Unique Stress-Busters: Entrepreneurs Share Their Secret Weapons

I stopped trying to manage stress. I started treating it as data.

Most entrepreneurs are trying to get rid of stress faster. I got curious about where it was living in my body instead.

After 16 years in corporate, Jetstar, ANZ, Virgin Australia, I’d become extremely good at overriding my nervous system to keep performing. Efficient, yes. Sustainable, no.

The shift happened when I started working with somatic practice. Not meditation apps. Not cold plunges. Actually learning to read what my body was signalling before my mind had a story about it.

What changed in my decision-making: I stopped confusing urgency with importance. A lot of what felt like “critical decisions” was just unprocessed activation, my nervous system in a state it had learned to default to under pressure.

When I could tell the difference between a genuine signal and a stress response masquerading as instinct, my decisions got quieter and more accurate. Less reactive. More mine.

The unconventional part? I now treat nervous system state as a business metric. If I’m dysregulated, I don’t make the call. Full stop. That single rule has saved me from more bad decisions than any framework I’ve ever used.

It’s the work I now build entire programs around at The Coherence Lab because once you’ve experienced the difference, you can’t unknow it.

As a technical founder in the mental health space, my most unconventional approach to stress is treating my cognitive bandwidth exactly like an API rate limit. Most entrepreneurs try to optimize themselves to handle an infinite number of decisions, which inevitably leads to system failure—or what we commonly call burnout.

Instead, I engineer hard constraints. I allocate a strict ‘token budget’ for daily decisions. Once I hit that limit, I stop making choices for the day, even small ones. If a low-priority issue arises late in the afternoon, it gets queued for the next day’s batch processing. I have aggressively automated or delegated my standard operational routines specifically to preserve these ‘decision tokens’ for high-level architectural choices.

This protocol has radically transformed my decision-making abilities. By artificially constraining my output, I prevent the cognitive fatigue that leads to reactive, low-quality choices. When it is time to make a high-stakes decision—such as scaling our private-pay platform nationwide or overhauling our EHR infrastructure—I approach it with maximum processing power, ensuring absolute clarity and precision rather than just trying to survive the workload.

I started scheduling what I call decision-free mornings, and it fundamentally changed how I operate as a CEO. The concept is simple but the execution felt bizarre at first. For the first three hours of every workday, I make zero business decisions. No emails, no Slack, no approvals, no meetings. I spend that time exclusively on deep work, whether that is writing product specifications, reviewing code architecture, or mapping out quarterly strategy.

This sounds counterintuitive when you are running a software company with clients across multiple time zones and a team that constantly needs input. The conventional wisdom says the CEO should be accessible and responsive at all times. But I found that constant availability was actually degrading the quality of my decisions throughout the day. By noon, I was mentally drained from making dozens of small calls and my judgment on bigger strategic questions suffered as a result.

The unconventional part is that I literally block my calendar and put my phone in another room. My team knows that unless something is genuinely on fire, meaning a production server is down or we are about to lose a client, those morning hours are untouchable. What surprised me is that almost nothing that felt urgent at 8 AM actually needed my input before 11 AM.

The impact on decision-making has been measurable. Before implementing this approach, I was making reactive decisions constantly, responding to whatever landed in my inbox first. Now, by the time I engage with my team and clients, I have already done my most important thinking for the day. I arrive at meetings with clarity rather than scrambling to context-switch from whatever fire I was putting out five minutes earlier.

I also noticed that my team became more autonomous. When people know they cannot reach you for three hours, they start solving problems themselves. Some of the best process improvements at Software House came from team members who figured things out during my unavailable hours rather than defaulting to asking me.

The hardest part was getting comfortable with the anxiety of being unreachable. As entrepreneurs, we are conditioned to believe that stepping away means missing something critical. In reality, the opposite is true. The space to think clearly is what prevents the critical mistakes in the first place.

I stopped giving out my cell phone number about 12 years ago. That’s my unconventional approach, and it completely changed how I run my business.

When clients could reach me directly at any hour, every call felt like an emergency. I was making decisions reactively, responding to whoever was the loudest, and treating every 9 PM voicemail as if the building were on fire. The quality of those decisions was terrible because they were driven by adrenaline rather than judgment.

