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- the familial relationship between burnout, entrepreneurship, and money
the familial relationship between burnout, entrepreneurship, and money
featuring a very special guest...
Sneha Rampalli & Kyla Bolden
November 19, 2024
Hi lil bees!
Table of Contents
what’s going on in sneh’s world
A never ending book list. I was supposed to go to the bookstore and get a light read. Yet here I am reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, a tale of grief, death, love, and family. Also just ordered Real Americans by Rachel Khong, is anyone chronically possessed my deep and intense literature? Please feel free to share more book recs with me.
Family time: I’m extremely grateful to be spending time with my family for the next ten days. If I’m a bit slower to respond, please excuse me as I take a break from being on my laptop and phone 25/7 🙂 I will be seeing the best chocolate lab ever, so expect lots of pics from me.
Newsletter updates: Excluding this newsletter, there are two more releases for the year! One more special guest and one solo piece. I’m going to take all of December and January to work on an very exciting launch for between the buzz. It’s gonna make you laugh, cry, and think, all at the same time. If you want to follow along the journey, I’ll be posting snippets on my personal Tiktok.
Today’s piece is co-written with a very special guest, Kyla Bolden.
She is the founder of Wiz Kid Learning, an ed-tech startup working to unlock the potential of children and young adults focused on the STEM space. I got the chance to connect with her a few weeks ago, after I listened to her Beyond Bold podcast on burnout. It touched my heart as I am someone who is relentless and wants to build the change I want to see in this world, no matter what it takes, but also struggles with taking pause at times.
We chat about navigating burnout and the familial relationship between burnout, entrepreneurship, and money, Kyla coming in as a seasoned entrepreneur and Sneha coming in with a money mindset perspective.
what is burnout
According to the WHO, it is defined as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterized by three dimensions:
Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job
Reduced professional efficacy
While it’s not classified as a medical condition, burnout is a word that comes up a lot in the entrepreneurial world, and as founders, we know it all too well. But burnout doesn’t happen all at once; it’s a slow build that we often ignore or push through until it’s impossible to deny. We mask it, keep going, and show up, even when every task feels heavier than the last.
Kyla’s first encounter with burnout happened in 2020. “Before the pandemic, I was grinding hard on a district-wide deal that could bring online learning into schools on a massive scale. It was exhilarating—and exhausting. I knew I was burnt out because I was constantly overwhelmed and emotionally drained. My brain felt foggy, every problem seemed insurmountable, and my energy was running on empty. What helped me pull through was stepping back and letting myself rest.”
Sneha’s also happened in 2020. “I was working on Soulsmile Club at the time, a way to donate without spending extra. I was hooked by combining American consumerism with giving back to our communities in a seamless fashion. So I began leading technical direction, I created pitch decks with my co-founder, I led sprints with our team, I coded our landing page from scratch to fit my perfectionist needs, I interviewed different Instagram influencers to educate our consumers about sustainability, community, and mindful spending. Sound tiring? It was. I felt this intense pressure to make Soulsmile Club a revenue-generating company and was terrible at delegating because of my perfectionism, but most days I was running on zero steam and had still not recovered from the burnout of college. I thought jumping to the next invigorating idea would cancel out the burnout from a previous phase of life.”
the cyclical relationship of burnout, entrepreneurship, and money
Burnout doesn’t just affect energy levels; it affects how we relate to and manage our finances. When burnout hits, even the thought of looking at finances feels daunting. For many women, this can be compounded by societal pressures and financial stigmas. We’re often told we’re “not good with money,” while facing statistics like the pay and wealth gap and the funding disparity in venture capital. These pressures can make it even harder to confidently manage finances during burnout, reinforcing a narrative that simply isn’t true.
And burnout doesn’t just affect our finances. Our money mindset can also lead to burnout. Financial expert Manisha Thakor calls this phenomenon “The Cult of Never Enough,” a painful mindset that brainwashes you to believe that the money you earn and the accomplishments aren’t enough – that you constantly need to be doing more. It doesn’t help when women tend to feel inadequate in their knowledge around finance, and therefore don’t indulge in investing. All of this sounds familiar, right?
Brenna Baucum, a certified financial planner and founder of Collective Wealth Planning, explains, “It's impossible to feel comfortable when you have no idea how much you need. That feeling of uncertainty leads to an inability to see the forest from the trees. Clients feeling this will often prioritize short-term decisions because they feel easier. Unfortunately, this narrow focus comes at a cost.”
When we're exhausted, our brain's prefrontal cortex—responsible for complex decision-making and impulse control—takes a back seat. Instead, we enter autopilot mode. Our need for immediate solutions and instant gratification looks for quick fixes and “bandaid solutions.” This can look like:
Scarcity mindset circles: Surrounding ourselves with others who mirror our scarcity beliefs and behaviors.
