When investors push: responsibility to others and your body

Sunday evening. The children are asleep, his partner is watching a film, and he sits in the kitchen with his laptop, checking the bank balance for the third time. Tomorrow is the investor meeting. The numbers aren’t catastrophic, but they aren’t what he promised six months ago either. His chest feels tight. When he finally goes to bed, at three in the morning he is staring at the ceiling, composing the sentences he will use to explain why growth is lagging.

“I’m not scared for myself,” someone in a similar situation once told me. “I’m scared of letting down people who believed in me. And that in three months forty people will be without a salary.”

Investor pressure is usually discussed as a business question: how to prepare the report, how to negotiate, how to communicate bad news. I won’t write about that — there are other experts for it. I’m interested in something else: what happens to the person carrying that pressure. To their body, to the fear of disappointing others, and to the boundaries they so easily lose under that pressure.

Pressure that isn’t only yours

Most of the stress in life is stress for ourselves: will I get the job, will I stay healthy, will the relationship last. A founder with investors carries something else. They carry responsibility to the people who trusted them with money, and to the people who trusted them with their jobs. Behind every salary they pay stands a family with rent, loans and children.

This is a particular kind of weight. With personal risk you can say: “If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just start again.” When other people’s lives are at stake, that sentence no longer helps. Many founders describe to me how their relationship with their own company changed at exactly the moment they hired their first person or accepted their first outside money. It stopped being a game and became an obligation.

I wrote about the anxiety that accompanies founders more generally in Founder anxiety: when the company is both your child and your debt. Here I want to focus on the part that comes from outside — from people who expect results.

What happens in the body

The body responds to pressure the same way it responded to a predator thousands of years ago: with the fight-or-flight response. The adrenal glands release adrenaline and cortisol, the heart speeds up, the muscles tense, digestion slows. For a short time this is excellent: you are focused, quick, alert. The biologist Robert Sapolsky, in his book on stress, likes to point out that a zebra that manages to escape a lion is calmly grazing again a few minutes later. Its stress response switches off.

We humans often can’t do that. Our lion is not a single danger, but the monthly report, the next funding round, the email that arrives at eleven at night. When the alarm doesn’t stop ringing, we speak of chronic stress. The neuroscientist Bruce McEwen introduced the term allostatic load for the price the body pays for constant adaptation: wear and tear on the heart, blood vessels, immune system and brain that builds up slowly and quietly.

In 2015 Mika Kivimäki and colleagues published a meta-analysis in The Lancet with data from more than six hundred thousand people. Those who worked 55 hours a week or more had around a third (33 per cent) higher risk of stroke compared with those working standard hours. For founders, who often work considerably more than that while the company is growing, this is not an abstract statistic.

Signs your body is already paying the bill

Founders are often very good at ignoring their bodies. They have learned to work when tired, ill, frightened. That is why it helps to know the signs that pressure is no longer only in your head:

• Sleep changes: you struggle to fall asleep, wake at three or four and can’t get back, or you sleep but don’t feel rested.
• Physical tension: a clenched jaw, stiff shoulders, headaches, grinding your teeth at night.
• Digestion: heartburn, cramps, irregular bowel movements, loss or increase of appetite.
• Heart: pounding, a feeling of pressure in the chest, a fast pulse at rest.
• Irritability at home and at the same time emotional numbness — you no longer really feel anything except tension.
• Self-medicating: a glass of wine every evening that becomes two, more coffee, the phone in bed.

Importantly: don’t automatically put physical symptoms, especially heart-related ones, down to stress. Have them checked by a doctor first. Only once the tests come back normal does it make sense to talk about what the body is carrying — and even then it isn’t “all in your head”, as I explain in “The tests are normal, but it still hurts”: what therapy knows about psychosomatics.

The fear of disappointing others: why it’s so strong

When I talk with founders about pressure, we very quickly arrive at the fact that they are less afraid of losing money than of the look on the face of someone who will be disappointed. An investor shaking their head. A board member saying: “We expected more.”

Why does such a look have so much power over someone who is otherwise confident, capable and decisive? In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we look at how patterns from the family are often repeated in the important relationships of adult life. Christian Gostečnik writes about how people unconsciously seek out and recreate the emotional atmosphere they know from home — even when it hurt.

An investor is not a parent. But they are someone who believed in you, who judges your work and on whom your future depends. For a person who grew up with a father who always expected more, or with a mother who had to be protected from worry, this is an almost perfect stage for an old drama. In that moment you aren’t only answering a question about revenue growth. You are answering a question you have carried since childhood: “Am I good enough?”

A conversation I often hear in various forms (composite, not a real person):

“When the investor told me he was disappointed, I felt like I was twelve.”
“What happened when you were twelve?”
“I brought home a school report with top marks in everything except one. Dad only asked about that one.”
“And what did you decide then?”
“That next time there wouldn’t be a single one. Never again.”

When a person makes this connection, the pressure doesn’t disappear. But it suddenly becomes easier to separate which part of the feeling belongs to the present situation and which to an old relationship. The distinction between guilt and shame, which I wrote about in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters, helps here too: guilt says “I made a mistake”, shame says “I am a mistake”.

