I Couldn't Sleep. I Obsessed Over My Failures. Then I Found the Weirdest Cure — Flyfishing? It's easy to buckle under the stress of entrepreneurship. I was on my last leg when I gave in, and tried flyfishing. What I learned out there in the river surprised me.

I think it was after my fourth sleepless night that I sought out Scott Willett, my neighbor. He is another entrepreneur, someone else who'd left the corporate world for his own — which meant he was someone who might, at last, understand me.

"It's not going well," I'd said by way of opening, back in March 2021, the two of us bunched round the campfire he built in his backyard.

"What's the it that's not going well?" Scott asked. He has a Ph.D. in organization management, which, among other things, gives him a therapist's demeanor, all open-ended questions in nonjudgmental tones.

Related: 3 Ways to Prevent Stress from Taking Over Your Life

"All of it, maybe?" I'd said. Only that wasn't quite expansive enough. It was the uncertainty of entrepreneurship, sure, and the fear which hadn't left me since I'd been laid off from my media job in November 2020 and decided to go it alone as a writer and course creator. What if I bankrupt us? What if my kids see me as a failure? What if my wife leaves me? Any entrepreneur knows that as what-ifs compound, they grow more dire. Scott knew it, too. But what surprised me, I told him, were the frustrations of my success. The wins were modest. Or they were large but not replicable, like good friends introducing me to better business partners in need of a one-time solution. Nothing was ever good enough, for long enough. Nothing happened fast enough. That was the big thing. I liked — and on many days, loved — being my own boss, but I loathed the irregularity of my paychecks and the days, months, years it would take to build out my future. I didn't know if I had the patience for that, which was another way to say I didn't know if I had the balls for it.

I told Scott that I wanted his serenity. I wanted his self-assurance.

"Because certainly everything's not just peachy in your life," I said.

"No," he said, gently. "Not always peachy."

Five years ago, he left Prudential as a vice president and global head of organizational effectiveness. He started a consulting firm, Pennington Human Dynamics, Inc., with his friend and business partner, Najeeb Ahmad. By the time I came to him, his business was thriving — though he kept a lot of his success to himself, out of deference to my mood. He did say that nothing in this entrepreneurial life was perfect. "That's just as true four years into it as it is four months in."

He looked at me askance, weighing something in his mind. To alleviate stress, he said, to get the patience I needed, the peace of mind I craved, "I think I know what can help you."

Related: Entrepreneurship Is All About Overcoming Obstacles

When he shared his idea, I laughed. It must be some joke. On that night, and for the next year, I refused to believe it would actually help. Then one day this spring, with no more patience, just as much anxiety, and some newfound anger, too — at the projects that had underperformed and the business partners who had overpromised — I relented.

I agreed to fly to Idaho with Scott. To fly fish.

This is not a fly-fishing story. For one thing, this is a magazine for entrepreneurs. For another, I hate fishing. I'd done a fair amount of it as a kid in Iowa, the rod-and-reel sort, the stand-on-some-dock-overlooking-a-fetid-pond sort. The sort where you catch nothing but a sunburn. This is why I'd resisted Scott's big idea to fly fish.

I'd fished. It'd sucked. I'd quit fishing.

The reason I flew to Idaho, though, had to do with something Scott told me in the weeks prior to the trip: "I don't care about the fishing either."

He talked about the multicount motion of casting, what that rhythm induced on those big waters, a tranquility that felt almost narcotized. Lulled like this, huge insights occurred, he said. Personal insights. Professional insights. Familial insights. Almost spiritual insights. In fact, some 400 years ago, a faithful member of an English church even compared fly fishing to something transcending prayer. "Peace and a secure mind / Which all men seek / We only find," wrote Izaak Walton, in a paean called The Compleat Angler, where he quoted a still earlier writer and fly fisherman named Henry Wotton.

That's why you fly fish, Scott said. To be among the privileged few who gain absolute clarity over whatever troubles them.

Related: 4 Entrepreneurship Lessons You Won't Learn In a Classroom

Scott and his partner Najeeb, as smart entrepreneurs, had found a way to monetize this clarity. Their consulting agency ran fly fishing trips to Idaho and Chile, among other places, inviting other entrepreneurs and top executives from leading companies to wade out into rivers and await something like transcendence. They called these four-to-eight-day trips 'The Compleat Leader," an homage to Walton and his book, which in the last 350-plus years has purportedly trailed only the King James Bible in how many times it's been reprinted in English.

Something seemed to happen on those big waters.

I wanted their secret.

On my flight from Connecticut, where I live, to Idaho, where Scott and I and six others would fish, I used the jet's WiFi to research — and, really, to compare myself to other entrepreneurs.

