Founders Stress: The Quiet Strain Behind High Achievement

Esther Dietrichsen-Farley

May 6, 2024

5 min read

Updated: Aug 9

You’re used to stress. You perform under pressure. You keep going when others would stop.

For many founders, these are not simply ways of coping with the demands of running a business. They are part of what has made the business possible.

The difficulty is recognising when something that has served you well is beginning to cost you more than it used to.

Stress as a founder

Founder stress often doesn’t look like stress in the usual sense. It can feel like responsibility, pressure, or simply the cost of building something that matters.

There may be no clear point at which it becomes too much. You may still be making decisions, solving problems, supporting other people and doing the work. What changes can be much less obvious: how difficult it becomes to switch off, how much space work occupies in your mind, or how little of you seems to be left when the working day ends.

This post explores how stress can show up for founders and high-performing professionals, and why it can be difficult to recognise when something has begun to shift.

Two women face each other, one in red and one in blue - symbolising the internal split founders often experience between outward control and inner stress

The Double Bind of High-Functioning Stress

Founders are often praised for their resilience, and often with good reason. Building and carrying a business can require an extraordinary capacity to tolerate uncertainty, make decisions without having all the information, recover from setbacks and keep going when other people are depending on you.

The difficulty is that there may be very little external indication when that capacity is becoming stretched.

You can still appear calm in a meeting. Still answer the emails. Still make the decision everyone else has been waiting for. And at the same time, you may notice that your mind rarely settles, that concentration takes more effort, that you are more irritable with people you care about, or that you feel strangely detached from things that used to matter to you.

You might:

Wake in the night with your mind already back at work
Find yourself more irritable or impatient than usual
Struggle to concentrate, despite spending longer working
Feel emotionally flat, detached, or unexpectedly tearful
Find that time away from work doesn’t feel particularly restorative
Be physically present with other people while part of your mind remains somewhere else

Stress does not always announce itself as an inability to cope. Sometimes the more useful question is how much coping is costing you.

If this feels familiar, you might also recognise some of what I describe in high-functioning burnout. The two can overlap, particularly when being competent and dependable makes it harder to recognise how much effort everyday life has begun to require. You may also recognise yourself in my post Private Therapy for Entrepreneurs: For the Ones Who Can’t Switch Off.

What the research tells us about founder stress

Research into entrepreneurial wellbeing has grown considerably in recent years. It describes a more complicated picture than entrepreneurship simply being “bad for your mental health”. Autonomy, meaningful work and the ability to shape your own working life can contribute positively to wellbeing. At the same time, entrepreneurship can bring substantial demands, including workload, uncertainty and financial pressure.

A 2024 study of self-employed people found a significant relationship between work demands and mental exhaustion, with quantitative demands such as workload and time pressure particularly important. The study also found a strong relationship between workload and presenteeism: continuing to work despite being unwell or when rest may be needed.

For a founder, this can be particularly difficult to separate from ordinary working life. There may not be another person who can simply take over. Decisions remain yours. Financial responsibility may be personal as well as professional. Other people may depend upon what you do next.

And work does not necessarily end when the laptop closes.

The business can remain mentally present long after the working day has technically finished.

Why Founders Stay in It

There are often very good reasons for pushing through.

Early success may have depended on your ability to tolerate uncertainty, work beyond what felt comfortable, solve problems independently, or keep going when there was nobody else to take over.

Those ways of working can become deeply familiar. They can also become entwined with identity: being the person who manages, who finds a way through, who can be relied upon.

And there may be genuine satisfaction in that. The answer is not necessarily to become less ambitious, less committed, or less invested in something you have worked hard to create.

The difficulty comes when there is increasingly little room for anything else.

You may notice that relationships receive whatever is left at the end of the day. That holidays take several days before you stop thinking about work. That decisions which once felt stimulating now feel relentless. Or that you have become so accustomed to carrying responsibility that you are not entirely sure what putting some of it down would look like.

Nothing has necessarily failed.

You may simply be noticing that the way you have been living and working no longer feels sustainable in quite the same way.

How I Work at The Farley

I work with adults who are carrying a great deal of responsibility, including founders, entrepreneurs and professionals whose working lives leave relatively little room for themselves.

At The Farley, therapy is not another place in which you need to perform or arrive with a clear account of what is wrong.

We can begin with what is actually happening, including the parts that may be difficult to explain or that do not seem to fit with how your life looks from the outside.

My approach is relational and grounded in person-centred therapy. I am not working from a predetermined programme for founder stress, or deciding in advance what needs to change.

Instead, the work develops through understanding your experience more fully: the pressures you are carrying, the ways you have learned to respond to them, your relationships, your sense of yourself, and what may have become harder to hear amongst everything else.

There may be things you want to change. There may also be things you value deeply about the life and business you have built.

Both can belong in the room.

Therapy cannot remove the realities of running a business. It can offer somewhere in which you do not have to manage them alone for fifty minutes.

I offer private counselling and psychotherapy in person in Southampton, online across the UK, and internationally where I am able to work within the relevant professional and insurance requirements.

You’re welcome to book a free 30-minute consultation if you’d like to get a sense of how it might feel to work together.

If this resonates, you may find these helpful:

The Farley