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I'm Inc. Executive editor, Diana Ransom.

And I'm editor at large, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

You're listening to From the Ground Up. Today's episode, How to Handle Grief as You're Starting a Company. After our conversation with the Slumu founders, Karen Robinowitz and Sarah Schiller, Christine and I wanted to dig in a little bit more to how founders can manage their grief while also balancing the demands of starting a company.

Yes, so we decided to reach out to someone who could give us more insight. I chatted with Tracy Dennis-Tawari about the very concept of grief, how humans process it, and how we come to terms with it. Tracy is a scientist, entrepreneur, and author. She's also a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the City University of New York. The company she co-founded is called Arcade Therapeutics, and it translates neuroscience research research into gamified digital therapeutics for mental health.

What did you take away from the conversation?

I have to say it was surprising. She told me that founding a company with your friend is not the worst thing you can do.

Wow, that is certainly counter to what we always hear. Basically to not go into business with a close friend.

Right. And Tracy knows firsthand, she founded her own company with a good friend. I also really liked what she told me about people who are all about outcomes and optimizing. Like many founders we know, they might not be able to understand that grief is not something you can just turn off so you can perform.

Yeah, that's a good point.

She also talked about finding and building a support system if you don't have a partner or close friend like Sarah and Karen have.

Well, let's dive into it.

All right. We kicked off the conversation by talking about what grief looks like and feels like and what it puts a person through psychologically and physically.

Grief is one those human experiences that is truly a normal fundamental human experience. At the same time, it's so painful, it's so powerful that a lot of us struggle with understanding whether our grief reaction is normal. Is this how it should be? Am I not getting over this quickly enough? And really grief, it doesn't just resolve itself overnight. So it's also, to some degree, more or less a prolonged experience, which is not That's how our typical emotions are. Grief involves sadness. Grief involves guilt. Some of us feel guilty when we are remaining, if we've lost a loved one. Grief is also a sense of yearning, because when we grieve, we really feel the absence of that loved one. Sometimes we become preoccupied with the circumstances of the loved one's death, especially if it was sudden or traumatic. Many of us feel everything from intense and overwhelming sadness to feeling numb, really, and feeling troubled by the fact that we're not feeling more. Why can't I cry? And things like that. Anger and bitterness are very natural, of course, that we've, how could the universe or God do this to me? These kinds of reactions happen often.

We start, sometimes, especially if we have what's called a prolonged grief response, which can start to get in the way of being able to live our lives and work and move forward. We can also start to chronically avoid situations that remind us of our loved one when we've lost. We can start to even have suicidal thoughts, wanting to join the deceased loved one, feeling alone or detached from others. I mean, the list, really, I could just... Really, the list does continue, but I guess what we can say in a nutshell is grief has so many different faces. It has so many different emotional and social and coping responses that I think as psychologists, we often really try to widen the net of what is considered acceptable and normal so that people don't feel stigmatized when they do have these powerful grief reactions.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to talk a little bit more about that and help them normalize it a bit. What is the difference between what you would call a standard grief response and a prolonged one? Is there an amount of time that is associated with grieving? I know it varies so much from person to person.

Yeah, there actually is. It was just in the past few years that the DSM, our diagnostic manual in psychology in the US, actually added on a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder. Actually, we have very specific criteria. I can talk about the debate around this later because a lot of people are saying, Hey, why are we pathologizing any grief But a prolonged grief response is a series of these kinds of responses I talked about that last for 12 months or longer after losing the loved one. It does give this... And grief, arguably, again, it can go on for the rest of your life. But it's the intensity and the disruptiveness of those responses to your life that this diagnosis is trying to call out. For 12 months or beyond after the death, you have to have either persistent yearning, intense sorrow, preoccupation, all of the thinking about the circumstances of the death all the time, every day, almost without a break. That's one part of it. You can see that that is pretty enduring. But then the second part is also really important that for 12 months or after, almost every day, you have to have some of these other...

