🌊 Deep Dive: The Emotional Survival Guide: How to Keep Going When Building Your Business Breaks You Down

What to do when the crying won’t stop, the vision isn’t enough, and all the legs of your life stool are wobbling at once

Today’s deep dive is different from what I usually write. It’s more personal, more vulnerable, and honestly, harder to publish. But if even one founder reading this is in a dark place right now and finds some comfort or guidance here, it’s worth it. Let’s talk about something we don’t discuss enough: what happens when building your business emotionally breaks you down.

Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I couldn’t stop crying.

Not the productive kind of crying where you feel a release and then move on. The kind where you cry for hours, think you’re done, and then start again. The kind where your chest physically hurts and you can’t catch your breath properly.

I’m not much of a crier. I’m the person who pushes through, who finds solutions, who stays strong when things get hard. So when I found myself sobbing uncontrollably for the second time in two weeks, I knew something was seriously wrong.

This isn’t a post about burnout. Burnout is exhaustion, depletion, the slow drain of energy over time. What I experienced was sharper, more acute—an emotional breaking point where everything I’d been holding together suddenly felt impossible.

If you’ve been there, you know exactly what I’m describing. If you haven’t, I hope this helps you recognise the warning signs before you reach that point.

Here’s what happened, what I learned, and what I’m doing differently now.

The Breaking Points

The first Monday started with financial stress and loneliness. Nothing dramatic happened that morning—no specific bad news or crisis event. But I woke up feeling the weight of everything at once: the variable income, the uncertainty, the isolation of building something alone while everyone else seems to be on a more stable path.

I felt really emotional throughout the day. I had some moments of tears that I could push past, but by night-time, it turned into full-blown crying that took hours to stop. I felt quite anxious and didn’t feel motivated to do much work, despite the fact that I really needed to get a lot done.

The second Monday, a week later, came after a rejection. I’d made it to the final three candidates for a freelance consulting project—the kind of work I do on the side to pay bills and funnel money into the business. After a very long interview process, multiple rounds, presenting detailed proposals, I got the “we’ve decided to go with someone else” email.

It felt quite painful. Like I had put in a massive amount of effort for no reason. All that time I could have spent on my own business, wasted on interviews for a project I didn’t even get.

And then the crying started again.

The Stool Legs Metaphor

Here’s the thing about emotional stability: life is a bit like a stool with multiple legs. Each part of life is a different leg—health, family and friends, romantic relationship, career, finances. When one leg is taken away or gets wobbly, there are other legs to balance on. You can stay upright.

But last year was very tough. At different stages throughout the year, nearly all of the legs were taken away or became dangerously unstable, leaving me feeling very pained and struggling.

Let me be specific about what “all the legs wobbling” actually meant: