You Don't Know How Stressed You Are.
How chronic stress redraws your sense of normal, and how to rebuild a reliable reference.
I write for founders and executives navigating the inner game of scaling.
Antonio Forenza is the founder of AWEAR, a wearable that continuously tracks brain activity to give a real-time read on stress and mental state.
When was the last time you knew exactly how stressed you were?
Not how stressed you thought you were. How stressed you actually were.
The Belief Worth Challenging
The conventional wisdom on founder stress goes like this: pay attention. Notice when the pressure rises. Manage it before it manages you.
This advice assumes your perception of your own state is reliable. After eighteen months at the top of a scaling company, it usually isn’t.
The body adjusts to the new baseline, then the mind, then the schedule, then the team’s expectations. What used to feel like alarming pressure starts to feel like a Tuesday, and the reference point quietly drifts along with it.
What looks like toughness from the outside is, up close, a measurement problem. You are still inside the system you are trying to evaluate, and the gauge has been rezeroed without your consent.
This week’s guest, Antonio Forenza, names this precisely. Then he describes the two interventions that actually pulled him back to ground truth.
What It Actually Looks Like
Before AWEAR, Antonio spent twenty years in telecom: a PhD at UT Austin, two startups, and then head of R&D at Rakuten Symphony, where he reported to the CEO and ran innovation across five business units in time zones spanning Japan, India, and Europe.
The travel piece is what broke first.
“When you are working nonstop, when you have a crazy schedule, when you start traveling a lot, you kind of lose control of your own world.”
He noticed it physically before he noticed it mentally. Stressed and overweight, he bought a smart scale and an Apple Watch and started measuring, because he needed somewhere outside himself to check against.
Twelve months later he was forty pounds lighter. The numbers had given him something his self-perception could not: a reference point that did not move when his standards moved.
But he was still stressed. And here is the part that matters for founders: he had no way to measure that. There was no scale for the thing he was actually carrying.
So he went to a ten-day silent meditation retreat. He had been meditating for years and thought ten days would be the most peaceful experience of his life.
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. It was like a bootcamp for your mind.”
No phones, no books, no eye contact, no exercise, no writing. Each day ran the same: wake at 4 a.m., meditate, eat in front of a wall, meditate, sleep. For ten days.
Throughout the retreat itself, he wanted to leave, and his mind would not stop spinning. But here is the line he keeps coming back to.
“You lose contact, you lose that reference. And then when you walk out of the gate, now you see the difference.”
He did not realize how loud his life had become until he sat in a small room with no inputs for ten days. The retreat worked as recalibration, even though he had walked in expecting relaxation. What the room gave him was a baseline he had lost.
That is the inner game insight. What looks like a stress problem at this stage is usually a reference problem. By the time you can feel the cost, you have already paid most of it.
If this resonates, forward it to a founder who hasn’t had a real day off in six months and tells you they’re fine.
From the Coaching Room
I recently spoke with a founder and CEO of a company doing more than $10M in annual recurring revenue. When I ask if she’s stressed, she always says no, and she means it. She isn’t performing equanimity. She genuinely doesn’t feel it.
But over the last few years, her health has declined. When back-to-back challenges land in the same stretch, chronic conditions she’s lived with quietly flare up. The body keeps a record her conscious mind has stopped reading.
That’s the thing about stress at this stage. It isn’t always loud. The body becomes accustomed to chronic load to the point where it no longer registers as a signal worth paying attention to. The volume drops, but the dose doesn’t.
Our work has been about reconnection. Truly learning how to feel the signals the body is sending: emotions, stress, pain, the rest of the readouts she had stopped picking up. This is foundational data for someone running a company at this scale, who needs to know when she is running on fumes before her health makes the decision for her.
Tools can put the body’s signals in front of you. The work of reconnecting to them is yours.
What the Research Actually Shows
The pattern in the coaching room shows up in the research too.
External feedback measurably retunes the nervous system.
A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback screened 1,868 papers and pooled 58 randomized controlled trials of heart rate variability biofeedback. The review reported small-to-moderate effects favoring biofeedback over control conditions, with the largest effects on anxiety, depression, anger, and athletic and artistic performance.¹
The mechanism is straightforward. When you can see your own physiological state in real time, the nervous system has something concrete to respond to. Subjective awareness alone is too noisy to course-correct on, while a signal you can watch gives the body a target to move toward.
Objective self-monitoring changes behavior; subjective self-monitoring does not.
