When “more” is not choice anymore: the hidden driver of founder hustle

Your partner goes to sleep. You say you’ll come soon. You open the laptop “just to finish one thing.” It’s 1am. You are still there. And when you finally close the screen, you lie in bed replaying a Slack message from three hours ago.

This is the pattern I see in almost every founder call I take. The framing everyone uses for it is “I’m ambitious.” The real framing, which takes a while to admit, is closer to “I can’t stop.”

There’s a difference. Ambition chooses. It gets tired, rests, comes back sharper. The compulsion doesn’t. The compulsion runs 24/7. For most of the founders I work with, the hook under the ambition is a short window of relief, maybe 40 minutes, that shows up after shipping something hard. Then the anxiety comes back and the chase starts again.

If any of that lands, stay with me. I want to show you what is actually happening, why “more” keeps not feeling like enough, and why the path out starts with something that looks a lot like grief.

Short version: the founder who can’t stop isn’t simply ambitious. Often an old pattern is running in the background, where effort equals being loved or being safe. Achievement becomes a way of regulating anxiety, not just a way of building a company. “Enough” isn’t blocked by laziness or lack of willpower. It’s blocked by a specific kind of loss the body has to move through first, the loss of the identity that was holding you together. Uncomfortable. Also how you get your life back.

What “never enough” actually is

Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician who has written a lot about stress and the body, describes his own workaholism like this. “Stemming from my early experiences, I needed to be needed, wanted, and admired as a substitute for love.”

Read that slowly. Admired as a substitute for love. What he worked for ran deeper than career success. At some level, it was the feeling that he was worth loving. This is a nervous system doing what nervous systems do. Find a strategy to feel OK, then run it forever.

He writes, more clinically, that if a child doesn’t feel valued for who they are, they may spend a lifetime proving their value through what they do and how much they do. Most founders I work with, if we slow down together, find some version of this in their history. A parent who praised grades. A family that got loud when things went wrong. A quiet message that being useful was safer than being real. Nothing dramatic, necessarily. Just a pattern.

You don’t have to have had a bad childhood for this to apply. You just have to have learned, at some point, that effort bought you something you needed.

As adults, this looks like a beautiful founder origin story. The drive. The capacity to work through things that would break other people. And the drive is real. And it is also a compulsion with a cap table attached. Both are true at once.

The tell: when “more” stops being a choice

Here is how you know you have crossed from ambition into compulsion.

You hit the target. The revenue number, the round, the customer, the launch. And for a brief moment you feel it. The thing you were chasing. Within a day, sometimes within an hour, the target moves. The number gets reframed as “well, that was obvious, the real target is the next one.” The celebration never happens, or it happens for ten minutes and then evaporates.

Another tell. You try to take a Saturday off. By 11am Saturday you are antsy, irritable, feel vaguely wrong in your skin. By 2pm you have opened the laptop. You tell yourself, “it’s just one email.” You know, as you type the words to yourself, that you are lying. The laptop is for the feeling, not the email.

Another one. You are physically on holiday with your family. You are on the beach. And part of you is in a Slack thread you can’t access because the Wi-Fi is bad, which makes you angry in a way the Wi-Fi doesn’t deserve. The Wi-Fi is a scapegoat. The real thing underneath is a feeling you usually drown with work, and without the work, you have nowhere to put it.

What the nervous system is doing, in all these cases, is using work to regulate anxiety. Calling that “workaholism” makes it sound like a quirk. It’s bigger than a quirk. It’s the operating system you’ve been running for decades.

The grief nobody warned you about

This is where people usually bounce off articles like this one. Because the implication is, “OK, so I should slow down.” And you think, “sure, I’ll slow down, I’ll take a week off, I’ll meditate.”

Then you try. And it gets worse before it gets better. And you quit after three days and go back to the grind, and you tell yourself this whole slowing-down thing isn’t for you.

Here is what’s actually happening in those three days. When you take away the thing that was keeping you regulated, you feel what was underneath it. The fear you’ve been outrunning for twenty years. The sense that if you are not producing, you are not safe. The quiet suspicion that the version of you that is not working is boring, or useless, or unloved. This is the part nobody warned you about.

What you are feeling is a form of grief. You don’t have to use that word if it feels too therapy. Call it whatever you want. The experience, though, is: something that was holding me together is gone, and I don’t yet know what’s underneath it. The ground under your feet feels thinner. You feel sad and angry in ways you can’t connect to anything current. You miss the hustle, not because the hustle was good for you, but because it was a whole identity, and now you don’t know who you are without it.

This is the point where most founders abandon the project. The middle is worse than the beginning. The middle is where “good enough” stops feeling like relief and starts feeling like loss.

If you can stay with it, past the middle, something else shows up. An evening where you sit on the balcony and the light is nice and you are not checking your phone and it’s fine. A Saturday you spend with someone you love where you are actually in the room. A quiet that feels different from exhaustion. Actually real. You have to earn it by going through the middle.