You don't believe that you've lost this loved one. You wake up every morning, even after a year, and it's like, Oh, wait, and you remember again. Or desiring to die, to be with a loved one. Again, this isn't just an occasional experience. It's almost every day to these very powerful levels. These experiences have to get in the way of you living your life. You can't get back to work. You're isolating yourself at home and you're not building new connections. It also isn't consistent with maybe a traditional, either a religious or cultural practice. Maybe in some context, it's after the year that you're supposed to continue to express some experiences. So there's no cultural context or explanation for it either. That's what might lead a psychologist or psychiatrist to actually diagnose prolonged grief disorder.

Yeah. Have you found or researched any proven strategies for mitigating that disruptiveness that you've described?

Yeah. There are really some great therapeutic approaches that can help people, whether they're experiencing experiencing this prolonged grief or just really natural and expected grief, because the key is this yearning and this difficulty when you struggle with grief to really accept that this loved one has been lost. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy is a very research-supported approach that we have for a lot of mental health problems. But in grief, what you see CBT really trying to do is to help people identify patterns of thought, habits of thinking that have actually started to become distorted over time. That's not to say that there's something broken in the person and how they're thinking, but say you've lost a loved one and you start to believe that you'll never be able to love again or that you being around other people puts them at risk, that it's like you're the bad luck omen. Or sometimes it's these beliefs that can even be very subconscious, but really are driving some of this debilitating grief. So CBT tries to identify those kinds of beliefs and thinking. It also can help people cope with secondary depression or anxiety or other kinds of mental health experiences that bereaved adults experience.

There's another therapy that's a really wonderful therapeutic approach that emerged out of CBT, but it's quite unique. It's called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Act. Here, the key is that there's a belief throughout psychology that when we resist and deny and avoid our uncomfortable pain feelings, it actually makes them grow worse, and it prevents us from developing coping strategies. The key focus of act is to really help people come face to face with the reality of their grief, and to whatever degree they can accept this loss so that they can start to figure out ways to cope and move on. Because often when we get stuck in prolonged grief, part of it is that we're just not accepting the feelings that we have as well as the reality of the loss.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was going to ask you specifically about that resisting and denying, which might be common ways that people try to deal with their grief, try to, especially if they are founders of a company, might say, I'm just going to set this aside right now and dive into my work. I have a specific case I wanted to talk to you about. Last week on our podcast, we spoke with the two cofounders of the Slumu Institute. Their names are Karen Robinowitz and Sarah Schiller. Now, this business they've created is one that's full of joy. They literally make, sell, and display slime for a living. Do you know this stuff?

I am well-acquainted. I have a 12-year-old daughter. I am well-acquainted with the Slumu Institute. We have visited it ourselves as a matter of fact. Oh, wow. Yes, it's wonderful.

It's great. It's a very joyful place, but this business was founded out of grief. Karen had lost her husband while they were already going through a separation. He died. Sarah's husband had had a debilitating stroke. They were already parents of a daughter who has a rare disease that requires a a lot of care, special care and treatment. Karen described to us, she described her grief as this deep and dark depression that lasted months and months. She left her job. She stayed cooped up at home. She had a very dark period, and it lost another family member during it. So this grief was pervasive of her life. And then a friend's daughter brought some slime into her house, and she meditated with it for hours and played with it. And it was such a contrast, it seemed, to that time period that she had just been through, that it almost made the epiphany, this could be a business, a little brighter to her, a little more profound. Is that possible, that contrast being heightened there?

I love that story so much. What it makes me think of in terms of the grief process is when you have a loss of this magnitude, especially if there are complexities. So maybe if there's this grief that's unresolved, there's this grief with guilt, there's all this complexity velocity, and then there's other challenges that are happening at the same time. It becomes very complicated. Part of what happens in your view of your past is you start to feel that you're... Sometimes people can feel cursed or that the universe or whatever that is that they believe in that's greater than themselves. It's how can I depend on anything? That uncertainty. Then in their future thinking, it's really difficult to start picturing that future and envisioning telling the story of a future that can move beyond the grief. The fact that the slime was brought into the home and there was this inspiration, this spark, I could see that being really a great example of what people sometimes try to do in therapy for grief, which is to find an activity, a goal, a relationship, something that you can then start to tell a new story of your life around that actually creates a view of the future.

