Stress and Anxiety

Hello my friend,

Every week, I share difficult parts of my career and how I’d make them easier for you, and myself (if I could go back). That’s why the newsletter is called “Light Work” now, instead of “Darwin’s Newsletter.” I write about how management’s changed, how Rhode sold for $1B, and building at beehiiv (my day job), in hopes that it’ll help you in your business journey too.

Today’s post has actually caused me the most stress out of everything I’ve ever written. And in the greatest irony, the post is actually about how I deal with stress and anxiety, which have been a constant part of my life for years.

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, like I should have probably learned a thing or two by now if that’s the case, but trust me with where this is going.

One of the reasons it’s constant (at least for me), is because I don’t really focus on trying to remove the stress. I don’t mind it that much (with one major exception I’ll cover later). My focus is more on managing and using the feelings. I’ll get to that later in the post.

Sure, I get cranky when I’m stressed. But does it bother me in a major way? Not really. I’m not upset about having to get this post juuuust right for you (even though I’m stressed that it’s too personal and might completely bomb anyway).

So today, I’m sharing how I manage feelings of stress and anxiety, with a few suggestions that will hopefully help you too.

Let’s get into it.

Stress and anxiety at all times

I think every major stressor in life, reflects growth. Even though this is about business, it applies to all walks of life:

• Go to the gym, feel pain in your muscles, get stronger (or give up before you hit your goals).

• Go to med school, feel the pain of exams and residence, become a better doctor (or give up before you finish).

• Pick up a guitar, practice for years, and finally play the songs you love the way you want (or give up before you get there).

Between my work at a tech startup (beehiiv), building my own little candle business, writing this newsletter, helping people with their products and using AI, there’s a lot to do.

This week, a few people who know what I have going on asked me the same thing (in different words):

• “How do make your stress go away?”

I couldn’t answer it. I never really dealt it per-se. I sort of just do the next thing, and then the next, and just keep going. Sometimes the stress gets better or worse, but it’s always there.

Thinking about it again since then, that’s actually the wrong question.

The better question is:

• “How do handle stress?”

Every part of life worth pursuing involves some level of stress. The bigger the goal, the more stress is involved (typically). And while it varies from person to person, I’ll always believe that stress is required to achieve great things.

But stress and anxiety are obviously not the goal.

They are the price we pay for the benefits we want.

It’s just that some people handle stress better than others.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in achieving more in your career, and so for you and me this is especially important. If we can’t handle the stress, it’ll eventually crush us, and we’ll give up before we reach the goal.

That one exception

To contextualize how I handle stress now, I need to share when I handled it so badly that I’ve since completely revamped my approach.

I was 22, and I had started working part time jobs to cover my university tuition. I was already in a difficult place because my dad had passed away in the previous year. I was waiter, I freelanced, I did construction, everything I could get my hands on.

And there was a very specific moment when I had been owed a lot of money (even by today’s standard), and the guy who owed it to my left the country. I wasn’t the only person he owed money to, and so he just cut his losses and ran away.

So here I was, already sad about my dad, now out a ton of money and time, and really just overwhelmed trying to figure out my next move.

I became very seriously ill because of the stress. I recovered, and then started reading more on psychology, history, money, etc. I read so many books, but I could never really live ‘stress-free.’ Work-life balance never really existed for me. There was always something.

How to actually manage stress

Organize

Stress and anxiety often lead to burnout. But burnout is (usually), not a workload issue. It’s usually about high demand and low clarity. Do you even know everything you have to do, or do you say “yes, I’ll do that,” and then forget about it until next week when your boss reminds you?

Every time I feel that kind of stress and anxiety at work, I do one thing.

I write down all the issues. That’s it. Until you know every single thing that gets done, there’s no way to make meaningful progress.

Look at the roots

When I wake up to 20 messages about bugs in the beehiiv app, what’s not working, and churning customers, it’s hard to zoom out and figure the root of the issue. No business will keep 100% of its customers. The root issue is not that people are leaving, it’s that this particular group of customers said the platform is ‘too expensive.’

So, we look at how to get customers the value we’re offering sooner, or change the pricing model. Anything that addresses the root issue where users feel we’re ‘too expensive’. Some users will leave. There will be bugs. But finding the root of the issue, we can then better understand how to fix the problem.

Prioritize & act on it

If you don’t know what to do first, everything is stressful.

Prioritizing is one of the most essential skills in business, and it’s one of the most important when trying to deal with stress specifically. Once we know what we need to fix, we act on it. This is probably the most useful thing for me when dealing with stress and anxiety.

The thing is that once we land on that priority we have to stick with it. We can’t change it tomorrow. Some people would say that’s too chaotic, and it can be. But not if you’re looking at the root of the issue. It’s better to take twenty minutes and actually take a step forward (even if it’s not a 100% perfect, guaranteed solution), then to take three days thinking about what to do while the problems continue (talk about stressful).

Timelines

I used to believe the solutions to my problems at work were usually about big, strategic projects where we just kept adding more and more to try and make the problem go away. But when I force myself to solve the issue in the same day, I did one thing guaranteed to work.

For example, a beehiiv user wouldn’t reply to my emails. I emailed him three times, left a note in his account, went to the team about a ‘communications strategy’ etc. It was all a waste of time. He never replied. Someone else got in touch with him.

The next time this happened, I solved in a day. That user did not reply, same as before. So, I completely disabled that user’s access to the beehiiv platform. He emailed me 5 minutes later.

Ego

This was a hard one for me to deal with. See, I like the idea that I’m competent and good at what I do. This identity and the ego that fuels it hate having to possibly accept that I’m not actually good at what I do.

So you know what, I never let myself even be in a situation where I might fail. Where I might risk doing something that makes me look like an idiot. So what happens? I would avoid the thing I actually should do.

I do it to this day. I should post more on IG, but I don’t. It’s so stupid. But my ego and the way I see myself doesn’t want to even risk me looking like I’m pandering, so I don’t post as often as I should.

What no one tells you about stress and anxiety

To end this, I want to clarify one thing about stress and anxiety I haven’t seen anyone mention yet.

Every human feeling is natural, has a purpose, and is part of life. But fear is one that’s changed over the generations. Our ancestors felt fear when they were at risk of literally dying from predators in nature. That produced adrenaline, which helped them run faster, or fight harder. This kind of stress was a very good thing because it helped keep them alive. I don’t think our ancestors would have ever said “I’m so glad that lion scared the hell out of me because it made me run away faster,” even though it’s true.

But in today’s modern societies, we don’t really have to worry about that. Fear has changed. Our nervous system responds in the same way, but we’re not at actual risk of dying anymore. And so instead of a burst of adrenaline that gets us out of that ‘fight or flight’ situation, it manifests in a constant state of worrying about the next email, or the next support ticket, or the next thing in general. Nobody says “I’m so glad that work stresses me out so much because it helps me see what I should or should not do,” even though it’s true.

And sometimes, it’s important to remember that stress and anxiety are actually a sign that you’re doing something that matters to you. Nervousness, anxiety, stress, these are all signs that you care.

Thanks for reading. I hope this helps.