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Private Practice Strategies - By Anthony Centore
Stress management and rest for the entrepreneur
Building and sustaining a business is a day-in, day-out battle between uncertainty and
perseverance. Make a few bad decisions or take your “eye off the ball” for just a minute, and it could be “game over.” As an entrepreneur, your ability to persist through prolonged times of risk and stress is as important to your company’s survival as it is to your own.
Says one entrepreneur, Dan McDade
of PointClear, a business-to-business prospect development company, “Running your own business takes nerves of steel.” The trouble is that nerves aren’t steel. They’re nerves — and they can be broken. For many, the long hours and stress of entrepreneurship have their costs.
This past month, a friend and colleague called to tell me that his wife had
brought him to the emergency room
after he experienced several days of heart palpitations. The diagnosis wasn’t a heart attack but rather high blood pressure brought on by stress. He was prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and is doing better. But others in his shoes are handling stress by self-medicating with alcohol or marijuana or carrying a bottle of trusty benzodiazepines in their pockets.
Most of my columns are about lighting a fire and encouraging the hard work
of entrepreneurship. This month we’re going to flip the coin and talk about stress management and life balance. A lot of advice on this topic is available already, but I’d like to share a few strategies that I’ve found to be particularly effective for the entrepreneur.
Get enough sleep
Everyone has heard about the importance of sleep. But too often, we
entrepreneurs think, “That’s for the guy (or gal) who’s not trying to build a business.”
Not true. Sleep is particularly important for entrepreneurs. When you’re tired, your ability to manage stress drops through the floor, and you don’t think clearly or creatively. In sum, you make terrible business decisions.
While the effects of sleep deprivation are harsh, the benefits of sleep are impressive. One Stanford University study found that basketball players who slept about 10 hours a night sprinted faster and demonstrated a 9 percent increase in accuracy when shooting free throws and three-pointers.
Although a typical recommendation is seven to nine hours of sleep per night, different people need different amounts of sleep. To determine how much you likely need, ask yourself how much you would sleep if you didn’t have to work. Then try sleeping that much.
Exercise
Exercise is important for the entrepreneur. Studies have shown that moderate exercise improves mood and creativity. If you’re new to exercise, try scheduling just 30 minutes of gym time into your daily routine. Be prepared that on certain days, it will seem that even 30 minutes is too much to steal from your mounting workload. There will be some days when you’re so mentally preoccupied with work that you just can’t convince yourself to go exercise. If you need to skip a day, so be it. Just don’t skip a week!
I’ve found that on days when I’m feeling crunched, I can still walk for an hour without losing any work time. How? Because there are always business calls
I can make while walking (I sometimes find solutions to business problems faster during a walk too).
Of course, if the idea of incorporating exercise into your daily routine makes you tired, first focus on getting more sleep.
Side note: At my company, we experimented with something we thought would be an effective work-exercise hybrid — treadmill desks. What we found is that it’s really difficult to get work done when on a treadmill desk. It’s tough to focus when answering even simple emails, and graphic design is impossible. However, standing desks seem to work well as long as there is also an option for a person to sit if he or she gets tired.
Create a work-free zone
There was a time when I would maximize my home for productivity.
I built a home office, even though I already had an office at work. Like
many entrepreneurs, I told myself that having a home office would make my life easier (and more productive). I could be home more with family. I could get work done in the mornings, even before getting dressed. And I could work in the evenings. And the weekends (woohoo!).
What a terrible idea. Doing work at home in the proximity of family is not the same as being home with family.
I’ve since turned my home office into a mini home theater. Instead of having a dedicated space to work at home, I now have a dedicated space at home to not work. I still work at home, but my house is no longer a trigger to keep working.
Schedule fun
As an entrepreneur, you have a vast amount of work to complete at any
22 | ct.counseling.org | December 2014