Two Emotional Failure Modes: Reactivity and Paralysis
In the last chapter, we explored the anatomy of your psychology - a system made up of beliefs, thoughts, and emotions that drive our actions. In the high-pressure, emotionally intense, resource-constrained world of startups, the part of founder psychology I see most commonly thrown out of alignment in this system is emotion. When founders haven’t yet developed the skills to work with their emotions, those feelings don’t quietly recede into the background - they take over, because the stress of running a startup never fades - it compounds.
I can’t count the number of founders who have told me they wanted to find a way to “manage,” “control,” or “get rid of” their feelings. And this makes sense - when emotions feel overwhelming, it’s easy to assume they’re the problem. But they’re not. What actually derails founders are two emotional failure modes that stem from a lack of skill in processing and integrating the intense and varied emotions that are a normal part of every founder’s daily experience.
Founders commonly believe their emotions are a problem because they get stuck in one of two emotional failure modes: reactivity or paralysis.
The two most common failure modes I see are reactivity and paralysis. In reactivity, emotion hijacks your psychology and drives impulsive, unstrategic, thoughtless action. In paralysis, emotion builds to a breaking point and essentially freezes you in place while responsibilities pile up. In both failure modes, founders lose access to strategic thought, intentional choice, and clear execution. When your emotions are so scrambled that you can’t think clearly or move forward, your startup stalls with you.
I want you to remember: Your emotions aren’t the problem. But startups are so emotionally intense that an underdeveloped emotional toolkit will become one - either now or later. The good news? These failure modes are optional. Leave them for your competitors. When you learn how to bring your thoughts back online and balance them with your feelings, you restore psychological integrity and bring your full system back online - with all the clarity and direction it unlocks for you. Once you can recognize how these failure modes feel and operate within your psychology, you can shift them.
Let’s explore reactivity.
Emotional Failure Mode #1: Reactivity
One emotional failure mode is reactivity.
Reactivity happens when emotion becomes so intense that it outpaces a founder’s emotional skill and overrides thought. It’s what happens when founders act on what they feel, without stopping to think.
When intense feelings aren’t named or processed, they hijack your behavior. Your psychology gets stuck in an emotion → action → emotion → action loop, where emotions drive impulsive, unstrategic, and often chaotic responses. There’s no pause. No perspective. No choice.
In this state, your psychology is all emotion and no thought. The part of your brain responsible for logic, reason, and problem-solving - the prefrontal cortex - goes offline. And your fear center, the amygdala, takes over. The amygdala isn’t capable of long-term strategic thinking. Its job is to scan for danger and keep you alive. You don’t want your amygdala running your startup, with your thinking brain in the backseat.
I see this all the time: brilliant founders doing ten things at once, none of them well. Caught in urgency. Triggered by stress. Jumping in to say something or fix something even if it’s not their priority. Reacting instead of choosing. This isn’t because they don’t know what matters - it’s because they’re not connected to the part of themselves that can act on that knowing.
The solution isn’t to push harder. It’s to slow down - just enough to bring your brain back online. Pausing breaks the reactivity loop. It gives you space to think about what you’re doing, and the capacity to work with your feelings instead of being run by them. Thought returns. Focus returns. Choice returns. And with it, execution becomes deliberate and strategic again. At first, this might feel like a loss of speed. But it’s how you stop wasting time fixing the messes that reactivity creates. And it’s how you realign your energy with what matters most.
So if you find yourself feeling like a chicken with its head cut off, try this:
Stop. Breathe. Drop into your body. Name what you’re feeling. Ask what you need. Then - and only then - decide what comes next.
In a startup, there will always be more work than any one human can do - even one as impressive as you. You don’t need to do it all. You need to do what matters - with clarity, presence, and direction.
Try building check-ins into your workflow to make sure your brain’s still online. Set a timer every few hours or add five-minute buffers between meetings in which you can direct a few simple questions to your brain:
“How am I feeling right now?”
“What do I need?”
“How can I take care of what I’m feeling?”
“Is what I’m doing aligned with what matters most?”
These practices may seem small, but they add up. They recruit your brain back into your day, rebalancing your thought with your emotions and actions - and help you escape the reactivity trap.
Founders scale themselves when they learn to think and feel — before they act.
Emotional Failure Mode #2: Paralysis
Paralysis is the second emotional failure mode. It’s just as common - and just as costly - as reactivity.
Where reactivity is all emotion and action with no thought, paralysis is all emotion with no action and no thought. It’s a psychological shutdown. A collapse. A full-system freeze.
Paralysis happens when emotion builds to a level so intense or prolonged that your psychology can no longer metabolize it. Instead of moving through you, that emotional energy just sits - heavy, unprocessed, and stuck. Your body is flooded. Your brain is offline. And everything starts to feel impossible.
When founders don’t know how to process what they’re feeling, the emotions don’t disappear. They stay in the body. And if they’re intense and durable enough, they crystallize into secondary emotions that are even harder to work with.
Unprocessed frustration crystallizes into resentment - and eats away at your relationships.
