“MEDITATION. MASSAGE. ENDORPHINS. THE SMELL OF VANILLA. THE COOL OF JAZZ. THE TRANSCENDENCE OF OPERA. THE TASTE OF CHOCOLATE AND FINE WINE.
— Delightful Moments such as these are part of all human experience: the small, but powerful, separations from the daily humdrum when we feel stronger, calmer, more joyful, more in control, more distant from pain and anxiety.”
— Joyance Partners

By nature, starting and growing a company requires a lot of mental, emotional, and physical effort— there’s no avoiding that. You are experimenting as fast as you can to create a product (or service) that people actually value. Typically, you are also doing so within the constraints of time, capital, and ‘unknown’ factors.

As such, it is natural for founders and founding teams to find themselves stretched to complete many high-priority activities within a given time and to learn new skills and implement them quickly. To think that work-life ‘balance’ exists for founders during the formative and growth stages of a company is an illusion— the operating context is demanding, and appropriately so. However, that does not mean:

Growing your startup needs to be net-negative to your wellbeing.
Caring for your wellbeing has to be time-consuming.

In this post, we share 9 simple activities we use to optimize our wellbeing without having to sacrifice large amounts of time. We have shared them with our professional networks informally— clients, colleagues, and partners. In codifying it in a post, we hope it inspires you to create your own rituals around wellbeing and happiness.

Our observations are purely empirical and based on what we have experienced and learned in our lives. What we share aren’t prescriptions as we aren’t healthcare professionals. Instead, they are examples and models for how we approach our wellbeing and happiness.

Here’s how we approach the topic:

First, having more time doesn’t guarantee you will use it well— we all know individuals who seem to have a lot of time and seem to complete very few activities. Furthermore, we have all had the experience that as we become more fatigued, both mentally and physically, the likelihood of making unforced errors increases. Therefore, there are diminishing returns on our efforts as our energies are depleted. This does not mean you have to be entirely energized the entire time you are working on your business— but it does mean you have to walk the line between ‘worked-out’ and ‘burned-out.’

Second, having less time doesn’t guarantee you won’t get a lot of things done— we all know individuals who seem to get a lot of stuff done even in a very finite block of time. In fact, narrowing the time availability can provide people with more precise focus.

Therefore, spans of time aren’t the determining factor for productivity and wellness. Just like having more money doesn’t guarantee your health or happiness either. Instead, we like to think about wellbeing in terms of energy units:

Quantity: balancing the input of energy with the output of energy. If your output is high, your input should grow to match it too. It is useful to notice what activities are restorative to your energy reserves and what activities diminish your reserves.
Quality: the energy we use to complete administrative activities, compute detailed calculations, connect with key networks, and craft strategy— all these activities require different energy. Some of them come naturally to us, some of them do not. It is helpful to be aware of which activities come naturally to you and which ones do not— we will elaborate on this later in this post.
Transforms: everyone stores stress differently. Typically, people hold it as tension in certain muscle groups in their body— your state of mind and your physical experience is intimately entwined. Everyone also manages stress differently— exercising (releasing stored tension), eating, listening to music, singing, and painting, for example.

To recharge your energies: what works for you can work for others, but typically, it will be unique to you. We find it more important to be aware of how you manage your energy— quantity, quality, and transform— so you can work with your nature, not against it. Here are our top 9 ways to recharge our energies in no-time:

1: Float in a Sensory Deprivation Tank

A sensory deprivation tank (float tank) is a pitch-black, soundproof pod filled with 10 inches of water. The water is heavily concentrated with Epsom salts, so when you lie down, you float in the dark effortlessly. Epsom salts contain magnesium, an essential mineral that is known to help improve muscle function and reduce fatigue.

An hour in a sensory deprivation tank can be the equivalent to a few hours of deep sleep. If you don’t have much spare time but you would like to feel rested and recovered anyway— this might be an excellent option for you to try out. Most places that offer this service also offer monthly passes.

