Our Take on Maintaining Good Mental Health While Running a Start-up Business

As it's Mental Health Awareness Month, we thought we could talk about our personal learning of the relationship between starting a business and maintaining good mental health... as we know it can be challenging! Of course, everyone has their own personal experience, so the below is based on what we have experienced. 

How are you? As a small business, it is easy to get caught up in the numbers, and your mental health can quite quickly suffer.

With social media constantly shouting about successes, not failures, it is easy to feel pressured into comparing yourself and your business to others. As much as it is still important to research your competitors, try not to prioritise this too much! You will rarely see people's downfalls on social media... but they do happen!

As a small business ourselves, we constantly feel like in order to succeed, we need to work, work, work. As much as this is true... you want to work smart to avoid burning out! You may put pressure on yourselves to stay busy all the time, but it is as important to dedicate time to recover, outside of work. Looking after your mental health will make you more productive and creative when you are working.

So, try not to feel guilty for taking the odd break! Enjoy your lunch break away from your desk! Turn off your work phone when you're not working! Our motto for 2021 is Work Smart, Play Hard.

When running a business, you can easily feel isolated. It can be more difficult to talk to your family and friends about issues related to your work, than talking about personal issues. We have found that it is a good idea to have a mentor, where you can discuss any challenges and identify the solutions at work. 

One important thing we have also learnt is that there is no added value in worrying about what may or may not happen (this does not only apply to running a business). All this does is create anxiety for yourself. So, it is best to focus our energy on what we can actually control. 

We hope the above is useful and we would love to hear about your personal tips on managing mental health whilst running a small business.

To find out more about our business. Click here...