Thread by @alexhillman

Been thinking about this question since I saw it on @IndieHackers yesterday.

I don’t totally know what “founder anxiety” is in the context of the question, but...

I have run my own business for almost 15 years. And I have been hospitalized for anxiety.

So, thread I guess?

https://twitter.com/indiehackers/status/1170103884729257984

For background, my anxiety dated back to when I was very young. Hospitalization was in my teenage years.

And since timeline matters, I left my job to run my own business when I was 23.

If I think back to my most anxious years, it had a lot to do with how I processed judgement and expectations.

Some of that was external, for sure. A lot of it was internal.

I’m not crying about my childhood btw. I had it REALLY GOOD. But I was really really really bad at handling failure and mistakes.

I overindexed negative thoughts and soaked in them. The ways I beat myself up were far worse than any bully (and boy was I bullied).

I remember waking up with intense anxiety. Always. Every day. No matter what I actually had to do that day.

Like the Sunday scaries but every damn morning. Often I didn’t even know what I was freaking out about.

The one time I wasn’t anxious?

When I was learning. When I had a goal or an idea, and I was figuring it out.

This is very, very counterintuitive.

Uncertainty is a huge source of anxiety, right?

Tying this back to the original “founder anxiety” question, I think a lot about how I handle uncertainty today, and how it’s changed over the years.

I think, along the way, the thing that changed was that I stopped trying to manage and control everything that was outside of my control.

I wish I could trace it back to a specific early lesson or experience but I can’t. At least not right now.

But today, I deal with my “founder anxiety” by being super clear with myself about what I can control and what I can’t.

And 99.9% of things, I can’t control.

All I can control is myself and my reactions. That’s literally it.

Over time, I learned to spend less time worried about judgement and expectations. I couldn’t control what others thought or expected anyway.

But I could control what *I* thought, and what *I* expected of myself (and of others).

It’s not easy to control an anxious or obsessive brain.

It’s taken years of incremental practice to recognize when I’m reacting to something I can’t control, to remind myself that I can’t control it, and to focus my energy on something I can no matter how small.

This is a weird and circuitous thread. I wasn’t sure if I had a takeaway when I started. But I wanted to think through it out loud and see what came out.

Gonna keep thinking, might add more to the thread.

Maybe one takeaway is that feeling uncertain is normal, but it’s extremely easy to overindex that feeling as SOMETHING IS WRONG and let that take over the rational reality that nothing is wrong, you’re just not sure what’s gonna happen next and that’s okay.

Another is to be kind to yourself and trust yourself.

If that’s too hard (and it is very hard), find a friend or mentor who you trust and ask for their help.

I’ve gotten good at doing it for myself but some days even I need someone else to say it for me.

Another thing I do a lot is a sort of mindfulness exercise where I listen to a conversation so intently that I’m trying to step into the other persons’ experience or point of view.

The key is to listen to understand, not to respond. This focus gets me out of my anxious head.

If you’re anxious because you’re spending too much time in your own head (one of my top reasons), get into someone else’s head for a while.

I find it’s extremely hard to obsess about my own thoughts AND someone else’s at the same time.