How I handle stress

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

Building a startup is like riding an old wooden roller coaster with no seat belts. It’s exciting but you’re always worried about getting thrown off. In the first few years, it feels like the startup is trying to kill you every week. There’s a new competitor, customer issue, or engineering issue that threatens to kill everything you’ve been building.

Well, I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that feeling never truly goes away and the company will continue to try and kill itself. The good news is that it’ll happen less frequently. Once you’ve gone through a few big swings, you begin to realize that the ups, downs, and spirals never last forever and are rarely fatal. That’s an open faced shit sandwich if I’ve ever seen one.

I'd like to share some habits I’ve built that are working for me. Not because I've got it all figured out and you should follow my exact approach, I don't, and you shouldn't. I'm sharing because I've found things that work for me, and I hope you might find one or two helpful ideas for yourself.

tl;dr - the major variables that impact how I show up every day are: sleep, food, exercise, philosophy, relationships, & hobbies. Give yourself a score for each right now -1, 0, or +1 for each. How’d you do? I’m in the positive now but I’ve spent a good amount of time in the negative.

I rode my bike to the office for 7 years, not super far but far enough that I’d put all my gear on (shorts, jersey, shoes, etc…). There were days where 7pm would roll around and I’d still be sitting there in my bike gear and a pair of flip flops. It’s exactly as bad as you’re imagining it.

I knew exercise was important to my mental state but I hadn’t figured out the rest yet. When Covid hit, I moved to working from home and lost that daily morning commute. It took me 2 years to realize that, aside from all the other craziness, my body was really missing daily exercise. So, here’s what works for me, I’ve grouped them into categories that I think impact one another, for me at least.

Exercise, sleep, & food.

In 2017, I had two concussions within a 4 month period and the two biggest symptoms were sensitivity to light and anxiety attacks. I solved the first by wearing sunglasses nearly everywhere. The second was a little harder because they would occur as or immediately after I would fall asleep. I’d be asleep for less than a minute and would wake up with my heart going as if I were in a fist fight with a bear. I once woke up running, I’m not sure from what but when I realized I was awake I was mid stride and already out of my bedroom. It’s funny now. At the end of 2017, we had twins and my sleep was immediately better… problem solved (sarcasm). My biggest problem was falling asleep, there would be nights where I’d be able to feel the anxiety and would know that I’d be up until 3am or 4am.

One counterintuitive change has helped me dramatically. I started working out regularly after reading two books, Burn and Exercised. It helped but I was still having trouble sleeping every now and then. The real magic, for me, came when I started getting up at 630am every weekday and doing my workout. I use Fitbod by the way and it’s fantastic. I’ve been in this routine since the beginning of the year and so far haven’t had any issues like I was near the end of last year.

The habits I’ve adopted that have helped:

• No alcohol Sunday through Thursday, unless we have company.

• Read calm fiction on my kindle for 15 minutes before I fall asleep.

• Exercise every weekday morning at 630am.

• I shower and change into outside clothes after every workout.

• 16 hour intermittent fast until lunch unless I make pancakes for the kids.

• Protein shake after lunch to reduce the hunger madness I was getting at 4pm daily.

• Every January, my wife and I give up alcohol and track our calories.

It took me months to onboard each of these habits and I don’t recommend trying all of them at once. Try one at a time and see if it works for you. I’m not an expert in any of these, they’re just habits that have helped me and placebos are ~50% effective so take my results with a grain of salt.

Philosophy.

I didn’t want to write about this one because there was a time a few years ago where it was the cool thing to do if you were an entrepreneur. I’m sick of hearing about it, even though it’s helped me greatly.

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter what philosophy you follow. The thing that helped me most was taking 10 minutes every morning and reading about it. I set the goal of not reading on my phone until I had gone through my morning routine. Reading a little philosophy every morning helped me process emotions and events from the previous day.

The biggest thing that helped was the time to calm my brain and prepare for the day. I tried meditating, mindfulness, and stretching but they weren’t the same. It’s also really hard to stretch on the toilet.

If you must ask, I read about stoicism. What worked best for me was reading the original texts (translated to english), Meditations and Moral letters to Lucilius. If you’re just getting started, I enjoyed A Guide to the Good Life.

When life gets crazy I still remind myself, “control your perceptions, direct your actions accordingly, and willingly accept what is outside of your control”.

Relationships and hobbies.

Two things I didn’t make time for in my early days. When Carb.io was taking off, my girlfriend (now wife) would refer to me as the ghost of dirty dishes. I think there was an entire month where we lived in the same house but didn’t see each other. I worked too much. Overworking myself meant I was mentally exhausted at work and wasn’t making good decisions. If I would have worked less, I think it’s likely I would have made better decisions.

My wife and I try to hold Wednesday’s open for a couple check-in but with kids and full time jobs, it’s been hard to consistently have energy for it. The biggest thing that’s been recharging us is going to see live music. It’s how we met and what we enjoyed most when we were dating.

We now make it to around 2 live shows a month, they’re not huge names and sometimes it’s just live music in a bar, but it’s our thing and keeps us close. Your thing will be different, your person will be different, but it’s important to invest time nurturing the relationships that are meaningful to you.

I don’t just do this for my significant other, I have a list of folks ranging from my brother to a buddy from high school that I want to keep in touch with. I chose a frequency to connect with them and have a reminder in my phone that I look at once a week. These relationships are my support network, therapy when I don’t want to admit I need it, and my cheerleading squad when I need a boost.

Pro-tip: One thing that didn’t work for my wife and I was trying to run our weekly couple check-ins like an EOS L10 meeting… even bad ideas are worth trying once eh?

When you’re training for a triathlon you obviously need to exercise quite a bit. What surprised me was that you’re not supposed to go 100% every time you train. As you advance in your training, you need to steadily increase your volume of activity. Active recovery is light exercise that you do between big workouts to promote the healing (recovery) process.

My active recovery from startups involves spending time with my family, playing games with my friends, and going to live music with my wife. These are all things that take time away from me working more and give my brain something to focus on other than what’s going on at work.

Making time for active recovery has benefited me personally and professionally. When I am feeling relaxed and recovered, I make better decisions and am able to achieve a higher quality work product. I can work 12-14 hour days and it happens from time to time but I know that trying to sustain that effort level for too long is going to compromise the quality of my work.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if touching on the personal stuff like this is interesting.

Collin

PS - I love learning about habits that are helping others so if you have something different that’s working for you, hit that reply button and let me know.