I built a mental health app — here are my top tips for surviving as an indie hacker

Indie hacking can be a rough path full of seemingly fruitless labor, uncertainty, doubt, and unpredictable setbacks which all take a toll on your mental health.

In my time building a mental health app called Mind Sanctuary, I’ve found certain recurring negative thinking patterns and developed strategies to mitigate or resolve them. This form of self-care or therapy is derived from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy where you attempt to find and replace cognitive distortions. The other core strategy is to perform certain exercises that can improve your mood and reduce your stress.

Burnout

Burnout is one of the most common types of work-related stress that can affect performance and make you want to give up. I don’t think burnout is the result of working too hard, but rather the result of prolonged stress without fulfilling results. The common cognitive distortions I’ve noticed are minimizing the positive and magnification which can both lead to symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Minimizing the positive is when you fail to see the good in what you’ve done even if it wasn’t what you were hoping to achieve. Magnification is making a setback greater than it really is in reality. I find that the most negative feeling I often have is doubt. I begin to doubt if what I’m working on is worth my time or if I’ll regret it. From this, I’ve learned that it’s important to focus on the process rather than just the result. Jeff Bezos uses a mental model called The Regret Minimization Framework that helps mitigate short-term doubt and uncertainty.

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time” - Jeff Bezos

Stress & Mood

Everybody can relate to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and just being in a bad mood sometimes. Luckily, there are tools you can use to improve your mental state. Regular healthy habits like getting good sleep, eating well, and exercising regularly also play a key role in maintaining good mental health but I’ll focus on more specific exercises here.

One common exercise that I’ve built into my app is box breathing. It’s a breathing exercise where you breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4 seconds, and then hold for another 4 seconds. After 16 seconds, you can restart and repeat for as long as you want. Box Breathing exercises have been shown to reduce cortisol levels, improve mood, and improve attention.

Other techniques include mindful meditation, guided imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, or prayer. I haven’t personally used these exercises, but everybody is different and responds well to different treatments so I encourage you to try them and find what works well for you. I’ve also heard that having a pet and taking good care of it can help with mental health.

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