WHY ENTREPRENEURS OFTEN NEED MENTAL HEALTH CARE
While many would love to be entrepreneurs and not have to work for a corporation or a dead-end job that pays low, there’s a lot of stress and pressure that comes with being your own businessman.
As Forbes reminds us, being an entrepreneur can be very stressful. “We’re easily trapped in a ‘never-not-working’ mentality, forgoing opportunities for fun and connection and thinking about work even when we’re not actually working.” Entrepreneurs can be “notoriously sleep-deprived, undernourished, over-caffeinated and financially constrained – with little emphasis on self-care and adaptive coping strategies such as (healthy) exercise and fun.” This can leave entrepreneurs vulnerable to addiction, depression, and other mental health issues.
What creates a lot of mental health problems for entrepreneurs is uncertainty with your business, money, the future, and more. As Forbes continues, “As humans, we like to create an illusion of certainty to manage our anxiety around our ultimate powerlessness. The ability to envision the future and anticipate job-security is an avenue to this experience of certainty – one less accessible to those of us working for ourselves. Thus we’re susceptible to higher levels of uncertainty, anxiety, and responsibility for what’s truthfully out of our control.”
And one of the hardest tackles that entrepreneurs have, losing their identities in their jobs and companies. “The looming existential void (and self-worth tied to our company’s success) is a manifestation of perfectionism that causes both anxiety and an emotional roller coaster – dependent on our everchanging company forecast.”
Entrepreneurs and artists often have these psychological problems in life, and while it can make mental difficulties more complicated, at the core these mental health problems are certainly solvable, and there is always help and coping skills to learn. Like building a business from nothing, good mental health can be challenging to achieve, but incredibly rewarding as well.