How to Handle Stress as an Indie Hacker

Making products involves dealing with uncertainty. You question the choices you make. You sacrifice time and energy to work on something that is statistically likely to fail. Worrying about potential problems is part of being an indie hacker. We all accept that, but if you react to uncertainty by trying to think your way to certainty — it's going to backfire. You'll end up spending your limited mental energy on things that lead nowhere.

In this post, you will get actionable advice on how to stop needless worry so you can focus on the things that actually make a difference.

Worry is a chain of thoughts about potential threats in the future. The human brain is exceptional in many ways. Still, it does a poor job of distinguishing between threats you think about and actual threats. There are several parts of your brain involved in detecting potential threats — the most important one is the Amygdala.

The Amygdalas job is to keep you safe. It constantly scans data coming in from your senses and will put the body into a state of alertness if it detects anything that resembles danger. This state is what stress is — a response to a perceived threat. Thoughts of worry are what keeps you in this state because you can't get away or fight imaginary threats.

Awareness of your thinking is vital if you want to change how you react emotionally — and the first step is catching yourself worrying. Easier said than done, but a trick is to build awareness of thoughts through your emotions.

It works because it's easier to notice your mood change than your thinking change. Every time you feel anxious, sad, or restless, you take a mental step back and observe yourself thinking. What was the chain of thoughts that made you feel this way? What did you imagine in your head that made your body prepare for danger?

These kinds of thoughts often start with "What if":

• What if I don't know enough about this ?
• What if I'm not smart enough?
• What if nobody likes this?
• What if someone thinks this is stupid?
• What if I'm not good enough?

A common trait of all these questions is that you won't get answers by thinking about them. The next step is to recognize the futility of worry.

All thoughts are short-lived, and you have hundreds of them every day. Most of them you don't give much attention to, but some you dwell on. Why is it you believe some thoughts are more important than others? When it comes to worry, we tend to think worry is helpful because it resembles problem-solving.

When you problem-solve, you will eventually come to a conclusion. Worry doesn't end — it just leads to more worry.

We are bad at differentiating between worry and problem-solving because we rarely observe ourselves thinking and challenge the importance and value of our thoughts. Recognize that thoughts are just thoughts. You decide which ones are important.

This can sometimes be a challenging exercise, but there are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Is this something I will figure out by thinking or doing something?
• Is this something I can control?
• Is this something I need to prepare for, or is it better that I deal with it if/when it happens?
• How much time do I need to spend thinking about this?

To check if a thought is important or not, you can try to postpone worrying to a time later that day. Set the alarm and ask yourself if you want to spend time worrying about it or if you want to do something you enjoy.

If you don't feel the need to worry about it, it's a good indicator that the thought wasn't that important. It doesn't mean that the thing you worried about wasn't important or valuable, but trying to be certain about it isn't all that important. When people do this experiment, they will start to challenge what their beliefs about worry are. Worry feels important because the brain thinks there is something explicitly threatening. By postponing the thought, you separate from worry with time and check if that the thought was actually that important.

Recap

1. Worrying is thinking about threats. Your Amygdala interprets worry as a real threat and will set of a stress response.
2. You can't control your stress, but you can change how you react to worry.
3. Notice worry when your mood changes.
4. Recognize that you most likely will not get an answer or be more prepared by worrying.

Worry less. Do more.

I'm a cognitive therapist that tweets about mental health and app development. Follow me on Twitter if you would like to get more actionable tips from cognitive behavioral therapy.