Responsibility is not the same as carrying everything

A founder is responsible for the decisions they make, the promises they give and how they treat people. That is real responsibility and no one can take it away. But they are not responsible for market conditions, for other people’s decisions, for an investor’s mood or for the feelings of every employee.

In practice the two quickly merge. When someone on the team resigns, the founder feels guilty for “not supporting them enough”. When an investor is unhappy, it doesn’t occur to them that the investor has pressures of their own, investors of their own and a bad week of their own. They take everything on themselves, because it is the only way to feel in control.

The paradox is that taking everything on doesn’t make a person a better leader. It makes them more exhausted, more irritable and often less capable of clear judgement. Stress research, starting with the classic work of Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, shows that how stress affects us also depends on how we appraise it — as a threat we can’t cope with, or as a challenge in which we have some influence.

Boundaries: not with investors, but with yourself

When I say “boundaries”, people often think it means saying “no” to an investor. That is a business decision and I won’t advise on it. The boundaries I mean are the ones that protect you — your body, your time with the people you love, and your inner space.

These are boundaries such as: the phone doesn’t come into the bedroom. I don’t open reports on Sunday evenings. For the first twenty minutes after I get home, I’m not reachable. When I feel my heart pounding, I get up from the desk and go outside. They sound small, but under pressure these are the first to go. And once they go, the body no longer has anywhere the stress response could switch off.

Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz researched what allows people to recover after work. One of the key ingredients is psychological detachment — not being at work in your free time, not only physically but also in your mind. For founders this may be the hardest task of all, which is why I devote a separate post to it: Always “on”: why entrepreneurs can’t rest.

Boundaries are also boundaries with yourself. Not promising, in a moment of enthusiasm, something you know will cost two months without sleep. Admitting to your partner that you are scared, instead of “protecting” them from worry. Founders often think that not talking about the pressure at home is a sign of love. Their partner, though, often feels mostly the distance.

Exercise: whose burden is this?

You can do this exercise tonight, with a sheet of paper and a pencil. It takes about fifteen minutes.

1. Write down everything weighing on you this week. No tidying up: the meeting, salaries, this or that employee, the numbers, the conversation with your partner, the pain in your back. Everything on one list.
2. Divide the paper into three columns: “mine”, “shared”, “not mine”. Think about each item and copy it into one of the columns. If you aren’t sure, put it under “shared”.
3. For each item in the “mine” column, write one small step that is within your power. Not a solution, just the next step.
4. With the “not mine” items, notice your body. Where does it tighten as you read them? Breathe in, and as you breathe out say in your mind: “This is not my burden.” You don’t have to believe it. It’s enough to notice how you respond.
5. Choose one item you will talk about. With your partner, a friend or a therapist. Pressure that no one knows about is twice as heavy.

When people do this for the first time, they are often surprised at how long the “not mine” column is — and how much energy they have spent on things they have no influence over.

When it isn’t just stress

I wouldn’t want this post to sound as though all pressure is harmful. Some tension before an important meeting is normal and even useful: it focuses you, prepares you, helps you stay sharp. The problem isn’t pressure itself, but pressure that never ends and has no way out.

Nor would I want you to put every kind of distress down to “just stress”. Pressure can trigger or reveal depression, panic attacks or addiction, which need professional help — from a doctor, a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist. If you find yourself suddenly waking with a pounding heart and a feeling that you are going to die, read Why panic arrives only once things calm down.

And one more limit of this post: if the situation in the company is objectively unsustainable, no breathing exercise and no therapy will fix it. Then you need people with business, legal or financial expertise. Psychotherapy can help you make those decisions more clearly and with less shame — but it can’t make them for you.

If, under pressure, you ever think that everyone would be better off without you, don’t carry that alone. In Slovenia you can call the Klic v duševni stiski helpline on 01 520 99 00 (daily from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency in Slovenia, call 112.

What a conversation can offer

For many founders, the therapy room is the first place where they don’t have to perform anything. They don’t have to be optimistic for the team, convincing for investors and reassuring for the family. They can say that they are afraid.

In relational family therapy we look at how present pressure meets old patterns — the role a person had in their family, the voices they carry with them, the way their family dealt with uncertainty. For those who would like to look at these patterns more systematically, I offer a longer session, A Look into the Past, in which we draw your family genogram across several generations together. I also work with English-speaking clients, so you are welcome to write to me in English.

What to remember

• Investor pressure is distinctive because you carry responsibility to others — not just to yourself.
• When the stress response doesn’t switch off, it becomes chronic stress, which strains the heart, sleep and immunity; long working hours are linked to a higher risk of stroke.
• The fear of disappointing others is often so strong because the investor unwittingly takes the place of an old relationship.
• Responsibility for your own decisions is not the same as carrying everyone else’s feelings, the market and other people’s decisions.
• Boundaries with yourself — sleep, the phone, time with loved ones — are the first to go under pressure, and the first worth restoring.