Ninety-two percent of you are like me: We've endured a tremendous amount of stress that then transforms into mental health problems over the last two years. That's according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), which did a massive survey this spring of small business owners in the U.K., finding that the pandemic and its pressures kept people anxious. Many of them couldn't afford to get sick. Seventy-five percent of them didn't take a single sick day off. They didn't think they could, lest their businesses fail.

We struggle mentally at a rate that's higher than the general worker. According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and data it gathered some years ago, entrepreneurs feel more stress than nine-to-fivers. Research published in the journal Small Business Economics and other data found that entrepreneurs reported experiencing more depression (30% compared to 16.6%), tend to be diagnosed more often with bipolar disorder (11% to 2.6%); and perhaps as a result, tend to self-medicate, with a higher substance use rate than the general worker (12% compared to 6%).

Now, it's not all bad. We also tend to love what we do: the freedom, the creativity, the short path from idea to action. Michael Freeman, a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco has carried out fascinating research that suggests entrepreneurship actually attracts those of us who are a little off, a little different, a little daring. Viewed from this vantage, our mental health concerns are both a byproduct of our work and an inherent feature of our personalities, there even before we went out on our own. Our crossed wiring may be the thing that allows us to pursue our dreams. That's what John Gartner argues, too. He's a former assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who wrote a book about the phenomenon: The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of )Success in America. "Hypomania is a mild form of mania," Gartner writes. "Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas…Successful entrepreneurs are not just braggarts. They are highly creative people who quickly generate a tremendous number of ideas—some clever, others ridiculous." And this run of ideas — and their accompanying cycle of doubt and fear and exuberance as they play out in our worlds — "is a sign of hypomania," Gartner writes.

Related: Why You Need To Change Your Perspective on Failure

The problem is that many of us have no idea how to tame those wild inner beasts. Forty-five percent of small business owners, according to CEBR's research, don't know in whom to confide when our depression and anxiety and burnout hit, as they inevitably do. We just work through it. And we work through it because we don't have the time for anything but. According to one study of 500 managers, 96% said we lack the time for even the strategic thinking that will drive our businesses forward.

I nodded along to all this as I read. Same, I thought. Same, same, same. I realized that none of us will ever find that vaunted clarity, that much-needed peace of mind, working like this, living like this.

Soon after, I touched down in Idaho.

I'd started the day all big hopes and open mind. We hit up the Madison River, just across the border in Montana, the sky cracked wide and blue, the bluffs of the high desert rising all around us, breathing air so crisp it snapped when it hit your lungs. My guide, Earl, told me about the fly fisherman's motion. With the rod in hand at 9 o'clock, you stiffen your wrist and cast your arm up to 12 o'clock and then bring the arm back down.

To get the rhythm right — to allow the fishing line, billowy as it is, to move behind you and then whip through — just "say 'Coca-Cola,'" Earl said, smiling. He was 60-something and tall, maybe 6'2", wearing a goatee and ruddy complexion and also shorts and sandals, the most impressive part of the get-up given that the morning temperature was in the mid-50s.

"Coca-Cola?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

Coca, up to 12 o'clock.

Pause.

Cola, as you cast down and through.

I liked Earl immediately. I liked Dan, too, the entrepreneur from New York whom Scott and Najeeb had paired me to fish with that first day. He was roughly my age but had founded and sold numerous companies, a serial entrepreneur who never bragged about his worth and wanted, especially after we set out in our drift boat, to simply admire the view.

Related: 3 Top Tips for Managing Stress and Anxiety as an Entrepreneur

I wanted some trout on the line for sure, and beyond that the holy grail: the promised revelation, buried just for me in this slow-moving river, which would grant me patience and peace of mind.

But then…nothing. No peace of mind. No clarity. No fish, even. Sure, at some point in the afternoon, hungover from the now-merciless sun that I could almost smell burning my flesh, I'd hooked something. I pulled and reeled and listened to Earl as he half-shouted to keep pulling, keep reeling. Then my rod broke. Just broke in two. Even Earl scoffed at my poor fortune. "That doesn't tend to happen."

When I got back to the lodge, fishless and frustrated, and I heard the stories from the other executives and entrepreneurs — one general manager of a manufacturing multinational had caught 10 trout — I left the happy hour and headed up to my room.

Was the freak occurrence of my broken rod the same "bad luck" I'd left in Connecticut? The "sure thing" movie deal, adapting a story I'd written, that was now wobbling in postproduction and may not have its premiere at all? The digital course I'd created for storytellers like me that despite my confidence had almost aggressively underperformed? Its meager sales taunting me? What if I never had real breakthroughs with my books and screenplays and digital products? What would I do then?

