The Stripe guide to managing founder stress

That Dr. Walling - she's crazy smart 😉

Great article and reminder to take the day off, have a break, have some pancakes for breakfast and most importantly listen to the body... 😊That part was really valuable to be reminded of.
I bought and read the book last year. Highly recommended as well, if you want to get a bit more in detail.

PS: Snap, forgot to click "Post Comment" two days ago. Anyway, here you go. Thanks for the Sunday read!

Dope read!

This was particularly valuable to me:

Suffering from chronic stress is a like being the proverbial frog in the pot with the slowly boiling water. The frog got in trouble one degree at a time. [...] The magic trick of effective chronic stress management is to catch it early. You have your own early stress indicators. Your body is often the best early warning system that stress is beginning to take a toll.

And the related advice on recognizing your individual stress signals. Selfawareness

This guide is also excellent for non-founders.

I really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing.

There a number of impacts after my crash & brain injury. Some are around impulse control and emotional regulation. My wife and I have started referring to fight-or-flight as "lizard brain". When you drop down into lizard brain, when fight-or-flight kicks in you're not thinking straight, you're reacting and focusing on self-preservation. Through this recovery process I have also learned there is the states of mind 3.) logic, 2.) emotion, and 1.) instinctual "lizard brain".

I've come up with a whole list of strategies for dealing with the negative impacts of brain injury, probably too many to list here. Two critical things for me are:
1.) Meditate/mindfulness throughout the day.
2.) Have a plan and be able to offload stress and mental RAM to that plan.

My PTSD psychologist gave me a great analogy. He says "the anxious mind is like a flapping tarp and mindfulness is just tacking down one of the flapping corners". He has taught me to meditate throughout the day to "switch the default behaviour to a tacked down tarp rather than a flapping tarp".

Long story short, in my opinion, being able to regularly reduce stress, control stress levels, and offload to a task list rather than worrying overnight are all helpful.

Hope that helps and if I can reduce anyone's stress or provide other tools & techniques I'm happy to share.

The 4/5 deep breathes for 4/5 seconds works like magic! Just experienced it.