A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity pooled nineteen randomized trials and roughly 2,800 adults to test whether self-monitoring interventions changed behavior. The pooled effect was significant, but the moderator analysis is the part founders should read.²
The effect held only when participants used objective monitoring tools such as accelerometers (Hedges’ g = 0.40). Self-report alone did not reliably move the needle. Translation for the inner game: self-awareness still works, and external signals help fill the gap when chronic stress has been quietly shaping how you read yourself.
Rebuilding Your Reference
When the pressure rises, the instinct is to pay closer attention, and that instinct is right. The moves below add the structural layer underneath it: practices that hold steady when self-perception starts to drift.
Pick one objective signal and watch it for a quarter.
Resting heart rate, HRV, sleep stages, time-to-fall-asleep, weekly average wake time: pick one and refuse to interpret it for the first thirty days. Just look. The point is to put a number next to a feeling so you stop trusting the feeling alone, and to notice what your body does when the number lands. After ninety days you will know which weeks were actually expensive, regardless of what your memory tells you.
Build a recalibration window into the calendar.
Antonio takes a week each year alone, no conversations, to reset. The format is yours, the rule is that nothing on the schedule can mean anything to anyone but you. A long weekend does not reach this depth. You need enough days that your nervous system stops anticipating the next obligation. The week that feels indulgent on the calendar is the week that protects the next eleven.
Recruit one human who is allowed to tell you the truth.
A peer, a coach, a partner. Their only job is to mirror what they see. You will not catch the drift in yourself, but you can hear it from someone else, if you have given them permission first.
Compare actual against intended, every week.
Founders typically track output, but few track condition. At the end of each week, write down what you intended that week to feel like and what it actually felt like. The gap between the two is the thing your perception is hiding from you. The accumulated record becomes the external reference your in-the-moment perception cannot give you, and after a quarter the pattern is legible enough to plan around.
The Bigger Picture
The mistake at scale is treating stress as a feeling to be managed. Stress at scale is an environment. You are inside it, and it has bent the instrument you were going to use to measure it.
Antonio’s product is one expression of this insight, the retreat another, a coach another, a peer group another. The form does not matter; what matters is that the signal comes from outside the system that has been quietly recalibrating you. Founders who scale well do not have lower stress baselines. They have more references: ways to check whether the drift has started, people who can name what they are seeing, numbers that do not flatter them.
“Whenever I feel stressed or whenever I feel the pressure builds up, my mind by default goes back into that tiny room where I spent ten days of my life.”
That sentence is what the work actually produces. Somewhere to stand outside the stress, even on the weeks when the stress itself does not lift. A reference point your future self can return to when the present has stopped making sense. If you are reading this and quietly thinking you do not need this, that is the drift talking. Build the reference before you need it.
Founder Circle: A reference you can return to.
Most of the founders I work with don’t need more advice. They need a place to recalibrate before the drift costs them something they can’t get back.
I work with a small group of founders who want three things:
Clarity on what you cannot see from inside the company, named out loud by people who have been there.
A space to work through the hard decisions without performing for the room.
A peer group that gets it: founders doing the inner work alongside the operational work.
Our next circle meets soon, join us!
P.S. What is one thing your team has noticed about you in the last month that you didn’t notice yourself? I read every response.
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC) and founder of Little Pursuits. I partner with founders and executives through the leadership inflection points: the identity shifts, the hard conversations, the decisions you keep carrying alone. This newsletter is where that work meets the page.
If you want to go deeper, check out the references used in our research:
¹ Lehrer, P., Kaur, K., Sharma, A., Shah, K., Huseby, R., Bhavsar, J., & Zhang, Y. (2020). Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Improves Emotional and Physical Health and Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 45(3), 109–129. The review pooled 58 randomized controlled trials and reported small-to-moderate effects favoring HRV biofeedback, with the largest effects on anxiety, depression, anger, and athletic/artistic performance.
² Compernolle, S., DeSmet, A., Poppe, L., Crombez, G., De Bourdeaudhuij, I., Cardon, G., van der Ploeg, H. P., & Van Dyck, D. (2019). Effectiveness of interventions using self-monitoring to reduce sedentary behavior in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 16(1), 63. Nineteen randomized trials totaling roughly 2,800 adults. Self-monitoring significantly reduced sedentary time (Hedges’ g = 0.32 overall), and the effect was significant only when objective monitoring tools were used (g = 0.40).
Love the idea of rebuilding and recalibrating!