There is mounting evidence that starting a business reduces stress

Written by Ross Buhrdorf. The Chief Executive Officer and Founder of ZenBusiness, a $1.7 billion company providing business software and services to "help over 700,000 entrepreneurs make the leap from their day jobs and start their businesses".

This feels like propaganda to promote their products.

As someone who got into this track a few years ago, i think it's rewarding in certain ways but my overall considered opinion of the the article is LOL.

There may be a selection bias here. Did this study draw from successful entrepreneurs? Did they interview ones whose startups failed?

The right way to study this would be to sample business license applications from five years ago and track down the people today.

My intuition is that this article/claim is nonsense. But I have no doubt that people who are less stressed or better at dealing with stress are more likely to start a business...

There is Good Stress, and there is Bad Stress!

Being in a stressful situation that you have little or no control over is likely creating a bad form of stress. Such as being trapped in a corporate job under a toxic management structure.

However, dealing with your growing business and recruiting to fulfill more orders than you can otherwise handle, that's probably a good stress.

Watching your business collapse and orders vanish, thats a bad stress!

Stress isn't one thing, and running a business generally creates stress at both ends of the Good Stress vs Evil Stress Tier List! ;-)

Now financial security on the other hand, that has to be around the top of the Stress Reduction list!

I have to say this is surprising. I have a cousin who co-founded what was once the largest email spam filtering company in Europe. He said that if he could get a do-over he'd just take a 9-to-5 and not deal with the stress and how much it had aged him. Of course this is just an anecdote and it's possible he was doing it wrong™, but it certainly fits the trend with others I have spoken to. For example, there's a feeling that the buck stops with you, it's difficult to establish boundaries for a healthy work life balance because there's no one else to pick up the slack. And if no one picks up the slack then you just get outcompeted by the businesses that do.

I wonder if there's a difference between various types of self employment where some are on net less stressful than others. In my cousin's case as a co-founder, there may still have been a lot of pressure from other team members, which is only marginally better than having a boss. Also, if there are effective strategies one can employ to limit issues that can have a negative impact in a self employed context, then further studies to elucidate such would be incredibly valuable.

It's not about just starting a business but employing folks, working with them as a team, sharing ideas with them and collectively become stakeholders of a new creation. The ultimate source of stress reduction is the people or folks, not material wealth!

For whatever reason, Fortune articles appear frequently on HN. Although they almost never receive a high number of votes, I am surprised that this critical-thinking community still has them show up. I understand that Fortune articles are written in a style that appeals to the HN audience (myself included), but they often lack substantive analysis and read more like carefully crafted PR pieces than genuine journalism. The articles tend to follow a formulaic pattern of surface-level business narratives while avoiding any meaningful critical examination, essentially functioning as sophisticated native advertising.

I have always believed that the purpose of employment (of working for someone else) is to gain enough savings and skills to eventually launch your own business. If you don't execute this plan, you risk feeling frustrated and trapped. An exception is if you have a parasitic value-robbing position somewhere which not everyone does.

I’ve started a number of businesses, about half successful. My worst day in business was better than my best days in middle school.

Exogenous dopamine.

"The results overwhelmingly favored entrepreneurs, who evidenced significantly lower blood pressure and hypertension rates, fewer hospital visits, and reduced incidence of physical and mental illnesses."

How many times do we need to repeat the basic statistical fact that correlation does not equal causation? We need to teach this in grade school because it is lost on so many people.

You can think up many attributes of entrepreneurs that might explain lower stress in general: more entrepreneurs likely come from wealth, have resources to start a business, have a sense of confidence in themselves etc.