In the last 5 months since I started my new venture, Bluesky Local, I’ve taken to working a healthy 7 days a week, at least 10 hours a day on average. While working on this schedule, setting, achieving, and missing countless goals, I’ve become burnt out two times, meaning I was so mentally exhausted from overworking that I had to take a break in order to regain my strength and motivation.

In the process of keeping a diligent work schedule and making the mistake of “burning-out” twice, I’ve learned a few lessons as to how best to manage stress when one is in working full-time to start-up a new business from scratch.

1) Get Sleep. Part of the reason I am motivated to get up and work the same long hours each and every day is because my body and mind is well rested. I’ve set an alarm that beeps at 7:30PM each evening letting me know that I need to get off the computer. For some people, me included, the light from the computer can confuse your biological clock and keep you awake longer if you look at a screen immediately before going to sleep. I’m typically in bed reading a book between 9 and 10 and fall asleep soon after then. I wake up naturally, without an alarm, the next day typically around 8 or 9 AM. By getting 9-10 hours of sleep every night I find my mind is much more alert and able to problem-solve with a strength that is twice what is would be than if I worked straight through the night (something I’ve done in the past). Piling up a sleep debt can only contribute towards a lack-luster motivation and a poorer quality of work.

2) Exercise Frequently. My mobile phone’s alarm goes off twice a day. The first goes off at 12PM telling me to stop working to break for exercise and to eat lunch. Everyone has been told since they were young of the amazing short and long term benefits of exercise. I’ll tick off a few of the key benefits for those leading a start-up lifestyle.

1. More energy
2. Increased confidence (good for sales)
3. Cathartic release (one can liken lifting and learning to control progressively heavier weight amounts to the ability to manage the stress of problems you will undoubtedly face day-in and day-out in your efforts to grow your start-up).
4. General long term benefits; for example recent studies have shown that there are long term benefits to mental fitness with regard to memory.

3) Eat (at least 3 times a day). Keeping a regular eating routine will help you to bear the stress of everyday start-up life. This is important because it shows your body and mind that you are disciplining yourself to keep a regimented schedule that is controlled based on personal choice rather than on whatever your start-up allows you time to do (whenever it’s convenient for the business or you’re just too hungry to go on working). You can also liken it to the exercise suggestion: you lift a weight amount that you are able to control with each rep and not the other way around, which would cause you to struggle.

It is recommended that you eat more than three times a day if possible. Imagine that your body is like a wood chipper. If you overload it with logs (larger meals), it won’t be able to cut them up (digestion) effectively and quickly enough. Rather, if you eat more frequent and smaller meals your metabolism will be able to more efficiently digest each meal, and less will be stored as unnecessary fat.

4) Take Breaks. This tip can coincide with the exercise and eating habit tips, but it could also be something different such as meditation, playing a video game, anything of your preference outside of work. The time that you spend away from your work can help you to actually stumble upon solutions to problems you are currently trying to solve. It happens to my business partner and I all the time. It may seem counter intuitive, but you sometimes have to take breaks from work in order to actually learn how to complete your work.

5) Understand Why You Are Working. The second time that I burnt out, about two months ago now, I felt like a car engine that was unable to start-up again. I had no gas, no spark to ignite action in order to move the car forward. To figure out how to regain my motivation I sat down one day and had a mental conversation with myself, recording it on paper as I went. I challenged myself, asking question like, why I was working? What was special about what I was doing, why did I care? I concluded the session by listing out three personal core values for why I was working on the business, why I was continuously pressing forward, to what end. Then I asked myself why twice more and got to the point where reason held no bearing, because these were the values I held unquestionably. They were part of who I was, and a ceaseless source of fuel for the action and progress I was seeking to regain. Realizing this I was quickly able to resume my work ethic.

I know a good number of entrepreneurs. Our type is an uncommon breed because we can work seemingly endless hours, taking our minds and bodies to unreasonable limits. The weird thing is that the work is what can become the only thing that is routine, and, at the same time, the least understood. This is not desirable.

While our work is our lives as entrepreneurs, it is vital to understand our core motivation for doing that work because otherwise we are more like the machines and software that we seek to build. Building a healthy routine on top of that motivation to limit and discipline oneself will translate to long-term, sustainable results for your business.

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