Because if you've lost a loved one, you are picturing a future with that loved one, and all of a sudden, that whole story has been pulled out from under your feet. I think that this ability of this founder, it's not even pivoting, it's transforming. Transforming that experience into something that also is bringing joy to other people. I think that is just a beautiful and perfect example of how we can transform some of the worst pain in our life into something impactful.

Yeah, Yeah. So creating a new view of the future, writing a new story, even beginning to think like that is helpful in coping. That might seem to suggest that starting a business while you are grieving is maybe not the worst idea in the world, or is it? Everyone's grief is different. That's a different- That's a core question I'm trying to get to here, and I just got a spark of maybe it is- I'm an entrepreneur as well, and starting a business is really hard.

Then you start neglecting your well-being. There's a high risk of that. At the same time, the best founders we know are mission-driven founders. If they are at a point in their life where they have the context and the scaffolding to support being able to do something as hard as build a business. On top of that, you have this energizing mission. It's like this is you're building a new future, not just for the world you're creating with this new business, but for yourself. I think I agree with you. I think that But under some circumstances, it could be just the right thing to jump in. And certainly don't feel that you can't do it because you're grieving. Never put that barrier up for yourself.

Yeah, I like that. Sloomo, in particular, It is this business that these founders poured their energies into building because of the benefits that they had gotten out of it themselves. They felt at peace. They felt meditative. They felt joy. And they both said to me that they want to, at this stage of their life being doing something every day that makes them happy. I love that. Maybe it's coping mechanism, maybe it is just knowing yourself and what is good for you. But can you talk about joy and grief? Are they on a stable spectrum, or can they coexist? Can they not coexist? What's the psych view of joy and grief?

Joy is good. Joy is good. But here's the interesting thing. No mental health professional worth their salt, will tell you that the definition of mental health is the presence of joy or happiness. Just as we won't tell you that the definition of mental health is the absence of suffering. Mental health is the ability to engage in the inevitable struggle of being human and to work through it more often than you avoid it or cut off from living as a way of coping. I think joy is a wonderful antidote to grief. If you can muster that and stimulate that in your life, it can coexist with grief. So you still will carry that grief. Grief doesn't just disappear. But what the existence of joy tells us is that we can hold all these feelings, and that the solution to grief is not to eradicate it, but rather to have it exist with other feelings. Honestly, it's a really broader approach that I really advocate for when it comes to all sorts of painful emotions, like anxiety, like depression. We often feel that, Oh, if we feel anxiety or sadness or depression, we have to eradicate that feeling to be mentally healthy.

But that is only going to get us in trouble because whatever we try to suffocate just grows back stronger. I think this notion of I'm working through the grief, but I can also have joy is great. What about if we just go for contentment sometimes? We often hold ourselves to this standard. People talk about it as toxic positivity, but I think it's true. Maybe it's, yeah, go for joy, but also know that if you're going for feeling pretty good, you're also doing well. That's a great... We think that contentment is only for cows, but I think contentment is underrated, frankly.

Great. Isn't that a very Finnish way of being? Why strive for excellence when it's so hard to just be average?

Be average? I can be great. Just don't be perfect. Don't go for perfect. Go for pretty darn good, and maybe sometimes excellent, but average is good, too.

What you're saying, it sounds like part of mental health is a living in your feelings and building the resilience to be able to do so regardless of the extremes they take. Are there some tools that you can share for building that resilience, especially for folks who have a lot of other demands in their lives, like founders of companies or executives?

Yes. And there are a lot of great tools out there. There are actually a million tools, and we're inundated with them all the time.

Do we use them? Do we employ them?

Do we use I want to make a meta comment, though, on these tools before I share a few. And the meta comment, and this is something we founders really struggle with, too. Everything about business is about optimization. It's about efficiency. It's about how little do you invest in, how much profit can you get out? We see the triumph of this optimization mindset in places like Silicon Valley and these hugely successful companies. But I think, unfortunately, we started to apply this optimization mindset to our mental health and well-being. Now it becomes almost like a hamster wheel of, I better be totally functioning at top, and I'm going to start eating. I'm going to start consuming soylent because eating is such a waste of time. I better meditate and do my...

