Self-care for Business Owners: How to Prioritise your Mental Health While Running a Business
Keeping control of your mind, your time, your temper, and your happiness becomes much more difficult as a business owner. Life changes when you run a business, and it can feel isolating.
But business owners are problem solvers and aren’t the sort to let the problems grow.
Out of stock? Get more.
Not enough staff? Hire more.
Sales have dropped? Run a promotion, start a marketing campaign, change, tweak, and fiddle until the lines on your reports start to move in the right direction.
So, let me ask you this: when you’re struggling, why is it any more acceptable than when your business is struggling?
In this blog, we're sharing some self-care tips to help you prioritise your mental health, so you can get back to enjoying running your business.
Self-care tip #1: set aside time for yourself
Getting a break from work can be one of the most effective strategies for de-stressing and detoxifying both body and mind, and it should be something you do every single day.
That's right - we're not just talking about booking holiday! Your mental health needs to prioritised daily.
Business owners with families can struggle with this in particular because even when work ends, there are often a dozen things that the family need help with. Homework, cleaning, bills to pay, people you have to see, trips to the shop; it goes on and on and can be demoralising.
Ask yourself what you enjoy doing, or maybe what you used to enjoy that you’d like to take up again. This could be:
- Sport or exercise
- Cooking or baking new recipes
- Reading or writing
- Playing or listening to music
- Watching films
- Going to the theatre
- Learning a new craft, such as painting, woodworking or building
- Gardening
- Spending valuable time with your family doing puzzles or activities
Any and all of the above are excellent things to do with your time. But when you're working 60+ hours every week, it might be that R&R (rest and relaxation) is the only thing you want when you're not working, and that's perfectly reasonable.
The best and most personal advice doesn't come from articles or friends. It comes from your body and your emotions, so listen to them. If your emotions crave coffee with that friend you've missed, set up a coffee date. If it just wants you to go to bed, then go get some rest!
Top tip: Your body also knows what nutrients it needs, and maintaining a healthy diet during a long work week takes dedication. If you haven't got time to meal plan, make sure you make eating fruit and vegetables part of your everyday routine.
Self-care tip #2: have time when you cannot be contacted
The overworked effect is that you start to feel like a passenger in your own life, as though you are not a priority. At some point, you’re forced to ask yourself why you go to all the trouble.
That’s why it’s important to have something personal to look forward to (see tip number one) and set time away when you are not to be contacted.
It may be that you’ve been trying to do this. You undo that top button on your shirt and tell your team only to contact you in case of emergency... But half an hour later, your phone rings because someone made a mistake, and your time is gone.
It's much harder to destress when your phone could go off at any moment. So how can you make sure that those moments when YOU come first won’t be disturbed:
- Delegation. If you’re one of those business owners that’s always on call, ask yourself: are there truly any problems that your second-in-command can’t handle, at least in the short term? If all the pressure is on you, this is a problem for you and for the business, and you need to look into training other members of your team to deal with these problems so that you can get away once in a while.
- Turn off your phone. Sometimes, putting yourself first means being the only one present, and in the 21st century, being alone in a darkened room isn’t enough. Switching off your phone can help keep your focus away from work without constant notifications. Same for other devices - don't open those work emails when you're away!
- Tell your team when you will next be available - and stick to it. If someone on your team encounters a difficulty while you’re taking some space, their instinct may well be to call you straight away, interrupting your break. While letting the team know you’ll be unavailable may cause them to panic, if they know when you’ll be back, it encourages them to find alternate solutions to accommodate your break, even if they are short-term solutions until you can come back and implement your own solutions. Show you trust your staff to make decisions, and know that when you come back, you'll be able to handle whatever decision was made with a clear mindset.
Self-care tip #3: Recognise the causes of your work stress and anxiety and tackle them
As it goes with business, so it goes with life: problems are a lot easier to solve when you know exactly what’s causing them. When there are persistent issues causing you to stress, even getting time away will have limited effect if you always have to come back to the same problems.
Business owners have to take responsibility for many different areas required to trade effectively, and all businesses have things they could be doing better, which makes stress a natural consequence of business ownership.
Say you struggle with staff management, maybe some employees are underperforming, and you’re not sure how to address the problem. Problems like these can feel insurmountable when you don’t have a plan to combat them. Set some time aside to sit and come up with steps you can follow to solve the problem.
Your plan could look something like this:
- What's the core problem? Ask yourself this question. It can be difficult to do this when you're feeling emotional or stressed, but try to look at it objectively. What are the core problems that is resulting in your stress? Split these out into however many areas you need to tackle.
- Research. Next, learn more about the problem(s). It's likely that many other people have faced similar issues. How did they deal with it? Have a look at sites like Quora, or ask fellow business owners (with discretion) for advice.
- Plan. Now, make an action plan for tackling the problem(s). Are there skills or processes you or your staff need to fix the problem? If so, how can you arrange the training necessary so that your business has the skillset it needs? Make sure you're thinking long-term here, to reduce the likelihood that the problem will reoccur with such severity again.
- Address the problem. Try to stay level-headed as you put your plan into action, especially if it involves tough conversations. Whether it’s a personality clash, a technical problem, or a financial one, with the right knowledge and skills you can put plans in place to (at the very least) minimise the problem.
- Decompress and move on. After doing your best to tackle a problem, this final step is as important as the first three. Do something to take your mind off the problem and any uncertain outcomes you're worried about, and then move on to the next one.
Once you’ve done what you can to solve a problem, it’s important not to let it dominate your mind. You’ve taken it on headfirst. Now you’re getting on with life. You’re not running away; you’re moving past it.
Self-care tip #4: be compassionate towards yourself
With so much responsibility over your own and others' professional lives and the pressure that accompanies it, it can be easy to blame yourself for mistakes, whether they’re yours or anyone else’s. When you run a business, there will be bumps in the road, and many of them will happen regardless of what you do.
When things go wrong, it’s impossible not to stress, at least a little. But it’s vital not to blame yourself for every little thing or to bear all the weight of the business on your own shoulders.
How can you avoid doing this? In a sentence: show yourself compassion.
Approach your business with the mindset of doing your best but not doing everything yourself. In the long term, taking too much on is not sustainable and will have a detrimental impact on your mental health.
The best managers are healthy, calm, and clear-thinking. Stress prevents you from being any of these things. That’s why making yourself a priority is good or your business, as well as for you.
If you like the idea of showing yourself compassion but you’re not sure what it means in practice. Self-compassion at work might mean:
- Knowing when you’re not in a position to help with a task and delegating it to another.
- Recognising that you’re not sure of the best answer to a question or problem and asking for some time to think about it or asking for other opinions.
- Deciding you need to take a day-off to rest, blow off steam, or take care of something personal.
- Reaching out to speak to someone about things you’re finding difficult.
If you’re struggling with workplace stress, it’s vital to address it, but it can be hard to do by yourself. If you’d like to speak to someone about your mental health, support is available.
Call Bupa between 8:30AM and 6PM on 0808 273 6261, or take a look at their website at https://www.bupa.co.uk/business/open-up.
You can also look on Mental Health Foundation website for more advice on self-care and dealing with stress and anxiety.