Founder anxiety: when the company is your child and your debt

“At three in the morning I opened the banking app again. As if the balance might have changed overnight.”

It is a sentence plenty of people who run their own company could say. Someone who, a few years ago, left a secure job, pooled their savings, perhaps took out a loan, and started something they believed in with two friends. Today the company is growing. It has customers, it has a team, and from the outside everything looks the way they wanted it to. And yet they wake at three, heart pounding in their ears, the same list running through their head: salaries, the invoice a client still hasn’t paid, the contract that still isn’t signed, the colleague who said yesterday that “we should talk”.

Founders rarely talk about what happens at three in the morning. At conferences people tell stories of perseverance, on social media they post their wins, and with friends it is hard to explain anxiety to someone who doesn’t know what it is like when a company is both your child and your debt. This piece is an attempt to talk about it without gloss and without drama — what is particular about a founder’s anxiety, what research tells us about it, and what you can do so that it doesn’t take everything you have built.

Why a founder’s anxiety is different

Anxiety is an old and, at heart, useful system. The body uses it to prepare us for danger before we consciously recognise it — I have written more about this in What happens in the brain during anxiety. The trouble starts when the alarm doesn’t stop ringing, because the danger never really passes.

For an employee, worry usually has limits. They may worry about keeping their job, about whether the boss will be pleased, about whether the project will succeed. But somewhere there is someone who carries the ultimate responsibility. For a founder, there is no such someone. If there is no money for salaries, nobody else will go looking for it. If a client leaves, there is no department to cushion the blow. Uncertainty is not an occasional guest but a permanent flatmate.

Three more things set a founder’s anxiety apart from many others:

• Responsibility for others. It isn’t only about you. It is about people who left other jobs to work with you, and about their families.
• Entanglement with identity. The company is not something you do — often it is something you are. So every dip in sales hits not only the accounts but your sense of self.
• Loneliness. In front of the team you have to be calm, in front of investors convincing, and at home you don’t want to worry your partner. That leaves very few places where you are allowed to say you are afraid.

What research says about entrepreneurs’ mental health

One of the most frequently cited studies in this area is the work of psychiatrist Michael Freeman and colleagues at the University of California. In a study published in 2019, they asked 242 entrepreneurs about mental health in their own lives and in their families, and compared them with a non-entrepreneurial group. 49 per cent of the entrepreneurs reported at least one lifetime mental health condition, compared with 32 per cent of the comparison group. The differences showed up in depression, ADHD, substance use and bipolar disorder.

These figures need to be read with care — and that is how the authors themselves read them. The sample was small and not representative, the data were self-reported, and the study cannot tell us whether entrepreneurship causes difficulties or whether people with certain traits are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Probably both are true: some of the traits that push a person into entrepreneurship — restlessness, a need for novelty, high energy — may be linked to vulnerability, and entrepreneurial life then puts further strain on that vulnerability.

Ute Stephan, who in 2018 reviewed most of the research then available on entrepreneurs’ well-being, pointed to the other side: entrepreneurs often report greater job satisfaction than employees, because they have more autonomy and meaning. Stress and satisfaction live side by side. And that is precisely one of the traps — because the work is meaningful, anxiety is easier to overlook, justify, or declare to be simply the price you pay.

Uncertainty: fuel and poison at once

Entrepreneurship is, by definition, work in uncertainty. You don’t know whether the product will sell, whether the market will hold, whether next month will be better than this one. Some people experience that as excitement. Others as a constant threat. And most founders swing between the two — sometimes within the same day.

Psychologists have a name for this dimension: intolerance of uncertainty. The Canadian researcher Nicholas Carleton has described it as one of the fundamental vulnerabilities found in almost every form of anxiety. The point is not that uncertainty is dangerous in itself, but how we experience it — as something unbearable that must be removed at any cost. A person with high intolerance of uncertainty would rather accept a bad certainty than a good uncertainty.

For a founder, this means a loop you probably know. Uncertainty sets off the alarm. The alarm demands a response. Because you can’t remove the uncertainty, you respond with control: one more look at the numbers, one more email, one more evening at the office. For an hour or two it settles. Then a new uncertainty arrives — and because you are tired, it seems even bigger.

The way out of this loop is not for uncertainty to disappear. It won’t. The way out is learning to separate the part you can influence from the part you can only bear. There is a simple tool for this, the circle of control, which I will also use in the exercise below.

