Entrepreneurship is hard.
I know a lot of motivational speakers only share the glamorous things you can be and achieve as an entrepreneur, and they rarely share that you will cry yourself to sleep some nights, feel like a failure some days, contemplate quitting in some months and even see darkness when you think of your future in some years.
Entrepreneurship is a lonely and a worrisome path sometimes and that can have a negative effect on your mental health and so if you are an entrepreneur, here are five practical ways that you can take of your mental health:
1. Take Rest / Go On Vacation
One of the reasons that most people choose to be entrepreneurs is to work on their own time, to be flexible and to enjoy the adventurous ride that they have chosen called entrepreneurship.
Don’t forget that you need rest. You are not a machine. Take vacations where you don’t think about work, take breaks where you rejuvenate so that you can come up with fresh ideas and more zeal towards your projects.
Put rest in your timetable, and rest efficiently.
2. Acknowledge and know when you are burned out and take care of that early on
WHO defines burn out as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
As an entrepreneurs you will deal with these work stresses alone instead of taking them to your boss, and when you deal with disappointments, failure and setbacks for so long, it is easy to be burned out.
It is important to recognize or see the signs of burn out so that you can deal with it early on. As I said earlier you are not a machine, and it is okay to care for your mental health and take time to rejuvenate back to your whole self.
3. Listen to your instincts
A person once told me, ‘listening to your instincts could save you from a lot of heartbreaks and business losses’. I live by that advice.
Sometimes when it comes to working with people, your gut can tell you no. Learn to listen to it so that you don’t face hurdles that will affect your mental health in the future. Learn to listen to your gut.
4. Have a life apart from your business
As an entrepreneur a lot of times we struggle alone, or even in the times we hang out we still talk only about our enterprises.
It is important to have a life a part from work, and be there fully. It is important to hangout and do things that bring you joy instead of filling your whole world with entrepreneurship.
It is important to experience life apart from the entrepreneurship bubble or your office.
Those things fill your world and bring you joy and reduce the chances of getting depressed. Have a community that holds you together.
5. Have clearly defined goals and values
Have goals and break them into small, achievable ones.
And make it a point to celebrate yourself when you achieve your goals, no matter how small.
It gets depressing when you are hit with a failure after failure, but I think there’s a balance when you feel the pain of being hit by a challenge and you equally, strongly rejoice when you achieve a goal or win.
It is also important to have values, personal and business wise.
A lot of times, when we do things for our business that go against our personal values, it is our personal emotional and mental health that suffers. Even if you want success, it is important you achieve that while having followed your values rather than achieving that and not knowing who you are because you have forsaken yourself and your values, that’s mentally disorienting.
Even though I shared these five ways, please feel free to add as many as you would like according to what works for you. Comments are also welcome below. Mental health is such a personal issue, notice what works for you personally and take care of your mental health the best way you know how.
