Avoiding the Burnout Black Hole: What Every Founder Needs to Know

Nobody plans to get pulled into a burnout black hole. Yet during launch preparation, it's frighteningly easy to cross that invisible threshold where recovery becomes harder than prevention.

I learned this the hard way - multiple times. When I launched my first business in 2001, I ran on pure excitement. I worked through Bay Area traffic to networking events, built websites late into the night, and learned everything on the fly. By launch day I was exhausted, but I kept pushing because that's what entrepreneurs do, right?

For twenty years, I repeated this pattern with every new offering. Start strong, push harder, ignore the warning signs, recover just enough to do it all again. I got really good at painting over burnout - take a day off, try to party through it, anything to avoid admitting I needed real rest.

Then 2022 happened. Long Covid didn't care about my pushing-through skills. For the first time in my career, I had to completely shut down my business.

During my recovery, I discovered something crucial: managing energy isn't actually about pushing through. It's about understanding and working with your natural rhythms and limits.

Here's what I mean:

Your body operates on multiple energy systems - physical, mental, creative, emotional, social, spiritual, and sensory. Each one needs different types of support and replenishment. When you're preparing for a launch, you're drawing on all of these systems at once.

Think about a typical launch prep day: You're physically sitting at your computer for hours (physical energy), solving technical problems (mental energy), writing engaging copy (creative energy), managing launch anxiety (emotional energy), perhaps coordinating with team members (social energy), staying connected to your purpose (spiritual energy), and processing endless inputs from your devices and environment (sensory energy).

No wonder we burn out! We're depleting multiple systems simultaneously while usually only thinking about managing one or two of them.

Through my own recovery and working with clients, I've learned some essential truths about sustainable energy management during launches:

That's why I created the Anti-Burnout System in the Big Enough Bang Launch Planner. Instead of depleting yourself before you begin, you'll learn to monitor and maintain your energy throughout the preparation phase.

Key principles I've learned:

• Regular small breaks prevent total depletion
• Different tasks need different types of energy
• Everyone's energy patterns are unique
• Warning signs shouldn't be ignored
• Emergency reserves aren't for daily use

Through recovery and working with clients, I've seen how this transforms the launch experience. Instead of dragging yourself across the finish line, you arrive energized and ready.

The most critical part of your launch isn't your website, marketing plan, or social media strategy. It's you. And you need to maintain enough energy not just to launch, but to sustain your business afterward.

Dog Park & Dog Beach - Anti-Burnout Officer Paxton says this is the best way to stay un-burned-out - it gets mom out in nature, exercising and moving around. Paxton says he is definitely not biased about this in any way.