Tech Entrpreneurs and Anxiety/Depression

[Forest]

In our thread about Neurasthenia/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ie TMS), @BruceMC wrote,

I've seen tons of yuppies who arrived in the Silicon Valley in their twenties with high ambitions for economic success and an insane work ethic who wound up with CFS. They all share a similar pattern: First, they worked 14 hours per day at one start 'em up hoping for a big stock pay off until it went bust. Then, they moved their obsessive work-a-mania to a second start 'em up that also went bust. ... During their tenure at the third work-for-stocks company, they caught some kind of virus that laid them low for a week. ... they developed CFS and had to go on 20 hour-per-week reduced work schedules. They were never really the same again.

A couple of days ago, I was struck by a radio report about anxiety and depression among people working at tech startups in Boston:

There’s been no shortage of depictions of the startup tech world in movies and TV lately — Jesse Eisenberg leading his burgeoning Facebook team on 16-hour coding sessions in “The Social Network,” venture capitalists paying students to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs in HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

Everyone is pulling all-nighters, beating the competition and smooth-talking investors to make their “billion dollar idea” a success.

It sounds glamorous, but it’s a lot to live up to. And the less than healthy subtext is — forego sleep, food, family, friends, all for your company.

That kind of lifestyle can exacerbate depression and anxiety — both of which are becoming a serious problem in the tech startup world.

You can listen to the story here: startup anxiety.

They had Dana Severson as a guest. Here's his story, from an article in The Atlantic entitled, "Tech Has A Depression Problem:"

In 2011, a few months into starting Wahooly—a crowdfunding platform in which backers receive a share in the venture’s success—Dana Severson started to have bouts of debilitating anxiety. The company had started off well, but things had plateaued lately. “You see other people getting press and doing things faster than you and it makes you second guess every single skill that you have,” he says. But Severson didn’t tell anybody about his feelings. He couldn’t, he felt, because he had to be a good leader.

“Theres a lot of money at stake in this world—it's not only the investors that you need the confidence of, it’s also your co founders and employees,” he says. “I couldn’t allow them to have any sort of doubt in my ability to perform.”

After opening up to a friend, Severson learned that he wasn’t alone in his anxiety, or in his fear of admitting it. Seven months ago, he and developer Nick Ciske co-founded Startups Anonymous, a forum in which people in the tech industry can post questions and concerns anonymously and receive positive feedback.

So far, he says, about half of the submissions have been about anxiety and depression.

You can read the entire article here: Tech has a Depression Problem.

Both stories really grabbed me because I could relate to the ups and downs of running a startup. Will what you create keep growing for the rest of your life or will it be gone in five years? Acceptance is an amazing tool for mental healthy, but when there is that much uncertainty, you can't become "well adjusted." What do you adjust to? The good outcome or the bad? Life can be a rollercoaster, depending on which you think will happen.

In a startup, you have to do a million things that you've never had to do before, and the pressure can be intense, because it could either be the biggest success of your life or a complete failure, and you don't know which. Hence the rollercoaster.

 

[Ellen]

Perhaps the concept of outcome independence is applicable to running a start up, as well as to TMS. Try to relax and enjoy the ride, though definitely hard to do when the ride is a roller coaster.

 

[BruceMC]

Didn't think I'd open such a delicious can of TMS worms with my jaded observations about CFS and the startup world, Forest. But don't you think that "cyber space" by its very abstract nature is intrinsically stressful to the psyche? Maybe that's why so many accountants come down with CTS as their company starts to tank? The stress becomes locked into a self-amplifying cyber feedback loop that gets more and more intense as the declining sales figures surge through the accountant's fingers into a relational database on a hard drive or up in the Cloud. As Ellen implies, you have to be realistic and keep in mind that for every 1000 start ups in the Silicon Valley only 1 or 2 go public. Enjoy the ride while it lasts without harboring unrealistic expectations.