2: Soak in an Epsom Salt Bath

If you don’t want to pay for a sensory deprivation tank, you have an alternative— Epsom salt bath. The Epsom salts we use at home are CBD oil-infused, and we find it helps us relax quickly and enjoy a good night’s sleep. As long as you have a bathtub at home, you can buy Epsom salts— either in pure form, or lightly scented with essential oils— fill your bath up with warm water, dissolve the salts, and soak in it for a good 30 minutes. As you do so, you might enjoy the gentle sounds and feelings of the water ripples, even fall asleep momentarily.

3: Unwind with a Relaxation Massage

A relaxation massage is a smooth, gentle massage in which a massage therapist provides a whole-body hands-on treatment using pressure and strokes. The intention is to help relieve muscular tension, improve circulation, and promote general relaxation— you might even doze off during your treatment.

The benefit of a relaxation massage— similar to a salt bath or sensory deprivation tank— is someone else is doing the work for you. In other words, you aren’t expending energy to achieve relaxation, you’re receiving help from a professional.

4: Embrace Restorative Exercises

An exercise that is generative to your energies is important. Remember: most activities create a net expulsion of energy— which is great since that energy being expelled can include the energy of stress and anxiety that is held up in your body. And, exercise is a pathway for it to flow through you (transform). However, it is still an output— you must balance it with input (quantity). Which means a combination of rest, hydration, food as fuel, and oxygenation.

Restorative yoga, for example, is a practice that is focused on passive stretching in comparison to yoga classes that focus on moving from pose to pose and generating heat. Restorative yoga is quite mellow, so it is an excellent counterbalance to a busy, active lifestyle.

Conscious breathing (breathwork) exercises that focus on developing an awareness of how you breathe can help immensely too. You can go for about three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without shelter, and three minutes without oxygenated air. The great thing about breathwork— once you learn it, it costs nothing to practice!

5: Find a Piece of Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a practice that helps you train your brain for success in anything you do. If your mind can generate stress and anxiety, it can also create calm and confidence— if you show it how.

There are many ways people practice mindfulness. Some people have a mindfulness practice that is akin to meditation, and others have one that is more about being present with sensations (physical, emotional, for example) and developing self-awareness— choose the style you resonate with most.

Some people like adopting their own mindfulness practice and doing it alone. However, we also find it useful to have a dedicated facilitator — a human being who can provide psychological safety, and can assist you in accessing deep states of relaxation you might otherwise struggle to do yourself. We think you will enjoy taking some ‘time out’ of your mind.

6: Enjoy Some Music

You can listen to music, or you can also play music. For example, we have audio entrainment tracks that can help stimulate alpha brain waves— a resting state for the brain— that helps with overall calmness and allows your mind to learn, integrate, and process backlogs of new information.

We typically like instrumental music as our brains don’t need to process words, and can just enjoy the smoothness of analog sounds. If you play an instrument, or DJ (like Arjun does)— it can be a great creative release (transform) to shift from a state of stress and intense mental activity to one of free-flowing, artistic expressions.

7: Lean on a Coach

We find the best coaches are excellent listeners, empathizers, and question-askers. In doing so, they can provide us with the following:

Psychological Safety: We all have some irrational fears and insecurities in life— fear about the future, fear about a truth we don’t want to face about ourselves, or a fear about what others think about us, for example. When someone works with us to calm those fears, we can redirect our energies to more productive activities.
Mental Defragmentation: Some people process and synthesize high volumes of information by talking it out. If you are a founder who does this with your reports and co-founders, it can often overload them with too much information, leaving them with limited mental bandwidth to continue with their own activities. By talking it out with a trained coach, you can synthesize information rapidly and free your mind to do other things.
New Perspectives: Good coaches guide their clients to find the answers for themselves. In asking questions, staying curious, and removing their personal biases from the interaction, coaches can help you develop greater confidence and clarity in your own decision-making.

8: Offload Things You Can’t Control

What's more easeful: 1) Attempting to control and influence everyone and everything in the world so that the world is as you will it? Or 2) Controlling how you respond to the world around you and making conscious choices about your situation?

