to caffeine that people have. The nervous system clearly comes into play in all this.

I got made redundant rather than minions. Good outcome for me. Less good outcome for the startup staff I think.

Great comment - thanks for sharing. I think I agree - it's not just about the environment you work in (although I think certain environments bring it out more), it's a certain type of personality/mindset maybe.

You think it is a personality issue then? Some people can just handle pressure better than others?

Thanks for the insight btw :)

Not knowing anything about this, it sounds like that's probably true, but even your description makes it seem much more likely to happen in a startup.

absolutely - maybe even worse as the spirit of sharing etc isn't as strong in the corporate world

Do you think it is more a mindset of certain individuals as opposed to the environment they work in?

Hi James --

Thanks for sharing your thoughts + experiences so publicly.

I've been working on a few resources to help the startup + tech community raise awareness about these issues. Check out blueperiod.co to learn a bit more.

Would love to chat more deeply about this -- my email is rob @ blueperiod.co :)

Best,

Rob McFeeley

Thanks Rob - i'll be in touch

Nice share! I don't think people will ever openly discuss their struggles and will continue to have issues doing so in focus groups. The answers and solutions to mental health are complex and need serious discussion in society and any material that can probe that discussion is another step forward.

In England there's the charity "Time to Change" (formed by the two charities "Mind" and "Rethink Mental Illness") who tackle mental health stigma.

They aim to get people talking about mental illness and mental health, and this includes employees and employers.

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/

Here's their stuff about work: https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/time-to-change-your-workpl...

Most of that is aimed at traditional employment, rather that start-ups.

I just really like to see more of the startup related stuff on HN.

I know that talking about content and your preference of things posted to HN is discouraged but I need to mention that for me personally, it's really helped me in the past to see other people talking about this stuff.

I live in South Africa and there isn't a huge startup scene here.

Checking out HN every couple of days and seeing stuff about other people going through the startup phases played a role in getting me to the point where I believed I could do it.

I failed but even then, I knew that failure wasn't the end. I learned that here. I saw Eric Reis book recommended here and I lurked on several thread where people discussed the trials and tribulations they were going through.

I discovered fakegrimlock here and he showed me the importance of being on fire, why I must burn.

Nice post, thanks.

I've never run a startup so I don't know exactly how you feel but I do feel many of these things in my corporate job day to day. There is even some creep from startup culture finding it's way into corporate life. Now megacorps are launching new product/divisions/whatever and treating them as a "startup". What that tends to mean is "we expect you to work more hours than you are now, for the same pay, even though we're already making billions of dollars a year".

I knew these issues would be in the corporate world too but obviously I can't relate. These problems reach further then we'll ever know I think.

Ah, the panic attacks. If I don't wake up with one at least once every three weeks, I feel I'm not working hard enough. Besides, 3am is a good time to get work done.

That said, I believe pacing yourself is a big part of managing the mental health issues. Make sure you eat, sleep, exercise, and take appropriate breaks, even if you feel you have to work. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

> Ah, the panic attacks. If I don't wake up with one at least once every three weeks, I feel I'm not working hard enough

I really hope this is sarcasm, because I feel like this is a terrible mentality to have.

I hope you don't really think like that.

Your second point is completely true and much more sensible. It's about working sustainably.

I actually do think like that. It's a way of coping positively with the reality of the panic attacks. Recognizing that they're just a physical reaction to the stress of doing something that is both difficult and important is a way of not letting them govern my thinking.

What's different is depression. I don't know of a way to make myself feel positive about the bouts of depression. Then again, I've dealt with depression all my life. It seems independent of my founder life. Panic attacks, on the other hand, are very much a product of my founder life.

Treating panic attacks (which generally only occur at night, waking me up from sleep) as a natural result of the work is just a coping mechanism. It may not be the best one, or even a good one, but it works well enough for me.

My first company officer at the Academy was a Marine captain who openly admitted he over-worked his first company of Marines and ran the entire group into the ground. He said he learned from that to not expect so much of others. Nevertheless, if you, I, we, found ourselves in a high-demand, high-stress situation, the best advice he could offer was to "Revel in the suckiness."