Difficulty zooming out: spending your resources (time, energy and money) on more immediate, less satisfying areas instead of making mindful long-term financial decisions
The “busy badge”: constantly working nonstop, doing either as a source of pride or self-worth or in other cases as a means to hide from situations or feelings that you don't want to address. Aka tunnel vision, working around the clock and neglecting to actually live the life you tell yourself you’re working to build.
Especially being a founder, there can be a great deal of financial stress. Burnout and our relationships with money are two peas in a pod and more intimately related than you think.
managing burnout begins with rest
Before trying to understand your burnout or relationship with money, the elixir starts with rest. Specifically, sleep is our essential reset button. This may sound counterintuitive to when you have a building to-do list, but we can guarantee you that those tasks are not getting done or getting done well if you’re in a state of panic or overwhelm.
Understandably, this can be the hardest step. There’s a lot of shame with resting, especially with this cultish attitude to busyness. You can sleep when you’re dead right? It’s almost a badge of pride to spend fewer hours sleeping to work on your dreams. Working on your dreams should feel like play, but it’ll also be hard. But you don’t run the first few miles of a marathon at a 6 min pace just to conk out your legs. You remember that you can take some water breaks, because slow and steady wins the race.
advice for folks on the brink of burnout
Kyla: For me, managing burnout starts with rest. Sleep is my essential reset button. Rather than sleeping through the weekend to recover, I balance sleep with active recovery—whether it’s attending a workout class, spending time with friends, or ensuring I get quality rest each night. It’s this combination of rest and intentional engagement that recharges me and helps me avoid falling into deeper exhaustion.
If I could go back and give myself advice for the journey, it would be this: prioritize sleep. In my early days, I worked until 4 AM and then pushed myself to get up by 8. I now realize I could have achieved just as much with a few more hours of rest. Sleep isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity for clarity, resilience, and sustainable growth.
If you’re teetering on the edge of burnout, I suggest re-evaluating your priorities. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with a laundry list of goals, but not everything can be done at once. There’s a strategy, sometimes attributed to Warren Buffet, that suggests writing down your top ten goals, crossing out seven, and focusing on the three that truly matter. Simplifying priorities in this way helps avoid spreading yourself too thin, especially when burnout is looming.
Sneha: +1 to what Kyla said. I’m a firm believer in sleep as the ultimate form of rest, even if I struggle with sleep myself. I’d also say that in addition to active recovery, I get out of my head by experiencing awe. I created a little guide for myself that I shared with y’all, which reminds me to go out in the vastness of nature. Take in visual art, film, architecture and feel intangible and indescribable emotions. And better yet, do it with people you love to amplify the effects.
I also recommend identifying where your burnout is stemming from. The fundamental cause of burnout comes from overworking ourselves to feel some semblance of “enough”. Is it for your self-worth, is it for your company's success, is it to feel safe in your financial standing, is it some combination of all of the above? For me, it's all of the above. Our automatic response to burnout can lead to adding more things to our to-do list, because we are not operating at our expected performance and efficiency. No wonder when our metrics for worth and success are GDP (spending) and our labor market (productivity and unemployment rates).
Even just identifying this is crucial, because then you can answer what is your personal “enough” North Star. Jeneé Murphy, a speaker and financial life coach, has folks focus on the life they want (regardless of where they currently are) and then work backwards to reverse engineer how to achieve exactly that. “When you start with what you want versus limiting yourself to what you have, you open yourself up to new possibilities, and because our brains are naturally designed to solve problems, you start to see potential solutions to create the life you just envisioned, which is a lot different than trying to figure out how to do more with what you have.”
burnout is part of the journey
Burnout isn’t a one-time hurdle. We thought burnout was something we could conquer, something that wouldn’t come back. It’s the gift that keeps giving 😉 It’s something that returns in cycles, each time challenging us to find new ways to recover, refocus, and keep going. There are times when work demands will push us to our limits.
And while we may not be able to avoid it entirely, we can work on “bounce back time”—the idea that it’s less about preventing burnout altogether and more about how quickly we can recover when it inevitably shows up. This perspective shift has been vital. Instead of aiming to be burnout-proof, we focus on minimizing its impact and bouncing back faster each time. Remember the age-old tale, slow and steady wins the race.
So, while burnout may be part of the journey, it doesn’t have to be a roadblock. For founders, the goal is not to eliminate burnout entirely but to strengthen our capacity to recover and keep moving forward, because sometimes, it’s less about how often burnout happens and more about how resiliently we come back each time.
recommended reads & listens
closing thoughts
💭 have you experienced burnout before? where do you find your burnout stems from? is it your money mindset? entrepreneurship? perfectionism?
and generally,
💭 what do you like most about the between the buzz newsletter? have you been enjoying the women & money series?
💭 what are topics you want to hear more about from me?
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until the next 🐝 , and with 💛 ,
Sneha
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