The latter is less energy consuming and much more empowering. However, as human beings, we are famous for worrying about things we can't control. A simple example of this— whether someone invests in your business (or not) is not up to you. You can do your best to present it in the most informative and engaging light. But whether investors invest in your company (or not) is up to them, not you.

We know it is hard not to obsess about everything in your business, especially since you love it and want it to grow and succeed. However, there are things you can’t control. So, pitching your business to investors can be initiated and maintained by yourself. However, the investor’s decision to buy (or not) cannot be initiated and maintained by you. You can influence investors, but you can't decide for them. We find it useful to assume you can't control everything that happens in the world. You can, however, control how you respond.

9: Schedule Different Activities in Different Blocks

When we switch between different types of activities, there is friction associated with context-switching. While context switching is unavoidable, it is helpful to try to minimize it. There are typically five groups of activities that require different energies (transforms) to execute on:

Mission & Purpose (Why?): Call these spiritual or personal growth activities, where you reflect on what is important to you, and define the drivers behind why you do what you do day-to-day. For us, we explore this either on a break, a retreat or in working with a coach.
Strategy & Vision (What?): How you express and fulfill your mission and purpose. The vision is defined as what the end result looks like, and strategy is the plan on how you get there— you could call it a goal, a true north, a north star. It is always worth having a clear end in mind.
People (Who?): Collaborating with people, either in-person or over a teleconference facility. It could be a sales call, a mentoring meeting, or a team meeting, for example.
Pace & Place (When & Where): Involves serialization of activities, determining when things need to be done, and where you (or particular resources) need to achieve that. For example, a project manager might use a Gantt chart to track the progress of projects, and where appropriate, intervene to keep moving things along.
Process & Detailed Analysis (How): Involves research, data gathering, and data analysis. They usually involve an interaction between a person and facts! For example, it could be monitoring your financials, bookkeeping, reporting on key business metrics, or documenting comprehensive work-instructions.

Different people find different activities energizing or draining. For example, some people find interacting with people energizing, while others find it exhausting. Some people enjoy working with data, facts, and detailed analysis. Notice what sorts of activities come naturally to you.

In action:

At Format One, we typically do our weekly planning on Sundays, so we can sync up on what we need to do during the week, who needs to do it, and by when. We also forecast our schedule for the following weeks and months. This cadence works well for us. And, at the end of the week, we have our own internal meetings to assess how things went, solve problems, and make new decisions. We extend this planning cadence of our quarterly off-sites, where we revisit our mission and strategy.

For meetings and calls with clients (people interaction), we typically block off chunks of time in succession, so we aren't context switching from say meeting people, and responding thoughtfully to emails. For pressing emails, we try to take care of them either early in the morning, or late in the day— for emails that are simple and easy to respond to, we don't delay. We just get it done.

During weekly lunches, we have regular discussions about our strategy and vision— having incorporated data-points we have gathered from our interactions with people, emails, and social media. We find we think the best and freely, and can zoom out when we are eating together.

Here are a few questions that can help you organize different activities within different blocks:

Is your ability to envision and strategize at its peak during the morning, afternoon, or night?
Is your creative problem-solving ability at its peak during the morning, afternoon, or night?
Is your ability to interact with, speak, and engage people at its peak during the morning, afternoon, or night?
Is your ability to plan and serialize your activities at its peak during the morning, afternoon, or night?
Is your capacity to fact-check, obsess about details at its peak during the morning, afternoon, or night?

In Summary

Growing a startup is inevitably difficult. However, that does not mean that growing your startup needs to be net-negative to your wellbeing. It also doesn't mean that caring for your wellbeing has to be time-consuming.
Think about wellbeing in terms of energy optimization. There are several ways you can optimize your energy: 1) Balancing quantity, 2) Managing quality, and 3) Transforming energy into different forms.
The most rejuvenating activities help you; calm your mind, balance your emotions, release blocked energy in your body, and minimize strenuous output. Some activities require the help of others; some can be done alone. There is no right way or wrong way— you need to pick the one that works for you.
You can't control everything that happens in the world. You can, however, control how you respond. By letting go of things that are beyond your control, you free your mental and emotional energies for other activities.