Conquer Entrepreneurial Stress. The Battle With Intellectual Tigers

As entrepreneurs, we often face extreme mental challenges that lead to like, emotional and physical stress. We feel like our body is being chased like a tiger. But recognizing that you're not actually in danger is so important to separate these two things. Recognizing an intellectual tiger and realizing that you can take six breaths and completely reset the mental framework has been critical for me through my entrepreneurial journey. What's up everyday entrepreneurs? Today I want to talk about stress. Intellectual tigers is what I like to call them. And Jeffrey Woo, I met him many years ago. They were building a company that sold coffee cubes. They were Stanford grads. Now they run a business called Human. They sell Ketone IQ if you ever want to look it up. It's an amazing product. I'm big fans of these guys. They were some of the smartest people I ever worked with many, many years ago. Jeffrey now runs Antifund VC for Jake Paul. They got into W, they built better, they have some security companies. But he's really the VC fund behind Jake Paul and he's had an incredible come up. And I've always really respected his level of thought and intelligence around entrepreneurship and building businesses. And there was a video a couple years ago that I heard him talking about intellectual tigers and it really struck a chord with me. And as entrepreneurs, we often face extreme mental challenges that lead to like emotional and physical stress. Anyone who's an entrepreneur, I know that you've felt this throughout your journey. Geoffrey explained it beautifully one time about how often these intellectual problems that we run into, our amygdala literally triggers that we feel like our body is being chased like a tiger. We create a ton of emotional and physical stress at this time, even mental stress. And there's a really good pattern here that I recognized. You need to separate the two of them. It's intellectual stress. You're not being chased by a tiger. You're probably sitting at your computer, your breathing gets shallow, your chest gets tight, your shoulders get tight, and you feel this stress throughout your entire body because your amygdala goes into fight or flight. And separating these two things, knowing that you're physically safe, emotionally safe, and it's just intellectual stress has been critical for me through my entrepreneurial journey. So I want to share how other entrepreneurs have also dealt with this in the past. So in my experience, through building Data nerds for 10 years, building the stated for 5 years, and then exiting it to Adam Data for 8 figures, I realized how the intellectual stress can manifest into emotional volatility and anxiety, even physical symptoms. I strongly believe that a Lot of the physical symptoms that we endure or receive throughout entrepreneurship can be battled or managed by understanding how these stressors are impacting our own body. Elon Musk is notorious for talking about how he works to a hundred and one hundred twenty hour weeks and how it's always taking a toll on his mental health. How many entrepreneurs wouldn't want to change places with him or be in his shoes for even a single week? There is a constant pressure to be performing and developing and growing and learning. This is just the rhythm of entrepreneurship that we have to learn how to deal with. Arianna Huffington's another one. She actually passed out one time from exhaustion and it was such eye opener for her. She realized that she had to manage this intellectual stress that was being put on her from running all the businesses that she has. And there's a need for rest and mindfulness to reset these patterns for us to perform better, to feel better, to be happy healthy humans. Jeff Bezos is another one, talks about avoiding decision fatigue. I have a couple other videos talking about how Amazon has their six page memo meetings and I think it was so important for everyone to level before a meeting so that they knew the decisions that needed to be made so they weren't dragged on. One of the things when we were acquired that I recognized was once you move from a small startup of 10, 20, 30, 40 people to a company of 100, 150, 200 people, decisions often can be delayed for weeks, months, quarters, even years at a time. Having that decision fatigue and not having a final answer at the end of a meeting is such a waste of time for absolutely everyone. And Jeff Bezos always told entrepreneurs to get more sleep. I think sleep is one of the most underrated or overlooked parts of stress that we have in our day when it got to a point. Now I've recognized that I sleep for as long as I need to set an alarm. I still wake up at 5:36am every single day and lately with a lot of energy because of the sobriety that I've had. But understanding that you need to sleep and manage this stress that's going to come with entrepreneurship is so important. Another one of my favorite entrepreneurs is Sarah Blakely. She created Spang. She's married to Jesse Itzler, who's one of my favorite entrepreneurs out there. When she had these intellectual stress moments or she felt the intellectual tiger attacking her amygdala, she would find creative outlets and humor. One thing I do quite often throughout the day is I'll watch five to 10 minutes of a comedy, a stand up, something that will make me laugh to pull me out of those stressful situations. You need to be able to reframe them as learning opportunities because I never like saying the word failure. It was always a learning lesson or an opportunity for us. So a few key points in this are you need to understand this fight or flight response when the stress comes in and you stop breathing. Step back. John Asrath taught me this many, many years ago. You just take six deep breaths in and out. If you do that six times, you will actually reset your system. Your nervous system will reset and calm you down. So breathing can be critical in this. Also recognizing that your brain and your stressors are feeling fear at this time and true fear, but recognizing that you're not actually in danger is so important to separate these two things. So you need to have the emotional regulation to pause and breathe. And then once you're in a better state, cognitively reframe the situation that you're in. You need to change your perspective. Go for a walk. I always like getting a vast view. I don't know what it is about staring at the ocean or having a big view. It just instantly resets and reframes how I am feeling. Another great point in this is to have good rest and set a routine. I talk about consistency a lot as an entrepreneur. The most success I ever had was when I was in consistent routines. Sleeping, eating, working, resting. All of these things were so important to me to have a great routine. So build yourself a daily routine and prioritize your sleep. The next one is mindfulness and mental fatigue fitness. I have been meditating for 10 minutes every day for many, many years. I sit in front of my red light in the morning, I try and set my day up. I do deep breathing, Tony Robbins exercises to get in the zone to prepare myself for the day. And it's been such a lovely thing. Like today. My wife would have been pretty pissed at me when I woke up because I Woke up at 5:30. I was firing on all cylinders. I had more energy than I've ever felt before because my mental practice that I had this morning just fired me up. And it's like one of the first things that I do in the morning. The next thing that I would say is practice gratitude Lately I lost my uncle last week and one of the things that I was so grateful for, I deeply felt gratitude towards him and towards my family because of how strong of a unit and family we are. We're all there to support each other through this difficult time and I felt immense gratitude inside of me and it really helped me get through the week of this really difficult thing that happened in my life. And then the last thing that I want to say is when you're in these situations, never be afraid to ask for help and identify the problem and share with others. If you can delegate these things that stress you out and maybe aren't of high utility to the business, delegating them is your best friend. Hand them off to someone else in your company if you are not in the right mental frame or mental state to handle these issues. So leverage your friends, leverage your team, leverage your family, and you can seek mentorship at this time because that's why we built Everyday Entrepreneur. We've been through so many of these issues over the last 10 years that we're still learning them, recognizing them, but now that we have, we work more cohesively together, we get along better, we're happier, healthy humans at the end of the day. And so I wanted to share this because the difference between recognizing an intellectual tiger and realizing that you can take six breaths and completely reset the mental framework and I really want to push everyone here to be a happy, healthy human and live the best life possible. If you guys like this, please join the Everyday Entrepreneur community on school. There's links below. You can go and follow and see all the videos that we've shared on this. Thanks for tuning in.