Responsibility for the people who trusted you

When people describe what weighs on them most in running a company, they rarely mention their own money. Far more often they mention others. A colleague who has just taken out a mortgage. A colleague who left a secure job because she liked the idea. A partner who signed a personal guarantee. In Slovenia, salaries must be paid by the eighteenth of the month for the previous month — and many a founder knows exactly what their nights around the seventeenth are like.

This weight is real, and there is no point declaring it to be “all in your head”. But beneath it there is often something older. People who grew up as “responsible children” — the ones who looked after younger siblings, soothed their parents, made sure there were no rows at home — later find themselves in roles where they are carrying others again. And the anxiety they feel about salaries is not only anxiety about salaries. It is also a familiar, old feeling: “If I let go, everything will fall apart.”

In relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, we pay a lot of attention to patterns like these. Christian Gostečnik writes about how, in adult relationships, we unwittingly repeat roles from the family we grew up in. A company is sometimes a new place for an old role. If you are curious where yours comes from, it can also be explored in a longer session with a genogram, which I call A Look into the Past.

When the company is your child

Entrepreneurs often talk about their company as if it were a child. This is more than a figure of speech. In 2005, researcher Melissa Cardon and colleagues proposed that a founder’s relationship with their company resembles a parent’s relationship with a child in many ways: you created it, you are responsible for it, you have put part of yourself into it, so you experience it as an extension of yourself. The same group of researchers — among them the Slovenian entrepreneurship researcher Mateja Drnovšek — later developed the concept of entrepreneurial passion: strong positive feelings tied to activities that matter to the entrepreneur’s identity.

Passion is fuel. Without it, many companies would not survive their first years. But it also has a shadow. When the company is part of who you are, every threat to the company is also a threat to you. Criticism of the product sounds like criticism of your worth. A lost deal is not experienced as a bad month but as proof that you are “not enough”. This is where anxiety often intertwines with the feeling of being a fraud, which I wrote about in Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves.

One of the things worth noticing is language. Do you say “the company is in trouble” or “I am in trouble”? “Sales have dropped” or “I have failed”? These differences seem small, but they show how closely the two have grown together. I have written more about what happens when what has grown together is pulled apart in the piece on the emptiness after selling a company.

When anxiety hides inside productivity

Entrepreneurial anxiety seldom shows itself as anxiety. Much more often it shows up as diligence. As someone who answers messages at eleven at night. As a leader who has to review every decision personally, because “it’s quicker that way”. As a person who doesn’t take holidays, because they would be checking email the whole time anyway. From the outside it looks like dedication, and often it is. From the inside, it is often the only way to quieten the inner alarm.

A short example of how this sounds at home:

(This conversation is composite; it is not about a real person.)
“You were on your phone for half of dinner again.”
“I know. But if I don’t reply now, tomorrow will be even worse.”
“What exactly will be worse?”
“I don’t know. Something. There’s always something.”
“Has there ever been an evening when there was nothing?”
“… I can’t remember one.”

“There’s always something” is a very precise description of anxiety that has lost its edges. It is no longer tied to a concrete danger; it has become a constant state of the body. At that point it helps to name it for what it is. Not “that’s just how I am”, not “that’s entrepreneurship”, but: “What I’m feeling is anxiety. It makes sense. And it is not necessarily always an accurate forecast.”

If you notice your thoughts circling around the worst possible outcomes, it is worth reading “What if …”: why the brain would rather predict a hundred disasters than one calm day. Catastrophising is common among founders, because the work genuinely teaches them to anticipate risks. The difference lies in whether anticipation leads to action or only to another round of worry.

What anxiety does to the body and to relationships

In a study of entrepreneurs’ stress, Melissa Cardon and Pankaj Patel showed an interesting duality: entrepreneurs who experienced more stress earned more on average, but also had more stress-related health problems. The title of their paper is a question probably every founder asks: is stress worth it?

The body answers prolonged alertness in its own way. Poor sleep, a stiff neck, digestive trouble, headaches, more frequent colds. These are all signs I describe in the knowledge base under chronic stress. When anxiety builds up for long enough, it can spill over into burnout — and I have gathered the signs worth taking seriously in Burnout is not laziness.

