Your Body in Founder Mode
For the past ~6 months I’ve been wearing a whoop which measures my HRV day in and day out. They produce a graph that they call “stress“ which is really just a projection of your HRV with a few other variables tied in. Here’s what a normal day looks like:
There are many things that can cause your body to be under stress. Going for a hard run uphill - this will put stress on your body. Other things like low sleep or interpersonal conflict can cause stress too. The way your body responds to stress is through your nervous system, and whoop is measuring this data in a very controlled way.
What’s interesting, is I’ve been very good over the past year on taking care of my health, so I have a very stable stress baseline. My HRV on a normal night sits somewhere between 70-90ms (healthy range for a man my age), sometimes higher with a good workout. What I’ve noticed is that this changes based on company stress too - my body physiologically responds to this stress in a measurable way through my heart and nervous system.
One of the very unique parts about being a founder is how much your company gets tied to your identity - and my (loose) idea about this is that that identity tie then ties a lot of your nervous system response to how your company is doing. This is your “gut“ response to those external stimuli that feel threatening, validating, exciting, and everything in between. It’s why entrepreneurship can be such a drug! Because it’s stimulating your nervous system like no other job could.
As founders, the communities we participate in are so competitive, it can seem like “everyone is doing so well, it must only be me that’s under this amount of stress, I only ever hear about the ups of other people’s companies but no one talks about this existential dread”
When I advise other entrepreneurs, one thing I’ll say over and over again is “trust your gut“ - which is basically saying you need to trust your nervous system response to these stimuli. It’s the thing that has kept humans alive through many many what used to be life threatening situations. Somewhere in an entrepreneur’s body is a response to this stress which is pricing in all of the verbal, non verbal, and everything in-between information the entrepreneur has that no other person around the table possibly has in their head - it’s the superpower of founders.
It’s also something that is very very hard to understand unless you’ve done it (most VCs don’t, but founders do). The problem is only the entrepreneur really has the ability to trust that gut response, and it can take time for your brain and nervous system to process that data to come up with an answer. There are moments where you just have to surrender to “sitting“ in things because your gut hasn’t quite figured it out yet. You can go out and get more data, but sometimes you need be uncomfortable for a time as you figure it out. This is one of the cruxes to founder mode decision making - you have to also know your gut well enough to know when it’s figured out what it wants to do or not.