Mental Health Matters: For Business Owners Too
There was a time when the idea of owning your business was just a dream. It took years of hard work and sacrifice to make that a reality. You’ve likely taken a lot of precautions to protect your business, but have you considered that protecting your own mental health is a critical way to protect your business as well?
Your mental health is foundational to every aspect of your life, including the success of your business, and yet it’s often put on the very back burner. Here are some simple strategies you can follow to stay on top of your mental health even in the midst of hectic business ownership.
What’s At Stake?
A recent study funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation, found that 50% of small business owners feel stress or mental health conditions affect their business negatively. When ignored, stress and mental health challenges can start to affect your focus, energy levels, personal health and ultimately the finances of your business. Finding effective ways to protect your mental health is essential. Here are 5 ways you can protect your mental health and essentially protect your business.
Get Educated on Mental Health
You can’t protect your mental health unless you understand your mental health. Identifying mental health challenges should be done with the help of a professional. It’s also important to understand how running a business in particular can affect your well-being.
Dr. Marie Asberg uses the Exhaustion Funnel to help explain how high achieving individuals often fall into burn-out. At the top of the funnel is a balanced life with time for work, chores, rest, and fun. As responsibilities press in, an individual may start to feel less time for play, then rest, then chores start to slip. After an individual spends a good deal of time focusing all of their time and energy on just work, exhaustion is the final step.
Being aware of what is happening to you in this funnel is essential to making wise decisions concerning your mental health.
Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the practice of living in the present moment and keeping your attention and consciousness gently focused on what is happening right now. When we allow our attention to run away with what might happen in the future or ruminate over the past, stress can set in.
When you feel this starting to happen you need to consciously take a moment to realign your focus. Taking a few deep breaths, stepping away from your desk, or stretching can signal to your brain that it’s time to realign focus.
Add Some Movement
Adding some gentle and healthy movement to your days is another crucial way to destress and keep yourself grounded in a good work life balance. People too often only associate exercise with trying to lose weight, but the truth is that we need exercise for a number of reasons.
Exercising lowers blood pressure and gives you the opportunity to step away from responsibilities and reset your mind and body. Regular exercise also improves your heart function, joint function and immune function making it easier and more pleasant to get through each day.
Think Gratefully
Running a business requires a lot of thought and focus on money and resources. Spending long periods of time thinking on these topics can be draining and can even lead to cynical thinking especially when numbers aren’t adding up on paper the way you need them to.
Be careful not to fall into negative thinking even when you are facing discouraging numbers. It may sound sappy but there is always something to be grateful for and keeping an attitude of gratitude can affect your overall success. Not only will you be less likely to fall into depression, but when you come at the world with a grateful attitude it can help you find solutions to the problems looming on the horizon.
If you or your team are really struggling to find silver linings currently in the work place, schedule weekly times for team gratitude reflection. Use the time to talk about what is working, share wins, and get some positive vibes flowing.
Schedule Rest
Your weekly calendar may look packed, but it is critical that you schedule rest or you will quickly head toward exhaustion, burn out and mental health problems.
It will probably feel weird scheduling rest at first, but you should always view this as an investment. Just like you would invest time in training employees or educating yourself for success, scheduling rest is an important way to invest in your mental health and the success of your business.
Not getting enough rest can start to show physically as headaches, sleep issues, heart problems, anxiety, and memory lapses.
Your mental health matters and it cannot be put on the back burner. If you’ve fallen into the trap of thinking your needs must come last so that you can run a successful business, it’s time to flip that script. If you aren’t at your best, your business never can be.