Small moves. Nothing heroic.

I’m not going to ask you to go to a silent retreat tomorrow. Here are the smaller, realistic moves that actually shift this.

Notice the body first. When you’re about to open the laptop at 11pm, pause for 30 seconds and ask, what am I feeling right now in my chest, my shoulders, my stomach. Not metaphorically. Literally. Is there tightness. Is there a buzz. You don’t need to fix it. You need to see it. Most founders haven’t looked inside their body in years, and the moment you start, the compulsion starts to loosen.

Leave the phone in another room for one hour, once a day. One hour. Not the whole day. The discomfort you feel in that hour is the information. Sit with it. You don’t have to do anything heroic. Just notice that you are someone who can be without the input for sixty minutes. Most founders I work with find this genuinely difficult for the first month. That is the pattern being seen for the first time.

Do something that has no outcome. No skill building. No productivity. Not a thing that will make you a better founder. Just something for the sake of doing it. Swim in cold water. Draw badly. Take a slow walk. Cook a meal without a podcast in your ear. Your system is going to object. The objection is the whole point.

Schedule one real conversation with someone who knew you before you were a founder. Someone who remembers you as a person, not as a title. Let them see the version of you that doesn’t have a pitch. It might feel strange. The strangeness is because that version of you has been offline for a while and is blinking back into the room.

The accountability part

Here is the piece you came here for.

If what I described sounds familiar, you already know this. You have known it for a long time. The question isn’t whether you can see the pattern. The question is whether you are willing to do anything about it while the pattern is still “working,” before it costs you a marriage or a health scare or a collapse that takes everything with it.

Waiting until it breaks is the common path. It is not the necessary one.

Pick one small move from the section above. The phone one. The body one. Put it in your calendar. Tomorrow. This week.

Watch what comes up when you do. The resistance is the map. The part of you that says “I don’t have time for this” is very young. It learned, a long time ago, that stopping wasn’t safe. That’s the voice you’re hearing when you feel the urge to dismiss this and go back to the laptop. Your rational adult mind would actually appreciate a Saturday off.

You can give that part of you a different experience. Slowly. One action at a time. What works is noticing what’s there, and offering it something different from what it got the first time around.

Frequently asked questions

Why can’t I stop working even when I want to?

Usually because work has stopped being a choice and started being a way to regulate anxiety. For most founders, the hook underneath is the short window of relief that shows up for 40 minutes after you ship something hard, before the anxiety returns. Your nervous system learned, somewhere along the way, that effort keeps you safe or makes you lovable. As an adult founder, that pattern is now wearing the costume of ambition.

What’s the difference between being ambitious and being a workaholic?

Ambition chooses. It can pause, rest, enjoy a win for a week. Compulsion can’t. If you hit the target and the target moves within a day, if you try to take a Saturday off and feel physically wrong by 11am, if your holiday is ruined by bad Wi-Fi, what’s running underneath is a survival pattern wearing the costume of ambition. Both can build a company. Only one of them lets you have a life at the same time.

Is hustle culture actually a trauma response?

For many founders, yes. Physician and author Gabor Maté writes that workaholism often traces back to childhood experiences where effort bought love, approval, or safety. “I needed to be needed, wanted, and admired as a substitute for love,” is how he described his own pattern. The company is real. The achievement is real. And for many founders, the engine underneath is older and more personal than business ambition.

How do I start working less without killing the business?

Start small. Leave the phone in another room for one hour a day. Do one activity with no outcome attached, nothing that makes you a better founder. Notice where the tension lives in your body when you try to stop, without trying to fix it. Schedule one conversation with someone who knew you before you were a founder. These moves sound tiny. The tininess is the point. The nervous system shifts through small repeated signals, not heroic weekend retreats.

Why does taking time off make me feel worse, not better?

Because when you take away the thing that was regulating your anxiety, you feel what was underneath it. Fear, self-criticism, a sense that you are not allowed to just exist, and often a surprising amount of boredom. This phase is real, and most founders abandon the slowing-down project here because the middle is worse than the beginning. If you can stay with it past the initial discomfort, a different kind of quiet shows up. You have to earn that quiet by going through the middle.

Where to go from here

If you want support doing this work with someone who won’t rush you through it, that’s a big part of what my coaching is for. My Leaders in Tech program is built for founders in exactly this place. The work we do is slow, physical, and real. No hack, no productivity system. If you want to start smaller, you can book a free strategy call and we’ll look at what’s going on.

And wherever you are today, please do one of the small moves. Not because I said so. Because some part of you has been waiting a long time to be given permission to stop. 🙏

Onwards and upwards.

---

Sources referenced:

• Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal and interviews on workaholism and trauma
• Matt Munson, My Journey Through Founder Depression, mattmunson.me