What To Do When You’re Feeling Down?
One of the common questions early-stage startup founders ask is: How do others cope with stress and feeling demotivated? While there’s more awareness and focus on mental health and managing stress today, demotivation is still often expected to be tackled with sheer grit and perseverance.
Of course, grit and resilience have their place, but I encourage my clients to complement these qualities with a slightly unconventional approach. As a founder and leader, one goes through a lot: fundraising, short runways, crucial hires, fires to put out, building a top-notch management team, managing board dynamics, scaling issues, co-founder conflicts — the list goes on. And along the way, there are countless sacrifices, rejections, struggles, and failures, each one different but no less impactful.
Instead of immediately jumping to the next action step (which is still necessary), I ask them to pause and reflect: How do you really feel about what happened? And I’m not looking for the typical response of, “Yes, it happened. I’m a bit disappointed, but here’s how I’m going to fix it.” There’s power in pausing and truly feeling your emotions.
If the idea of this makes you uncomfortable, stay with me! I’m not suggesting you victimize yourself or drown in self-pity. But it’s important to let emotions flow through you rather than suppressing or numbing them.
I love the movie Inside Out for how beautifully it shows that all emotions, including sadness, have value and are necessary. The movie follows 11-year-old Riley, whose emotions — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust — personify her inner world and guide her through a difficult move to a new city. As Joy tries to keep Sadness away, believing she’s a threat to Riley’s happiness, the film reveals that suppressing sadness can prevent genuine emotional healing.
One of the central lessons is that sadness fosters connection and empathy. In the story, it’s only when Sadness takes the lead that Riley can express her true feelings and seek comfort from her parents. The film shows that sadness isn’t something to avoid; it’s essential for emotional balance and resilience. Feeling difficult emotions like sadness helps us process loss, change, and other challenges, leading to deeper relationships and healing.
In fact, research shows that if you allow yourself to feel your emotions — without feeding, escalating, judging, or resisting them — they typically pass within 90 seconds. Emotion, after all, is just energy in motion.
👀 Try this:
Start by identifying how you feel. You don’t need to use complex words — just recognize the simplest undertone: sad, mad, glad, scared, or creative.
Can you locate this feeling in your body? Where is it? What do you sense? (This is crucial because it helps shift your focus from your mind to your body.)
Now, breathe in and through the sensation.
(Optional) Listen for the wisdom of the emotion*
Sad — What wants to be let go of or mourned?
Mad — What is no longer serving you or others? What wants to be stopped, changed, ended?
Glad — What wants to be celebrated?
Scared — What wants to become known?
Creative — What wants to be created? What is attractive?
💡Tip: Here’s another way to practice being with your emotions, showing compassion to yourself, and allowing the emotions to be there. Try this short meditation: RAIN meditation by Tara Brach.
*Courtesy: 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
