5 mental health tips for small business owners

Mental health is as important as physical health. If you broke an arm, you’d likely take a few days off. In the same way, if you’re stressed, anxious, or unhappy, take time to fix that before you return to work. If you don’t, your business and lifestyle could suffer greatly.

This article will provide a few mental health tips for small business owners to maintain good mental health despite the stresses of running a business. We’ll look at several pieces of advice, including:

• Create a schedule and stick to it
• Make relaxation part of your working day
• Maintain personal connections
• Take up a hobby
• Keep moving forward

1. Create a schedule and stick to it

Learning how to schedule your day as an entrepreneur is a vital lesson for any small business owner. It’s great for increasing productivity and improving time management, but it’s also very handy for maintaining good mental health.

By creating a work schedule, you can ensure that your work life and personal life stay separate. Having your work and personal life blend together isn’t a good thing, as it can lead to you missing important personal moments or making mistakes while working. Separating the two can help you focus, which leads to better productivity and better mental health.

Keep in mind that you need to stick to a schedule to get any of the benefits. If you plan to finish work at a certain time, don’t keep checking your emails and responding to texts afterwards. If you don’t finish working when you plan to, you might continue working for hours, leading to stress, burnout, and poor mental health. 

2. Make relaxation part of your working day

When creating a schedule, don’t just fill it with tasks you need to complete. Make sure to take frequent short breaks, and put these breaks into your schedule.

By taking breaks, you’ll stop your brain from getting overwhelmed. You’ll also prevent burnout, and may even increase productivity as you’ll have more energy to do the work you need to do. 

As with scheduling, it’s essential to stick to these planned breaks, and to actually relax while you’re on a break. For example, don’t take a 15-minute break from writing your annual budget, but spend the time checking your emails instead. Step away from your desk and computer, then eat, drink, or talk to your family.

3. Maintain personal connections 

Running a business will take up a lot of your time, but make sure you maintain your personal connections, like your connection to your friends and family. Spending time with people you like is great for your mental health.

It’s a good idea to let your friends know about your new business. This means that they’ll be able to support you if running your business becomes stressful and begins to affect your mental health negatively. They may even be able to provide you with advice on how to run your business, which can help you be more successful. 

Telling family about your business is also smart, as it can help you set expectations about your working schedule. While running a business, you’ll likely need to work long hours. This can put a strain on your family life (especially if you work from home) which can cause stress, arguments, and may lead to poor mental health for the whole family. 

If you discuss the requirements of running your business with your family, they may become more understanding of your long hours and become much more supportive. 

4. Take up a hobby 

As well as personal connections, make sure you make time for yourself when you run a business. Find an activity you enjoy, and practice it in your spare time. Having an outlet like this is an excellent way to relax, which is key to improving your mental health.

Finding a hobby that’s separate from your work is very important. Many of the best business ideas start as a hobby, but turning your hobby into your job may make you find that hobby less enjoyable. You need to find something to spend your spare time on that’s entirely unrelated to your work, or you may find that hobby just as stressful as running your business.

5. Keep moving forward

One of our best mental health tips for small business owners is to try not to regret too many decisions and keep moving forward despite setbacks.

Running a business requires thick skin — if you are discouraged easily, you will often be stressed and anxious while running a business. This is mostly due to regret: you’ll look back and rethink your past choices or think of how changing a few things would have made a particular decision much more successful. Unfortunately, you can’t go back and change things, and living in the past in this way is very bad for your mental health.

This sort of anxiety happens even with highly successful entrepreneurs. Despite how well they’re doing, these people will look back and think of how they could be doing better had slightly different choices been made along the way. Instead of thinking like this, learn from any bad decisions you have made. Remember them so that you don’t make them in future, but you should be continuously moving forward and developing your business as best you can. 

Financial management can be the most stressful part of running a business, especially if you don’t have much experience with accounting. A good way to reduce the stress of financial management is to use software to help you. For example, an app like Countingup can do many simple accounting tasks automatically, saving you from the stress of doing everything yourself.

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.