Helping a founder step back from burnout

By the time they reached out, sleep was gone and every decision felt like a threat. Stepping away from the company entirely was not an option, so we built support around the life they actually had.

Where it started

They had raised a Series B eleven months earlier and had not taken a full weekend since. The presenting problem was insomnia. Underneath it sat a pattern that is common in founders and rarely named: an identity so fused with the company that rest registered as risk.

What they wanted from therapy was efficiency — a technique, ideally one that worked in under ten minutes a day. That request was itself part of the pattern, and it was where we began.

How we worked

Sixteen weeks, the same hour each week, no escalation and no extension. The consistency was as much the intervention as anything discussed inside it.

• Sleep addressed first and practically, because very little else is available to someone running on four hours.

• Work kept in the room rather than bracketed off — the aim was never to make them care less about the company.

• Decision-making treated as a symptom rather than a skill gap. Once sleep returned, most of the “bad judgement” they had been alarmed by resolved on its own.

• A written plan for the next difficult quarter, made while things were steady, so it did not have to be invented under load.

What changed

Over sixteen weeks the panic settled into something they could work with. They did not step back from the company, take a sabbatical, or restructure their role — outcomes that get recommended often and are frequently unavailable.

What changed was narrower and more durable. They slept. They stopped treating a difficult week as evidence about themselves. And they built one relationship outside the business where the company was not the subject.

In their words

“I came in wanting a technique. What I got was sixteen weeks where one hour was not about the company. That turned out to be the technique.”

— Founder, Series B, name withheld

A note on this story

Shared with permission. Identifying details — sector, location, team size, specific timings — have been changed or removed. Nothing here is clinical advice, and no two courses of therapy look alike.

[PLACEHOLDER — illustrative account; confirm before publishing.]