Erin Frey on Therapy

Hi, I'm Ain. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Kip, a Y Combinator startup that helps you get amazing therapy.

I started going to therapy when I realized that stress and anxiety were affecting my ability to do good work. I was waking up anxious every morning, thinking through the list of things that I would not get done that day. I realized I was thinking less clearly. I was making worse decisions, definitely making slower decisions. I would get agitated. My co-founder and I were getting into way more fights than we used to, and I especially noticed this lack of confidence. Situations that normally wouldn't bother me rattled me.

You know, one example is an interview. Right now it's a little stressful to do an interview, but I'm channeling that anxiety in a positive way. If this was taking place six weeks ago, I don't know if I'd be able to do the interview at all. I think at the end of the day, what happened was I noticed all these things were preventing me from bringing my best self to work.

When you're running a startup, every day matters. You can have a bad day or two, but you can have a bad week and then three bad weeks in a row. I also realized the irony that I was running a therapy startup. Tons of founders are using Kip to help manage the ups and downs and the stress and the uncertainty of running a startup, and I wasn't taking care of myself.

So, I took my own advice and I went to Kip and I booked a therapist. Now, a lot of founders are curious, and people in general are curious about how does therapy actually work and does it work? I like to explain therapy as this scientifically proven process that changes the way your brain works for the better.

This is what it was like for me and what we do at Kip. At first, you meet with a therapist and you figure out a goal to work together on. You might not know what your goal is. It's okay if you just feel off; that's fine. Your therapist will figure out what to work on with you in this session.

For me, I came in ready to go. I wanted to fix my confidence because that was clearly the problem that I was having. My therapist quickly realized that it wasn't confidence; it was that stress and anxiety were just overwhelming me, and my true self, my confident self, wasn't able to shine through.

So, after we have the first session, you'll continue to go to a therapist once a week, maybe once every other week. In sessions, you start to learn how your brain works. You learn about your thought patterns, you learn about how you navigate emotions, and you learn about the behaviors that you're doing every day, which ones are helping you and which ones are hurting you.

Your therapist will figure out and work with you to navigate your emotions better and how you can relate to your thoughts better to live the life you want. They’ll teach you tools and you'll build skills to do that. One good example for founders is that often we deal with this incredible fear of failure and a lot of negative emotions.

Say you're, you know, driving up Sandill Road and you're about to give a pitch meeting. Maybe in the back of your mind, you think, "Oh, I’m going to fail this pitch. I'm going to botch it and they're never going to invest, and the startup's going to, you know, blow; it's just going to go nowhere."

If you can learn with your therapist a way to stop those thoughts before they start making you feel bad, you’ll examine them. You'll ask yourself questions like, "Well, is there evidence for these thoughts?" You practiced your pitch a hundred times with this investor, and you had a great conversation just last week. You're running an amazing startup. There's really no evidence for you to think that you're going to fail.

Then your therapist will probably go further and ask you to think, "What's the worst thing that will happen?" So what if you fail? If you botch this pitch, all that happens is you don't get an investment from this one investor, and then you'll just go find another investor. It's not the end of...