Comment by 23david | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 23david | Hacker News Reader

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It breaks you mentally bit by bit, and I personally experiencing this a few years ago on a startup. It was horrible and unexpected to find myself mentally unable to get my work done. Essentially it seems that the stress hormones released by constant physical & mental stress physically damages/alters the emotional centers of your brain. And over time the damage becomes more-or-less permanent. There is some research to support this, but it's a very new field (Some good research is coming out of the PTSD research being funded by the military.) I don't think it's far off to say that at least mentally, starting a company is a lot like going off to war. Less risk of physical injury perhaps, but similar risks for mental injury.

For healthy people, but particularly people genetically susceptible to stress-related disorders, startup work can trigger full-blown depression and bi-polar manic/depressive cycles. That's just part of the job, and you need to be prepared for it and take care of yourself.

IMO, successful founders are the ones that successfully cope with the inevitable manic/depressive cycles. Self-awareness of our limitations, and good medication are life-savers. Once you start testing out different medication options, prepare to spend up to a year finding a combination that works to help keep you stable through the most stressful and depressed times. Don't give up hope. Ever.

In after the 1991 Gulf War, PTSD rates spiked beyond rates ever seen in the US Army. A study commissioned to examine the effects of PTSD found that this long-term stress was actually causing the hippocampus (the short-to-med/long term memory module of the brain, amongst other things) to atrophy. This confirmed a similar effect they had found with mice a few years earlier.

The next push is to replicate the more positive result of environment enrichment, which has been shown in mice but not people. Basically, environment enrichment has been shown to help facilitate LTP (long-term potentiation — an extreme period of neurogenosis) and makes the hippocampus less prone to stress-induced atrophy.

I've personally been a few very high stress work environments, but I use this knowledge to help convince myself to relax productively.

> In after the 1991 Gulf War, PTSD rates spiked beyond rates ever seen in the US Army.

Last year the [U.S.] Army's vice-chief of staff urged psychiatrists to change the term to "post-traumatic stress injury." Apparently, too many troops come home with PTSI but refuse to seek help. And as a result, some portion of them end up taking their own lives. The Army's hope is that renaming the phenomenon as an "injury" will reduce the fear of being stigmatized [0].

(Apparently some psychiatrists have rejected the idea of changing the name, because heaven forbid that they should alter their sacred naming convention for no better reason than that it might help some people.)

[0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/05/key-psychiatric-...

The failure of your startup is not comparable even psychologically to seeing the pointless atrocities of war.

Atrocities are horrible, but to our bodies and brains they are experienced as very very stressful events. You can get PTSD from going off to war without ever seeing atrocities. The daily stress level in the war environment is too high for most people to handle without causing problems.

And so too is the daily stress level for most startup founders... There is a general high stress level involved in the day to day running of a business (particularly if you don't have prior experience doing it), but sometimes horrible things can happen in a business that make stress levels go through the roof.

I can't prove it, but I don't think it's too far off to say that the stress reaction founders experience at the really difficult points of their startup experience IS actually comparable to the stress reaction experienced by soldiers witnessing a horrible atrocity.

Being betrayed by a co-founder or investor. Having key employees quit. Lawsuits. Running out of cash.

Driving over an IED. A mortar round headed your way at midnight. Gunfire. Running out of blood.

the two years I spent in Job Corps was enough give me PTSD. There was no one event that caused it. It was simply being in a stressful environment surrounded by the dumbest mother fuckers ever to claw their way out of a vagina (staff included). I have flashbacks, near constant depression, and bouts of rage that I simply turn inwards as more depression. I guess what I am saying is that it isn't just seeing combat that can fuck you up. (Not that I am in any way trivializing people who have PTSD from combat, just pointing out that, to our brains, it doesn't seem to matter)

> starting a company is a lot like going off to war

Why is this accepted, considered common knowledge?

It doesn't have to be this way. Not at all. The vast majority of crazy stress related to "starting a company" is self-inflicted, through poor choices, poor preparation, and personality issues, like grandiosity.

self-inflicted, through poor choices, poor preparation... grandiosity

Hey, that sounds like the reasons we go to war too!

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