When I cut off that direct line, something unexpected happened. I started seeing problems more clearly because I wasn’t seeing them in a panic. A client issue that would have had me scrambling at midnight instead came through our ticket system, got triaged by the team, and landed on my desk the next morning with context. By the time I touched it, I already understood what was actually happening instead of just reacting to someone’s anxiety.

But the phone number was just the start. The bigger shift was recognizing that most of what feels urgent isn’t. It’s just pressure being passed along. I started asking one question before making any decision: Is this actually time-sensitive, or does it just feel that way? That single filter eliminated probably 80% of the stress I was carrying.

The impact on decision-making has been real. When you’re not running on cortisol, you spot problems earlier, push back on bad ideas instead of just agreeing to make the noise stop, and have the clarity to think two steps ahead rather than just surviving the current fire.

The irony is that clients respect it. They don’t want a frantic person making decisions about their website. They want someone calm, deliberate, and thinking clearly. Protecting your headspace isn’t selfish. It’s how you do your best work.

Most entrepreneurs talk about stress management like it’s a wellness routine. Meditation, journaling, cold showers. I tried some of that. It didn’t stick.

What actually worked for me was giving my brain a problem to solve instead of telling it to relax.

When I feel the pressure building, I open a blank doc and write out exactly what’s bothering me. Not in a journal way. More like a business problem. What’s the actual issue? What do I control? What don’t I? What’s the worst realistic outcome?

It sounds simple. But the moment you put a stressful situation into writing, it stops being a feeling and starts being a problem. And problems have solutions. Feelings just loop.

The impact on decisions was immediate. I stopped making reactive calls when I was under pressure. I stopped agreeing to things just to reduce tension in the room. I started being able to separate “this feels urgent” from “this is actually urgent.”

One example: I had a situation with a client where the relationship was deteriorating fast and I felt pressure to make concessions just to keep things calm. I wrote it out. When I looked at it on paper, the numbers didn’t justify the stress I was absorbing. I ended the contract. It was the right call.

My advice: don’t try to stop thinking when you’re stressed. Redirect the thinking somewhere useful.

My unconventional stress management approach? I stopped trying to force myself into a generic meditation routine and started building an AI that adapts to how I’m actually feeling in the moment.

After 20+ years of building companies, I’ve learned that stress isn’t monolithic. The mental fog from context-switching between three different ventures is nothing like the sharp anxiety of making a critical product decision with no safety net. I tried every popular meditation app out there – none of them could tell the difference. They’d serve up the same gratitude practice whether I was spiraling from operational fires or just mentally drained from another 14-hour day.

That frustration became MediTailor. Instead of picking from a fixed library, our AI asks how you’re actually feeling – anxious, overwhelmed, mentally drained – and generates a personalized session on the spot. Some days it’s a 5-minute reset before switching between ventures. Other times, a deeper focus session before a critical product decision when there’s no room for error.

The impact on my decision-making has been concrete. I used to be reactive under pressure – decades of entrepreneurship teach you patterns, but stress still hijacks them. When you’re bootstrapping multiple businesses simultaneously, every decision carries weight. Now I have a tool that meets me exactly where I am emotionally and helps me recalibrate in minutes. I make fewer impulsive calls. I hold my position better when juggling competing priorities across different ventures.

The mental weight of running everything without outside capital means there’s no buffer for bad decisions. Having a way to reset between contexts has been game-changing.

The irony isn’t lost on me that solving my own problem became the product. But that’s exactly why it works – it was built for the real, messy stress of building things, not some idealized version of what meditation should look like.

One unconventional thing I do when stress builds is sit down and sketch furniture ideas in silence, even when the urgent issue has nothing to do with design. Because I lead both the creative and business side of my company, that habit may seem indirect, but it helps me more than pushing through at a laptop. When I sketch by hand, my pace slows, my breathing settles, and I usually stop reacting to whatever feels loudest that day. I start seeing proportion again, not just pressure. That has improved my decision making in a very practical way. I am less likely to make rushed calls on production, pricing, or customer issues when my mind is overloaded. Stress can flatten every problem into an emergency. Silence and drawing help me sort signal from noise, and better decisions tend to come after that.

I started deliberately leaving my phone in the car when I go grocery shopping. Sounds ridiculous but hear me out.

There was a period last year where I was making decisions reactively all day, client messages, Slack, email, and I noticed my thinking was getting really shallow. Everything felt urgent because something was always pinging. I couldn’t sit with a problem for more than a few minutes before something else pulled me out of it.

