So I'm cofounder + CEO of a small (7 full time, 2 part time) tech startup. I was enjoying it very much until ~6 weeks ago, until a series of events sent me into a whirlwind of anxiety from which I have yet to make any recovery from.I have never experienced anxiety on any real level before, and it is severely impacting my ability to work. Basically I find myself feeling entirely overwhelmed and generally unable to make any decisions. I have been physically turning up to work every day, but have spent most of each working day procrastinating (on reddit usually) or constantly popping out on short walks. Basically, I am very powerfully avoiding my work. My brain is on chronic fight + flight, and I'm going with flight. Of course, I just feel physically terrible as well, with the standard symptoms of chronic anxiety.It's also really fucked up my life outside of work. I've stopped going to the gym, I've stopped seeing friends, I've stopped eating healthily. I'm waking up 2am every night without fail.I am exploring the idea of taking some indefinite time off. I've already explored the idea with my cofounder who is open to it (he would be taking over leadership). On paper this seems like the obvious choice- both for my own wellbeing, and for that of the company (I'm hardly an effective leader right now, we are basically in a holding pattern, possibly with me doing nothing things would be going better than me doing what I'm doing now).My hesitations are: -it might be very demoralizing to the team to have the CEO step down -I'm just running away from my problems. Even if time off made me feel better, perhaps things would go right back to how they are now whenever I do eventually return? Isn't the only long term solution to learn to deal with problems instead of running away from them? -I don't want to feel like a failure/quitter -it is not good for my reputation among the team and investors and might damage my future careerI am wondering if there are any other CEOs here who have faced a similar dilemma? To be clear, I do not mean 'quitting' but instead explaining the situation to the team (and investors) and explaining that my cofounder would be taking over leadership for the time being. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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