Anxiety: A Functional Analysis
When founders come to see me who are struggling with their anxiety, I often find it helpful to lead them through a simple functional analysis of their anxiety: What is the upside of your anxiety? What does it help you with? And also: What's the downside? How does it hurt you? Realizing that anxiety serves a helpful function helps founders change their relationship to it in the moment. They go from being the victims of their anxiety to being more comfortable with the presence of anxiety in their lives. Anxiety becomes a more okay emotion to live with... until it's not. In developing answers to these questions, founders often realize that there's a tipping point where helpful anxiety starts to cause suffering and harm. Anxiety is not helpful if it results in lost sleep, irritability, endless spirals of thought with no resolution, and no valuable plan of action.
When founders realize there are two sides to their anxiety (helpful and not helpful), the question that then arises is: How can you walk yourself back to helpful anxiety from unhelpful suffering? What skills can you deploy in the unhelpful moments that will soothe, release, or transform your anxiety?
Here's how one founder answered these questions in a recent session - but I encourage you to find your own responses:
What's helpful about your anxiety? "It helps me stay grounded in action. I don't get lost in the high highs of this startup - my anxiety brings me back into the plan, into execution. It reminds me of what all needs to be done in order to keep going." (Amy's aside: I observed there's something motivating for her about her anxiety - that part of it comes from her strength in being able to action quickly and effectively.)
What's not helpful about your anxiety? "There's some anxiety I feel that i know is unrelated to anything tangible. It just exists. When I wake up in the middle of the night, this is the cloud of anxiety that hits me and I'm already in it. It's not helpful, it's not specific, and it feels bad." (Amy's aside: This is the part of her anxiety that comes from fear, not strength. It's also probably more intense because YC is so execution-oriented. My hypothesis is that this is the live-wire part of her anxiety that she'll need to soothe in order to step into a different, more manageable long-term pace after the flurry of YC.)
What's the muscle you can build to bring yourself from unhelpful anxiety back into helpful anxiety? "I can first notice when it's one vs. the other. They feel different, so I'll bring my awareness to myself and try to discern which is which. I'll pause and pay attention - is there anything helpful in this feeling? Is there a nugget of truth? I'll breathe through it. I'll tell myself it's okay that I feel this way - all founders do. If the anxiety is unhelpful, I'll learn to release it. I won't try fighting it by telling myself that I can't be feeling how i do. I'll let it go. If I need to, I'll talk to my cofounder about what I'm worried about to see if we can workshop whether there's any wisdom to it or not."