I could feel stress and dread building within me, my shoulders rising higher and higher to hold them, and I tried in my room to will some serenity by returning to a book I'd been reading.

The Relaxation Response, by the Harvard Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson, detailed his multidecade quest to make sense of medicine's most confounding fact: Up to 90% of all medical ailments seemed to have nothing to do with the body. They were stress-

related. Benson first found the link between stress and heart conditions like hypertension in the 1960s — but no one believed him. His fellow colleagues at Harvard thought Benson should quit his research. Their argument was the same one that science has always put forward, from the industrial age to the digital: Advancement comes from what can be measured, from lines of steel to lines of code. But how can someone measure stress? At the time, it was impossible.

And yet, across decades and despite guffaws, Benson continued his work. He did something even bolder than study stress: He prescribed self-care to treat it. He used the instruments of technology — the EKGs and CT scans of late 20th- and early 21st-century science — to show how blood pressure was lowered through prayer, how Tibetan monks in a freezing room and wearing nothing but loincloth could warm their bodies through meditation. Benson published study after peer-reviewed study, most of them showing how hypertension or anxiety or muscle pain or diabetes or infertility could be alleviated, eradicated even, by something he came to call the "Relaxation Response." You could induce this Relaxation Response anytime you want, he argued, through prayer or rhythmic exercise like running, or repetitive tasks like gardening. The point was to do something that quieted the mind. When you quieted the mind, you quieted the body. When you quieted the body, well, you healed yourself. Benson found this across more than 190 scientific publications.

So I tried what Benson recommended. I tried to meditate there in my room. I closed the door and sat in my chair and focused on my breath. For three exhalations, then five, I was good. Then my mind raced and wouldn't stop: The emails I was ignoring, the new projects I needed to launch, the deadlines that would loom after those launches. And above all, the pay. I was greedy for checks that were more than sustenance; they could prove my worth. I wanted those fat checks now.

Related: 9 Things You May Not Realize Are Causing You Anxiety

My eyes opened and my breath shortened and it seemed like even Benson was mocking me. Because before he died in February of this year, Benson recommended fly fishing to lower stress. Of all things. The repetitive casting is a "beautiful way" to induce the Relaxation Response, he told his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, where he served by the end of his life as the Mind Body Medicine professor of Medicine, having convinced the medical establishment of his way of thinking.

And yet what had his prescriptions done for me today? I'd broken a rod and caught no fish and certainly no insight.

This sucked. This trip wasn't a break from my life; it was its extension.

When I opened the door to head to the dining hall for dinner, I'd begun to concoct in my head the lies I'd need to tell Scott, who had become a good friend, when we flew back to Connecticut in two days' time and he asked me what I thought of the trip.

Our last day on the water promised something different. We would not be in drift boats. We would walk into the river itself. I put on rubber boots and the waders that looked like overalls, regretting now the three cocktails I'd had after dinner, which itself came with wine. Soon Dan and Earl and I were at the Madison's edge. I put a shaky foot into the river, wanting mostly to get this over with.

The strength of the current astonished me. It nearly swept my left foot out from under me, and I quickly brought my right leg into the waters to stabilize myself. At that point I wobbled and nearly fell a second time. The river came to my knees and pushed itself hard against my body, with the riverbed underneath nothing but rock, smooth and so very slippery.

"Whoa whoa whoa!" Earl shouted. "Find the silt between the rocks!"

I balanced my arms wide, steadied my core, and then moved my ankles this way and that until I found the footing.

"Good," Earl said. "Now let's walk there." He pointed to waters shaded by a small tree, upstream a good 10 paces.

You gotta be kidding, I thought.

But Earl began to walk and so I tried, too. I focused all my attention on the task of baby-stepping, straining, balancing my way upstream. When we reached our spot, I had to somehow hold my lower body firm while my arm cast back and through as relaxed as possible. It took me a solid 10 minutes to learn the dissociative movement necessary for fly fishing: How to keep your lower body almost cemented in rigidity and your upper body so relaxed all you hear are the metronomed mutterings of Coca-Cola.

Related: 10 Lessons About Failure That Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know

I'd always loved challenges like this. It was why I played football as an undersized high school freshman and why I'd decided against seeking another job after my layoff. And here, with every heel that wobbled its way into silt, every strained step against the river's force, every light-armed cast, here was a challenge. This was hard. And because it was hard, this was, ultimately, rewarding.