Less is said about what anxiety does to relationships. A founder’s partner often lives with someone who is physically present but mentally elsewhere. Children learn that a parent’s face over the phone means this is not the time for questions. Anxiety in a family doesn’t stay with one person — it spreads through the whole system. The partner begins to carry part of a worry nobody has spoken aloud. Or withdraws, not knowing how to help.

That is why one of the most healing steps is sometimes very simple: saying it out loud. Not all the numbers and not every scenario, but how you are. “I’m scared this month. I don’t need a solution, I just want you to know.” Anxiety spoken within a safe relationship usually shrinks. Anxiety you carry alone grows.

Exercise: separating worry from a plan

Founders are usually very good at solving problems. The trouble is that anxiety doesn’t present its thoughts as worries but as problem-solving. So it feels as if you are “working” at night, when you are only going round in circles. This exercise takes about twenty minutes and you can do it today.

1. Write down everything that is worrying you right now. Without tidying it up, in whatever form it comes: “November salaries”, “what if the client doesn’t renew”, “was the hiring decision a mistake”.
2. Next to each item, write the letter I or N. I means you have at least some influence over it in the next two weeks. N means you don’t — it depends on the market, on other people or on time.
3. For each I, write down one single next step and a time. Not a plan, a step: “On Tuesday at ten I’ll ring the accountant.” Once the step is written down, the worry is no longer a worry but a task.
4. For each N, name what you feel and where in your body. “Fear, tightness in the chest.” Don’t try to resolve it. Just notice it, and breathe out a few times, slowly, for longer than you breathe in.
5. Close the notebook and do something with your body. A walk round the block, a shower, five minutes of stretching. This tells your body that the worry session is over — and that you can return to it tomorrow at the same time, not at three in the morning.

The exercise is a variation on the technique I describe in the knowledge base as worry postponement, and in more detail in Worries you have no control over: an exercise that helps you set them down. For the first few days it may feel artificial. That’s fine. The brain needs a few repetitions to believe that a worry won’t be forgotten if it isn’t chewed over.

Where this view falls short

It wouldn’t be fair to explain all entrepreneurial anxiety as an inner matter that can be worked through with exercises and conversation. Sometimes anxiety is an entirely accurate reading of the situation. If the company really doesn’t have money for the next three months, this article won’t help. Then you need an accountant, a lawyer or an experienced adviser, not a psychotherapist. Therapy can help you bear it and make decisions more calmly, but it cannot replace the business decisions that have to be made.

Nor is every kind of restlessness anxiety in the psychological sense. A racing heart, agitation and insomnia can have physical causes — from thyroid problems to too much coffee and energy drinks, which many founders drink instead of meals. If the symptoms come on suddenly or are severe, the first step is your GP.

And finally: entrepreneurship is not an illness. Many founders live well with uncertainty, enjoy it, and prefer it to a security that would stifle them. I wouldn’t want anyone to read this as a warning that the entrepreneurial path is harmful in itself. It only points out that it has a price — and that it is better to pay that price consciously than at night, alone, at three.

When to seek help

You don’t have to wait until you break down to talk to a professional. Among founders there is often a belief that therapy is for those who “can’t cope”, and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. In reality it is the other way round: people who lead need a place where they don’t have to lead. I have written about how to fit that into a packed week in “I have no time for therapy”. If English is your preferred language, I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Take it particularly seriously if:

• you have been sleeping badly for several weeks and waking with a pounding heart;
• you are having panic attacks — I have written about why they often strike precisely those who hold it all together in Panic and control;
• you are increasingly reaching for alcohol, sedatives or other substances to calm down;
• you are withdrawing from your partner, children and friends because you have no energy for anything except work;
• you are having thoughts that everyone would be better off without you.

With the last one, don’t wait. Call your GP, the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (daily from 7 pm to 7 am), or the Samaritans helpline (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) on 116 123 in Slovenia, available round the clock. In an emergency, call 112. The failure of a company, even bankruptcy, is something people survive. You are more than your company.

What to remember

• A founder’s anxiety is often an understandable response to real uncertainty, responsibility for others and the loneliness of the role.
• Research suggests entrepreneurs experience mental health difficulties more often, but the data should be read with care — samples are small and causes unclear.
• When the company is part of your identity, every threat to the company feels like a threat to you. It is worth noticing where “the company” and “I” merge in the way you speak.
• A worry and a plan are not the same thing. A plan has a next step; a worry only has another round.
• Anxiety spoken within a safe relationship shrinks. What you carry alone grows.