How Mastering Anxiety Can Make You a Better Entrepreneur

It’s natural to have some anxiety as an entrepreneur. After all, you’re taking a major business risk and attempting to manage an entire organization after building it from the ground up. But sometimes, anxiety can become overwhelming or problematic for your health. Fortunately, the road to improving your anxiety is an accessible one – and it could make you a better entrepreneur.

The Nature of Anxiety

Anxiety itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s something that makes us human. Anxiety can equip us with the awareness, alertness, strength, and motivation necessary to deal with life’s toughest challenges, and when anxiety only emerges during those toughest challenges, we can function healthily and thrive.

The problem arrives when anxiety becomes too much to manage, emerges too frequently, or becomes associated with events and situations that do not require it. If you suffer from persistent anxiety outside the scope of normal human thoughts and feelings, you could have a full anxiety disorder. 

There are many different anxiety disorders, from Generalized Anxiety Disorder to more specific disorders that have roots in anxiety, like various phobias or panic disorder. All of them involve a level of anxiety that interferes with your daily life and makes it harder to do what you need to do as a business leader.

The Impact of Anxiety on Entrepreneurs

Anxiety that’s too intense, too frequent, or inappropriate can impact entrepreneurs in several negative ways, including:

·       Clouded decision making. One of your most important roles as an entrepreneur is making decisions, including some decisions in the heat of the moment. But when you feel anxious and overwhelmed, it’s almost impossible to think clearly. Your decision-making becomes much more clouded and less coherent, potentially compromising your business.

·       Irritability. Suffering from anxiety naturally makes one irritable. This can make it harder to connect with your employees, more difficult to manage existing partnerships, and practically impossible to resolve points of contention totally peacefully.

·       Poor sleep. Unsurprisingly, there’s a strongly negative and mutual link between anxiety and sleep. As you become more anxious, it becomes harder to sleep peacefully. As you lose sleep and become sleep-deprived, you become more anxious. This is a terrible cycle that can have countless detrimental effects on your mental and physical health.

·       Worse physical health. Speaking of physical health, while it’s tempting to think of anxiety as a purely mental phenomenon, it can have a real impact on your physical body. Dealing with high levels of anxiety, over the long term, can affect your cardiovascular health and even lead to early death.

·       Burnout. No one has the capacity to deal with extreme anxiety levels for prolonged stretches. If you keep pushing yourself without getting your anxiety under control, it could lead to burnout.

A Future With Less Anxiety

Thankfully, there’s hope. You can’t eliminate anxiety, but you can effectively manage it.

·       Talk with a therapist. The best course of action for most individuals struggling with anxiety is to talk to a therapist. A professional therapist will be able to help you better understand your anxiety symptoms, properly diagnose any anxiety disorder you may have, and recommend therapeutic and management strategies that can help you reduce the severity and frequency of your symptoms. In some cases, they may even recommend medications.

·       Document your symptoms. Even if you choose not to talk to a therapist right away, it’s a good idea to document your symptoms. Write down what you’re feeling and when you’re feeling it, so you can track what’s making you anxious, whether your anxiety symptoms are getting better or worse, and which management strategies seem to work for you.

·       Eat healthy. Clean up your eating and drinking habits to make anxiety easier to manage. Eating healthy, balanced meals full of vegetables and lean proteins is far superior to indulging in junk food all day. You should also make it a point to drink water and stay hydrated.

·       Exercise. Physical exercise is one of the best ways to manage anxiety symptoms. It can help you relieve stress and reduce your anxiety immediately – plus, staying in better shape leads to pronounced mental health improvements overall.

·       Get plenty of sleep. Don’t allow anxiety to start a vicious cycle of sleep deprivation. Do everything you can to get 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night, even if that means putting your phone down earlier than usual.

In moments of peak anxiety, you can use the following strategies to remain calm:

·       Deep breathing. Breathing deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth can help you stay calm.

·       Meditation. Mindfulness meditation guides you to focus on the present moment, instead of any intangible moment in the past or future; it’s a way of staying focused and grounded.

·       Counting and distraction exercises. Various counting and distraction exercises can help you recenter in the midst of anxiety or panic. For example, slowly count down from 30 or try to find 5 blue things in your current surroundings.

Feeling anxiety is an unavoidable part of running a business, and in the right contexts, it can even be empowering. But if your anxiety is starting to affect your quality of life or your work, it’s important to take proactive action. 

With the help of a good therapist and effective management strategies, you can get control over your anxiety once and for all.