Oh, yeah. People obsess over sleep times so much so that it ends up disrupting their ability to actually sleep.

A hundred %. I think that one thing that I can say on the very high, as I said, the meta level is if you're on a hamster wheel, not just a work and nose to the grindstone, but you're also on a hamster wheel of well-being, you need to step off. A framework for thinking about the kinds of things we can do to step off that hamster wheels, I like to talk about mental health being a hiking trail, actually, much more so than a hamster wheel. Part of that metaphor, what I think works about that, is this idea that when we're on a hiking trail, we never actually, when we're on a hike, always go for the quickest path. Sometimes there's deep work. There's walking the longer way around so that we actually have time to actually observe what's around us. There's this like, Oh, this is a muddy part of the path, but I'm not going to just stop hiking because it's muddy. I'm actually going to walk a little more carefully But I'm going to persist on and say yes and to whatever this path is throwing my way, because who knows what I'll discover when I take that approach.

I think that's one thing is when you think about your well-being and coping with feelings like grief, working through tough emotions. I think part of it is to not be optimization mindset about it, to really think about, I need to lean into this feeling and give myself some time, because that's where power is, actually. It's not owning me. I am actually making choices to own it, even if I'm falling down sometimes and failing sometimes.

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Yeah, that's so interesting. You have to make this space for yourself to be in your whatever ex-emotion grief, right? Yeah. That's interesting.

It's not that I think we need a mental health day every week. That's great. Mental health days are great, but I think we've almost started to... They mean nothing now. Just like, I'm a little stressed. I better take a mental health day. Well, what are you doing on that mental health day? Are you binge watching Netflix and having a really nice Negroni cocktail, which that might have been a personal experience talking right there. Or yes, maybe you're doing that, but maybe you're also actually taking time to journal about what you're experiencing. Maybe you know yourself and you're like, If I stay in all day, I'm actually going to tune out of my feelings. I'm going to go on that hike or that walk and connect with something greater than me, or I'm going to reach out to my therapist or that friend that I know will actually help me be more myself. Again, it's not that we don't ever need to escape from painful feelings. We also have to give ourselves a break. But if we think about that flexibility to be with and then to let go of these feelings, I think that's a really good approach that then we can plug in all of that great self-help and therapeutic research and tips that are out there.

We all know about mindfulness. We all know about breathing. We all know about how to work through some of our distorted thinking about our futures. We know those things, but how do we have a map of the territory about how to plug in all those tips? The first step is leaning into and accepting those feelings.

Right. Maybe not everything has a formula.

Not everything has a formula. It's okay to do less. I mean, in some ways, with this optimization mindset, we're either trying way too hard or it seems like perfection is the only goal, and so we give up. If we find ourselves either running ourselves ragged with our wellness routine or being like, F it, this isn't going to work at all, that's another time we know that I need to give myself a little more flexibility. That's a broad tip, so to speak, but I think it's a mindset that we can all cultivate.

I think that's really smart. So I'm not sure if you have a... Do you have a co founder in your business?

Yes, Raj Amin. I'm the co founder and chief science officer, and Raj is the CEO.

I have a co founder question. So the Sloom of Founders, I think they were really able to help each other, not only through the bonding over slime, but supporting each other, emotionally. But it seems to go against this common advice that I hear when I'm reporting on businesses, which is don't start a company with your friend. So could you talk a little bit about maybe building the right amount of personal emotional support into a workplace or a relationship that also involves working together?

Yes. I can speak about this personally because Raj is one of my oldest friends, as a matter of fact. He was my husband's one of his best friends from college. We've known each other for decades, and then we did decide to build a business together. There are definitely challenges because you have this personal relationship with all its strengths and weaknesses and all of its parts and all of its history on top of the complexity of the co founder relationship. But really, I think some key... And Raj is going to be like, Hey, do we do all those steps? We're going to talk about this later. We better walk the talk. But I think one thing that I know that science tells us, but also from personal experience, is it's really important to have conversations before something becomes a problem, both in terms of business challenges that you're just struggling with and you're like, Let me just sweep that under the rug until... You You don't want to wait for those things to blow up, and you don't want your emotional complexities. You don't want to wait till they blow up to get in front of them.