The grocery store thing started by accident, forgot my phone once and noticed how differently my brain worked for that 25 minutes. I was actually just thinking. Not about anything specific, just processing. Started doing it on purpose after that.

It sounds like nothing but the impact on decision-making has been real. I’m slower to react now in a good way. I’ll get a stressful client email and instead of firing something back immediately I’ll sit on it for a bit and the response I send an hour later is always better than the one I would have sent at the moment.

Some of my best ideas for the business have come from genuinely boring, phone-free moments.

During the time at GPTZero, it felt like there was pressure everywhere: with customers, the media, and within our own product. I did everything the stress management experts said to do, but none of it worked—until now. However, the best thing I could do was to start to track all of my bad decisions versus my level of stress.

By writing down examples of decisions that were considered rushed or high emotion, like pushing out an update of detection that had unintended consequences (increased false positives), I found patterns very quickly. Most of my mistakes occurred when I was switching contexts between different things or making decisions because it was late at night. Because of this, I started protecting how I made major decisions. No more late night decisions. No more reacting to product requirements until I had a chance to go back and look at them again.

The result of these systems has been immediate: less time spent doing reversals, less time cleaning up mistakes I made, and while the stress is still there, I don’t allow it to impact my decision making process like it did before.

The main point is that you do not need to try and reduce your level of stress, but rather to develop systems that you put in place, so that you stop making wrong decisions.

Most entrepreneur stress is not about workload. It is about unfinished mental loops running in the background all day long.

The unconventional move that actually worked for me was keeping a notebook on my nightstand. Before sleep, I write down every open problem, every pending decision, everything that is sitting unresolved in my head. Not to solve them. Just to get them out. The brain holds on tight to unfinished things, and that grip is what keeps you awake at 1am rehearsing conversations that have not happened yet.

Once it is on paper, your mind stops guarding it. The impact on my decision-making was real. I started waking up clearer, less reactive, and with a much better sense of what actually deserved my attention versus what was just noise from the day before.

One unconventional approach I’ve taken to managing stress is combining breathwork with AI as a way to filter my thinking.

Breathwork helps me create space and clear my mind, especially in high-pressure situations. But what has made a significant difference is using AI to process thoughts, particularly emotional reactions. Instead of reacting immediately, I externalise the situation and structure it through AI by asking it to take on specific roles, such as a growth advisor or a startup operator, depending on the context.

For example, if I’m facing a challenge with priorities or performance, I’ll frame the problem clearly and ask for an objective breakdown. This creates distance from the emotion and helps me see the situation more rationally.

The impact on my decision-making has been significant. I’m less reactive, more structured, and able to evaluate problems from multiple perspectives quickly. It feels like having immediate access to a second layer of thinking before committing to a decision.

One key takeaway is that stress often comes from being too close to the problem. Creating space, whether through breathwork or structured reflection, allows for clearer, more effective decisions.

One unconventional approach I’ve taken is deliberately scheduling “non-productive thinking time” into my calendar, no phone, no meetings, no input, just space to think without pressure to act.

As entrepreneurs, we’re conditioned to equate constant action with progress. But I found that when I was always “on,” my decisions became reactive rather than strategic. So I started blocking out 30-45 minutes a few times a week where I’d step away, sometimes just sitting in my car or taking a quiet walk with no agenda other than letting ideas settle.

The impact has been significant. It’s helped me separate urgency from importance, which is critical in leadership. I make fewer rushed decisions, and when I do act, it’s with more clarity and confidence. Ironically, doing less in those moments has led to better, faster decisions when it actually counts.

I think we all know someone for whom stress just rolls right off their back. It’s natural to them. And at this point, I’m convinced people like that are wired differently in some way, because anxiety, stress, and confusion have been part of my makeup for as long as I can remember. I’m quite sure I was worrying in the womb.

But while I might envy that ability to stay calm, and it definitely takes more effort on my end, I’ve learned something from those people over the years. In particular, an old neighbor: Mrs. Pak. I still think about her when things get hectic, because I swear, she never met a problem that was worth fretting over. Roof leak? Raccoon in the attic? No problem. She’d take a breath, make a plan, and get on with it.

I started to channel her here and there. At first, it was forced, but over time, having that model in my head helped more than I expected. And I still catch myself asking, ‘What would Mrs. Pak do?’ And then I try, as best I can, to take that approach.