I have tried to live by that for the last 20 years but it's hard to remember it's "just the suckiness" at 3 am for the Nth night in a row.

I think it's important to modify that advice with a heavy dose of reality testing: if it's really that important, where are the other people? Does it really need to be this hard? Are the others out of touch or is it me? In short, what environmental modifiers can I affect, and what environmental cues can I calibrate on?

In my experience, whatever reason you are working for what you're working for, what you do to get there matters, because those are the skills you are building. If you are having bi-weekly panic attacks then you're as likely to drop dead in your early 50s than enjoy the fruit of your labor. Is what you are doing more important than your life? It may be, but I would hope you're making that calculation. Living your whole life building up health debt is the same as building a system with technical debt - it WILL come calling someday.

I'm already in my early 50s (today is my 51st birthday). One of the things I've learned after a couple of years of trying to build a startup is that I love working on my startup. I'd put twenty years into a career in enterprise IT, and it made me miserable. I realized that it's not the work itself I don't like - it's working for others, working on things I think are stupid and pointless and doomed.

The problem is this means for now, I'm working two jobs, and I'm heading for a rough transition to working just one and the financial implications of that. That's a lot of stress.

On the other hand, doing a job I have come to despise until I'm too old to do it anymore, instead of doing something that matters to me, that makes me feel meaningful and accomplished... that's a whole different kind of stress. That's the kind that grinds you down and wears you to a nub. Once you hit a certain age, perspective really starts to set in. I look around at people in their 40s and 50s, and they're broken. They think their best years and best opportunities are all behind them. I look at mine, and they're ahead of me. That keeps me alive.

I think there'll always be groups of people like that. In my 20s there were big groups of people who's "best years" were in high school. Now approaching 30 and finding a lot of people bemoaning how good life was in their 20s when they were in college or traveling the world. For me life has gotten better and easier as I've gotten older, so far. Most of my enjoyment comes out of exploring and finding new places and getting to know people. I take any work I do seriously and try to do things that I think will matter and make a difference but I also realize I'm a small fish in a very big pond. I still have ambition and I'll always strive to be my best, but there is always the possibility of my health failing or other circumstances. I intend to be flexible with whatever life throws at me. I hope I'll be able to share your perspective when I'm your age!

That's awesome. Completely different perspective that what I have heard so far, thanks.

I think that mental health and work is something that's not talked about enough as a whole. If I don't feel safe making the journey to work in the morning then that's something that I want to be able to talk about with my manager. And if I'm not capable of doing anything more than staring at emails for a few days then it shouldn't be shameful to say that I'm suffering in ways that aren't physically obvious. It's so much easier to cope if you have a support network that includes your employer. Otherwise the shame and fear of being accused of making excuses to skive off of work can escalate very easily.

Optimize yourself until exhaustion. (tired eyes)

I would also like to frame this issue as a symptom of neoliberal capitalism, where mechanisms of the global markert are internalized as one's own needs and wills: investing in a better future, without ever ending up there, being creative and flexible nonstop for economical reasons.

I think it's important to deal with one's own anxieties and stresssymptoms also by sharing the knowledge and experiences.

But above that I also wonder, what we all together are keeping up, by asking of ourself and our collueges to exploit ourself (in academia, in start-ups, in traditional corporate environments,...)

Regading sleep: IMO it's vital to stop working at least 2-hours before bed. Your brain never stops and you never sleep well. Maintaining work/life boundaries and having a routine will help in keeping you sane.

I mistakenly thought this would be about startups addressing mental health. We need more of those.

Replace startups with research and you had me for a while. I had to ban myself from even reading academic papers (it's like my cocaine) and get a regular job.

Academia? Naa, I don't touch the stuff anymore.

Not just bad feelings. Lashing out and various forms of abuse are (partly) a result of such mental health problems. (And partly intrinsic to the forms of organization.)

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