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.

I especially noticed this lack of confidence. Situations that normally wouldn't bother me rattled me. 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.

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 booked a therapist. 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, you know, 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. After we had the first session, you know, 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, learn about the behaviors that you're doing every day, and which ones are helping you and which ones are hurting you. Your therapist will figure out and work with you to determine what behaviors you can change and how you can navigate your emotions better. They will teach you tools and help you 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 driving up Sandill Road, and you're about to give a pitch meeting. 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 go nowhere."

With your therapist, you can learn a way to stop those thoughts before they start making you feel bad. You examine them and 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.

Your therapist will probably go further and ask you to think, "What's the worst thing that could 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 the world.

I think a therapist is really powerful, especially for founders, in teaching you how to find frameworks and look at your thoughts differently. They help you achieve your goals. Therapy helped me immediately in two ways. First, I had this huge sense of relief. I had someone there I could talk to when things got bad—someone I could talk to about problems that I didn't want to tell my co-founder or I didn't really know how to explain to my family or friends.

I can't really overestimate how important it is to have a safe space. I also felt relief in knowing that I was on a path toward getting better. I felt so bad six weeks ago. I was so desperate to get better and get back to working and being my normal kick-ass self. Just trusting in the process and knowing that I was doing something that would eventually get me to that place in life made me feel better.

Later on, as we reduced my anxiety and stress, I noticed I was thinking so much better. Instead of looking at problems as these behemoths that I would never be able to tackle or things that I was just setting myself up to fail with, I started looking at them again as challenges—as these fun, exciting problems that I was going to solve. That’s the same way I had thought, you know, back a year ago when we started Kip.

I think those have been the most important things so far, and I'm sure that as I continue to go to therapy, I am going to get a lot more benefits out of it. So, unbiased, I think everyone should have a therapist. If you're feeling stressed, anxious, or depressed, or in a bad mood and it's not going away, absolutely go see a therapist.

But, you know, I wish I had started going to therapy way earlier—months ago, maybe even when I started Kip. I say that because stress, anxiety, and depression these are all predictable patterns in founders. You're dealing with this overwhelming amount of uncertainty and overwhelming amount of pressure and stress, both that people put on you but you're putting on yourself.

The faster you can find someone to help you navigate that, the better off you'll be. I hope that one day we look at mental health and we see a therapist in the same way we see other care providers. If you go to the dentist twice a year to get a cleaning and you go to a doctor for a physical once a year, why are we not investing in ourselves and going to a therapist every once in a while to make sure our brain is working?

As a founder, your most important asset, your most important muscle, is your brain, and you should be investing in yourself and making sure that it's working really well. That is going to make you a better founder, a better person, a better leader in the long run.