Unprocessed fear warps your thinking and distorts your perception. It can make you numb to existential threats - or see everything as one. Neither perspective is useful, because neither is real. And if you aren’t operating in reality, you won’t win.
Unprocessed uncertainty turns into anxiety, which blocks access to confidence and forward motion.
Unprocessed disconnection from purpose or passion hardens into burnout - where even basic tasks feel insurmountable.
Founders living in paralysis need to take care of their mental health. It is impossible to scale yourself - to learn the new skills your startup demands - when your psychology is dominated by these unprocessed emotions. More often than not, the startup must be deprioritized so the founder can heal and get back to healthy functioning. This is why paralysis is so dangerous - and so worth avoiding.
Paralysis doesn’t just shut down your execution. It corrupts your entire operating system. When intensely negative, unprocessed emotions sit stagnant in your psychology, they corrode the beliefs underneath them. When your beliefs are bathed in rage, hopelessness, resentment, and fear, your beliefs about yourself start to twist. You may begin to believe that you’re incompetent, incapable, or fundamentally broken - even when none of that is true.
Once these corrupted beliefs form, the thoughts that arise from them become unreliable. Founders lose the ability to think rationally or to cleanly analyze their decisions. The lens they’re using to view the world is distorted, so any action a founder takes out of paralysis is unlikely to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, the outcomes of those actions reinforce the founder’s corrupted belief system, validate their irrational emotions, and reinforce their warped thinking. Put differently, the warped actions this founder takes will reinforce the distorted story they’re telling themselves.
This is what makes paralysis so destructive. Not just because of what it blocks you from doing - but because of how it rewrites your internal narrative. This self-generated nightmare is the failure mode to end all failure modes - and it’s also really sad. When a founder’s psychology is weaponized against itself, their startup doesn't stand much of a chance.
If any of this feels familiar, you’re not alone. Many of the strongest founders I know have dipped into paralysis at some point. It’s painful - but it’s not permanent. Catch it early by learning to process your emotions and you'll have the best chance of getting back to clarity. Think of paralysis as a side quest intended to test the outer bounds of your strength.
The way out of paralysis is processing.
Founders who scale themselves don’t just push through paralysis. They learn how to stay in relationship with their emotions as they arise - before they accumulate into something overwhelming.
They develop simple, repeatable ways to name what they’re feeling, reflect on what it might point to, and take small steps to move through it.
This is what emotional processing looks like:
Pause to recognize what you’re feeling.
Allow yourself to experience the emotion.
Investigate whether it carries any helpful signal.
Choose to act with that new information - or not.
Then take one small step forward — not from pressure, but from alignment.
You don’t need to solve everything at once. You just need to keep your system balanced and moving. Imagine that your psychology is like a pot of pasta kept on a rolling boil. Stir it at regular intervals - or it will boil over.
And if you’re deep in paralysis - stuck, not delivering, feeling hopeless, incapable, or broken - this is one of the few times I’ll tell you: get help. Long-term paralysis creates a reality distortion field. It becomes hard to help yourself, because your perception is too warped to accept what others are telling you:
Whatever is happening, this isn’t the end of the world. You are okay. You can still do this - you can achieve what you’d like to achieve. You are capable. You have the skills, smarts, and ability to accomplish great things. What you’re experiencing right now doesn’t define you - unless you let it. There is greatness in you, and out ahead of you.
All of this is true. If you can’t believe it yet - hold onto it anyway. Get the support you need to clear your thinking, clean your lenses, and restore your emotions back to their natural state of movement and vibrance. Your beliefs about yourself will be the slowest to shift - but when they do, there is no more resilient founder than the one who looked a demon in the face who told them, “No you can’t” and answered, resolutely, “Yes I can” - and began again from there.
Founders scale themselves by learning to process their emotions quickly and efficiently — before they crystallize into something harder to move through.
These emotional failure modes aren’t endpoints. They’re inflection points.
I’ve seen these patterns across thousands of startup founders. It’s rare that I speak with one who isn’t navigating some version of reactivity or paralysis. The founders who learn how to get unstuck and move through these patterns quickly are the ones whose startups scale. They build stronger relationships. They make better decisions, more consistently. And ultimately, they create better products and more impactful cultures - because they retain access to their cognitive capacity regardless of how wildly the emotional roller coaster of their day is swinging.
It’s not that the best founders avoid reactivity or paralysis altogether. It’s that they’ve developed the capacity to recognize what’s happening, to stay in relationship with what they’re feeling, and to make clear, aligned choices about how to move forward. They include emotion in their workflow - not as something to “manage, “control,” or “get rid of,” but as a source of clarity, depth, and direction.
That’s the opportunity embedded in these failure modes: Each one is a built-in inflection point, offering you the chance to develop psychological skill and build emotional resilience. And because startups are emotionally intense by nature, you’ll be offered these opportunities again and again. That’s not a flaw of the system - it’s a feature you can use to your advantage.
Each of these moments is a chance to grow your capacity and return to psychological clarity as a wiser, more focused version of yourself.
This is how founders scale themselves. Not by avoiding these emotional failure modes - by becoming stronger because of them.