The truth is when you talk about things earlier rather than later, and maybe it's just this feeling and you're not even sure what to say about it, it's actually easier to talk about it earlier because it helps you not be too defensive. It's just you're having this open dialog about something that's challenging for you. I think one big key to being friends is to really have those conversations earlier. You also want to set, I think, some ground rules earlier, too, around expectations because when you're friends, you think you know everything about each other. You might have habits that you assume. You just have all these assumptions, pre-existing patterns in your relationship. It's all the more important, therefore, to talk about things like, We're starting this business together. We have some expectations around putting our money in maybe, or when do we call it off? Or there could be all sorts of things that cofounders have to think about. Have those conversations from the very beginning. You have to learn to argue well in a way rather than argue less. Then when you're in that earlier stage, too, it's going to be much easier when you anticipate the problems and the arguments to really listen deeply to each other.

It's when we listen deeply to each other that we can start to see, Oh, wait a second. You're starting to resent this thing that's happening, and I didn't even know it was happening, and I'm so glad I know about it now. I think that being really in front of and proactive instead of reactive is really important.

Are there any personal traits or things that you're going through or emotions that may not be super apparent on the surface that you should proactively bring up with a co founder or even a good friend that might help them know how to communicate with you?

Individual traits needs of the person or that you're seeing? Yeah.

Or if you're having those initial conversations with your co founder and you're talking about these big topics, at what point do we give up the company? At what point are we going to sell the company? How much finance are we putting in? Here's how to talk to me? Here are things you need to know about me as a person. Is there a realm of those things that's in the psychological or emotional realm that you should bring up proactively?

One thing that leaps to mind is we have all these sorts personality differences in how we like to cope with things. I'm the type of person, for example, that loves to chip away at big problems. I do not like the last minute prep, the adrenaline rush. That's not how I work. There's this, if you know that there's a style of coping with challenge where you don't like to be surprised out of left field, and it's going to trigger you or it's going to set you off. But your friend is exactly the type of person who loves to fly by the seat of their pants. That can be great that you can be complementary. But that coping style or planning style, that can start to blow up at different tense points in a company's evolution. I think being really clear on that and not just griping at each other every once in a while when they finally push your button hard enough. I think that stylistic difference can implode a bit. I also think in the classic optimism-pessimism difference. There's a classic introvert-extrovert. These are sometimes too all-inclusive in some ways. But if you understand where your co founder falls in those categories, you can also leverage that.

I mean, you can know, listen, I'm the optimist, and I'm going to maybe take some crazy chances or go for it even when all signals are stopped. But you know your pessimistic co founder is going to be more tuned in to some of the early warning signs. To actually articulate that and then say, Hey, every time I'm faced with a decision like this, we're going to be in lockstep with weighing in with each other so we find the perfect middle ground. Having and thinking of those differences as strengths, I think, is also a way to become more comfortable. Even if they are real differences, you can really think of each of yourself as having a superpower that you can work together Yeah.

And what about folks who don't have a co founder or really don't have a support system in place when they are suddenly experiencing something like grief? What advice would you give to a person like that?

I think building a support system ASAP is really important, and not just an emotional support system, which, yes, absolutely. Being alone in grief as much as it's tempting because it can be a very isolating feeling, and people often forget that grief doesn't just stop two days after the funeral. You can be tempted to withdraw. But finding those people for emotional support, at least to connect with them, is important. I think in business, finding mentors who are very growth mindset oriented, who really understand... I say growth mindset oriented because people who are all about outcomes, optimizing, and they might have less ability to understand that grief is not something you just have to turn off so that you can perform. That actually the most powerful transformation of grief, which can, as we said, actually motivate incredible innovation or these intuitive leaps or inspiration. When you actually think of that as part of a process instead of a barrier to some productivity milestone. I think those are the mentors who can really help you see the times, the opportunities, as well as the times that you need to be able to not go at full throttle and really give you some external advice and some objective advice about it.

That's wonderful, Tracy. Well, thank you so much for this conversation today. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Christine.

I really enjoyed it.

That's all for today's episode of From the Ground Up.

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