I got my first trout on the line an hour into our day. I kept the rod low to the water as I tried to pull him in. With that slack in the line the trout got away. It didn't frustrate me, though. It focused me even more. With Earl's help I learned not only to cast overhead but side-armed, so my fly could reach waters near the river's edge where native grasses drooped low over the current, nearly touching it.

The next time I felt a tug of the line I yanked my rod high above. It bent, and bent some more, as the trout pulled against it. Earl shouted his encouragement some 20 feet away about what to do, but I knew it. I knew now what it would take to get this fish in the boat. Moments later the trout crested the current, flapping on the hook. Moments more and it was in Earl's fishing net.

Moments after that and we were snapping pictures of the "good-sized" trout, in Earl's estimation. And moments after that we were releasing it back into the river.

Throughout all this, I never stopped smiling.

I came to love fly fishing that day. The work of it, how it demanded as much of your mental stamina as your physical. What kind of fly to use, and when, and why: The iterations were as endless as language itself — and having spent 20 years trying to master a sentence, I now saw the deep appeal of trying to master a river, and its trout.

By early afternoon, I'd caught another one. And yet the clarity I had flown across the country for still escaped me. I had no insight into how to forge ahead in my singular life with the assurance I would need.

So I stopped trying to find it. On those waters, I let myself put aside the future to appreciate what was around me: Two streams merging into one, and me casting at the darkened line where those waters collided; the day warming and the sparkling river rushing white near boulders; above me, the branches of two aspen framing a mountain's peak.

I'm going to remember this moment for the rest of my life, I thought.

And that's when the clarity hit me: The strain is the point.

Of course! I had wanted a cure for my anxiety and impatience and thought I would find it through ease, some sort of circumnavigation around what troubled me. But all of life is strain. The strain of the river, its current attempting to topple me with every step I took, was the strain of entrepreneurship, its modest successes and many failures. Ease of life, self-assurance — they don't come from avoiding the river or avoiding the doubt that follows a failed venture. You must step into the river. You must sit alongside your doubt. And only through straining against it do you overcome it. And that work of overcoming it, that strain of effort, especially as you begin to succeed, puts you in a flow state where you find creativity, tranquility, and patience.

Related: How this Entrepreneur Learned to Cope With Anxiety

Look what happened on this river, I told myself. You needed the force of the current against you, the slippery rocks underneath, to learn to stand tall against them and reach a point now where you could enjoy this day for what it is. The strain of the morning made your clarity this afternoon possible.

It's the same in business. The strain of writing books or launching courses should not be done away with. It should be embraced. The strain proves a project's worth. Because amid that strain you learn self-reliance. And self-reliance leads to confidence that leads to the patience I crave and something else, too: the understanding that my new career will work out because I'm straining now to ensure it will.

The strain is the point.

As I write this, it has been a month since my trip. I now carry out my days with what passes for patience and appreciation. I don't think I'll ever be Kumbaya Man but I find myself embracing the stresses as normal, despite the days' suckiness. I appreciate the suck, and understand it is building something: A fully armored me.

That's what Dr. Alia Crum finds in the people she studies, too. She's an intellectual descendant of sorts of Herbert Benson and his mind and body center at Massachusetts General Hospital. These days Crum runs her own Mind and Body Lab at Stanford. She affirmed so much of what Benson said. She says stats show that, yes, stress in any field, and in whomever it manifests, is debilitating and a source of anxiety and impatience and body aches and insomnia, and even infertility. But telling yourself that stress is a mechanism through which you can grow, which is also scientifically true, has led the Navy SEALs she's studied to complete obstacle courses quicker than their training partners and the finance bros she's observed to perform better at work in the face of looming layoffs. "Experiencing these challenges as an inherent part of our life cycle," she cowrote in one paper of hers, "can facilitate the acquisition of mental toughness, deeper social bonds, heightened awareness, new perspectives, a sense of mastery, greater appreciation for life, a sense of meaning, and strengthened priorities."

Related: Learn Time and Stress Management Techniques to Empower Your Business

It's all a matter of how you view the obstacles in your life. Are they some rushing current that stands between you and your aspirations — foamy and frightening, crashing against bulwarks, sending you upstream in search of some other path 'round? Or can you acknowledge the current's speed and scariness and step into the waters anyway, to wobble and baby step and strain against them? To see that each hour you stay upright amid this obstacle's almost animate wish to topple you — each hour you remain grounded — you gain that much more mastery over it, and over your life?

Because that's what Crum has found, and what I have begun to find. The power of the onslaught and your own strength to withstand it becomes its own kind of comfort. And eventually, having found a tentative foothold, you just may be able to lift your eyes from the endeavor of survival, and take in the beautiful vistas around you:

Your own realized dreams.