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If you were to scroll through YouTube or Instagram, you’d think that entrepreneurs live the most glamorous lives of luxury and leisure. What you rarely see are videos showcasing the toil and tears that go into scaling a business and making it successful. Since many of us have been raised on this diet of “rags to riches” stories, many founders enter entrepreneurship ill-prepared for the grind, and they often put their own health on the back burner, telling themselves there’ll be plenty of time for self-care once the business works out.
This is why studies show that entrepreneurs have a much higher rate of mental health conditions as compared to non-entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is also linked with higher rates of obesity, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stroke. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Entrepreneurship can be incredibly rewarding when we learn from others’ mistakes and successes. Perhaps the most important lesson is to improve your work-life balance now, so health and self-care don’t get postponed to a distant “tomorrow.”
Here are five simple changes you can make to protect your health while maximizing productivity and scaling your business.
Re-Evaluate Your Priorities
Finding a healthy work-life balance starts with honest self-reflection. Recognize the importance of social relationships with family and friends, and of self-care activities such as regular exercise, sufficient sleep, routine medical checks, and scheduled downtime. Also, give yourself time to pursue things you’re passionate about outside of work, whether that’s playing a musical instrument, a sport, or traveling. Consciously decide what matters most and then set aside specific time for those priorities. This is fundamental to establishing a healthy work-life balance that gives you fulfilment, as well as better mental health.
Establish Clear Boundaries
When you know what’s important, it’s easier to set clear boundaries. This can mean setting rules such as working within specific hours, not checking or responding to work mails and messages outside of business hours, not taking calls while spending time with family, leaving your laptop behind when you go on vacation, and so on. This is important to ensure that you are fully present in the moment, allowing you to get the most out of both personal and work time. This helps preserve cognitive energy, so that you can be more productive and focused when at work too.
Integrate Self Care into Your Workflow
Treat self-care practices as non-negotiable calendar entries – this includes daily exercise, healthy eating, 7–8 hours of sleep, regular medical checks, therapy if needed, and periodic breaks to de-stress. These are some of the most important habits of successful entrepreneurs, so try not to think of them as unproductive distractions from your work, and instead look at them as investments in your productivity and longevity. You can do this by taking walking meetings, including short movement breaks between back-to-back calls, and blocking sleep hours in your schedule.
Stay On Top of Disease Management and Prevention
Early detection can make all the difference. Regular health checks can bring attention to warning signs such as high cholesterol or prediabetes, allowing you to take simple preventive action. If you do have a chronic condition like type-2 diabetes or hypertension, it’s even more important that you adhere strictly to treatment plans which can include regular monitoring, medication adherence, and follow-ups. You can even use digital health tools like smart monitors, reminders, telemedicine, and automated refills to fit disease management into your routine seamlessly. As an entrepreneur, ongoing disease management is especially important to reduce the risk of fatigue, absenteeism, and disruptive illnesses that can derail your enterprises.
Learn to Let Go
It’s natural to feel that no one cares about your business as much as you do, but trying to control every detail is neither sustainable nor productive. With the right hires, training, incentives, and support, employees can be highly motivated and reliable. In this environment, delegating repetitive or specialist tasks and sharing responsibilities doesn’t just free your headspace, it also builds team trust. This will allow you to balance your personal and professional life so that you can take better care of your health and focus on more important decision-making to scale your business successfully, without being bogged down by the everyday nitty-gritties.
Ultimately, finding a good work-life balance doesn’t mean that your career needs to take a backseat to your health and wellbeing. Instead, it allows you to bring your best self to work, building and protecting your ability to lead your business for the long haul.