Maybe you’ve got someone like that in your life. Or maybe it’s just a more composed version of yourself you need to picture. Either way, channeling a new and outside perspective can be a surprisingly effective way to break the cycle of overthinking and move forward when business decisions start to feel heavier than they need to be.

One unconventional stress-management approach I use as an entrepreneur is short light and sound stimulation sessions designed to support nervous system regulation. I consider it unconventional because it is not usually the first tool people associate with founder stress, but for me it has been highly effective. It helps me move out of a reactive state more quickly and access a calmer, clearer mindset without needing a long practice or a lot of mental effort.

That has had a direct impact on my decision-making. Entrepreneurship often rewards speed, but stress can distort judgment and create false urgency. I’ve found that when I am more regulated, I make better decisions because I can separate signal from noise, think more strategically, and respond with more clarity instead of pressure.

Most founders’ default stress response is to push harder — move faster, do more. Mine was the same, until I adopted a framework I picked up from Arnold Schwarzenegger: Vision, Action, Celebration.

It’s simple, but most founders only do the middle part.

* Vision: Set something long-term and specific enough that short-term setbacks stop feeling existential

* Action: Break that into clear, immediate steps that actually move the needle

* Celebration: Actively recognise progress, this is the bit most people skip

Arnold talks about this in Be Useful, his vision of becoming the world’s best bodybuilder shaped every decision he made. That clarity filters out noise. For me, the impact on decision-making has been tangible. When something goes wrong; a deal falls through, a key metric drops, I can zoom out. The long-term vision is still intact. The next action is still clear. Stress becomes context, not a crisis.

When you have a clear north star, hard decisions get easier because you’re not reacting to the moment, you’re measuring it against something bigger.

And the “celebration” piece isn’t soft. Founders who don’t acknowledge progress burn out faster, recognising what’s working keeps momentum up.

I don’t check any emails or anything work related between 6-9AM. That is reserved for meditation, journaling, working out, and EFT Tapping. Having this time set apart has given me a lot of confidence and self trust. It is kind of like if I can show up for myself everyday, then it means I can also trust myself in making better business decisions.

After a demanding day, I’ve found the most effective way to unwind isn’t trying to switch off mentally; it’s about changing your physical state to switch out of stress. One of the easiest ways to do this is to go for a walk without your phone in the late afternoon or early evening. Even better, go with someone whose company you enjoy—and not someone you talk about work with. The natural light helps reset circadian rhythm, and the lack of digital input allows the mind to settle. Want to take it a step further? Get your bare feet on grass, soil, or sand for a grounding boost, and take deep, long breaths in and out through the nose.

The idea is to use Sensory Deprivation for Cognitive Reset.

Intentional elimination of external stimuli is a mechanical rest for the congested nervous system. High-level leaders are often subject to a condition of sensory overload in which the prefrontal cortex is impaired and logical processing is out of the question. Spending 60 minutes in a dark and quiet environment offers the brain a chance to release from a whirling fight-or-flight mode into a stage of recovery. This practice produces a significant reduction of physiological tension and heart rate variability. You get the advantage of having a data point viewable without the distraction or distortion effect of constant digital noise.

Physical Orientation and Decision Loops

Changing your physical point of vantage when you are in a moment of high stakes breaks cognitive rigidity. Many of the founders are constantly sitting in a stationary position for 8 to 10 hours per day, which strengthens stagnant thinking patterns and mental blocks. By moving your body and changing into a different room for 120 seconds, the brain is forced to re-map the incorporated surroundings and create fluid logic. This little interruption in the physical environment can cause a spiraling thought process to end immediately. It is a fresh proposal to consider a complex problem that, even a moment ago, seemed to be out of the question.

Identity Distancing: Risk Evaluation

Create a firm boundary between your personal self-worth and your business measurements so that you do not become emotionally burned-out. Entrepreneurs will often identify themselves with the quarterly profit margin or the latest funding results. Setting a strict cutoff for work-related data at 7:00 PM creates a psychological buffer for long-term strategic vision. This distance allows one to judge more objectively the risks involved because your ego is not bound up in the immediate end result. You become a more solid leader that will be able to make calculated moves and not in a shroud of desperation.

A regulated nervous system is, and will always be, your best tool for business sustainability. Calculated risks can only be possible when the mind is clear of physiological stress.