How time away from work strengthens your resilience

The first time I took a real break from my company, I didn’t do it out of choice. I did it because I had no choice. My body gave me the kind of warning you can’t argue with: dizzy spells that turned into blackouts, an inbox I couldn’t face opening, and a level of irritability that made my own team start avoiding me. I told myself I could push through—it was just a busy season, just a few more deals to close, just one last product sprint. But when your own co-founder sits you down and says, “If you keep going like this, you’re going to break something you can’t fix,” you stop pretending it’s fine.

Founders are wired for endurance. We’ll sit through red-eye flights, survive on airport coffee, and sleep in hotel conference rooms if that’s what the quarter demands. We tell ourselves that rest will come later, after we’ve hit a certain revenue number or closed a particular funding round. The problem is that “later” keeps moving. We forget that resilience isn’t just the ability to withstand stress—it’s the capacity to recover from it. And recovery doesn’t happen in the margins of our calendar.

The break I took wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t a month on a tropical island or a silent meditation retreat in the mountains. It was two weeks at home, where my main accomplishments were catching up on sleep, cooking my own meals, and reading something that wasn’t a pitch deck or an investor update. The first few days felt strange—like I was skipping class and waiting for someone to call me out. But around day five, I noticed something: my thoughts stopped racing. I could sit through a meal without checking my phone. I started thinking about my business not in terms of what was broken, but in terms of what was possible.

This is the part we don’t talk about enough in founder circles: how time away can sharpen your decision-making in a way constant grind never will. When you’re in the weeds every day, you lose perspective. Every problem feels urgent, every fire feels like it will burn down the whole house. Stepping back doesn’t make the problems go away—but it does recalibrate your sense of proportion. You can see which issues are structural and which are just noise. That clarity alone is worth the discomfort of stepping away.

Of course, the discomfort is real. The fear of missing out isn’t just a social media thing—it’s deeply baked into the founder psyche. We think if we’re not in the room, the deal will fall through. If we’re not on the call, the client will leave. If we’re not watching the dashboard, the metrics will collapse. That level of control might get you through the earliest days of your startup, but it’s also what makes you brittle. Because when you do eventually have to step away—and you will—it’s not just you that suffers. Your team will too, if you’ve trained them to rely on your constant presence.

That’s why taking time off is more than self-care. It’s leadership development. When you step back, you force your team to step forward. You give them space to make decisions without running them past you. You find out who’s ready for more responsibility and who’s been coasting. You also find out where your processes are unclear, because nothing exposes a weak system like the person who usually plugs the gaps suddenly disappearing.

The first time I took that break, I came back to a company that had survived without me—and in some ways, had run better. Some decisions were made faster. Some client issues were resolved without escalation. My team had discovered they could do more than they thought, and I had to confront the fact that I’d been holding on to control for my own comfort, not the company’s. It was a humbling realization, but it was also liberating.

There’s a deeper resilience that comes from this—not just personal stamina, but organizational resilience. A company that can function without its founder for a few weeks is a company that can withstand bigger shocks: a funding delay, a market downturn, even a founder transition. That’s the kind of resilience investors quietly look for, even if they don’t put it in the term sheet.

I won’t pretend that taking time off is easy, especially if you’re in the middle of a growth spurt or fighting for survival. But it’s exactly in those moments that you need it most. Resilience isn’t built in calm waters—it’s built in how you recover during the storm. If you wait until everything is stable, you’ll be waiting forever.

The key is to start small. Your first break doesn’t have to be a long one. It can be a long weekend where you actually log off, or a midweek day with no meetings, no Slack, and no email. The important thing is to be intentional about it—and to resist the urge to sneak work in “just to stay on top of things.” Those little check-ins are like keeping one foot in the door; you never actually leave, so you never actually rest.

When you do it right, the benefits show up in ways you don’t expect. Your tolerance for frustration goes up. You start spotting patterns in problems that used to feel random. You notice the ideas that keep resurfacing when your mind isn’t crammed with urgent tasks. You also become a better listener, because you’re not constantly thinking about the next thing you have to do. That kind of presence is rare in leadership, and people feel it.

After that first forced break, I made rest a recurring part of my operating rhythm. Twice a year, I disappear for at least a week. I give my leadership team clear ownership over what needs to happen in my absence. I tell clients in advance. I even set up my email auto-reply in a way that directs people to the right person, instead of promising I’ll “check periodically.” And every time I come back, I see something new—either in the business or in myself—that I would have missed if I’d stayed glued to the grind.

The irony is that my company has grown faster since I started taking these breaks. Not because I work harder when I return, but because I work smarter. I say no more often. I see the difference between a genuine opportunity and a distraction dressed up as one. I’m more willing to cut projects that don’t serve the bigger picture, even if we’ve already invested time in them. That’s the kind of decision-making you can’t fake—and you can’t sustain without recovery.

Resilience isn’t a personality trait you’re born with. It’s a capacity you build. And like any capacity, it needs cycles: stress, recovery, adaptation. In the gym, we call it training. In startups, we call it execution. But the principle is the same—without recovery, all you’re doing is breaking yourself down.

If you’re reading this and thinking you can’t afford to take time off, I understand. I thought the same thing. But I’d argue you can’t afford not to. The question isn’t whether your business can survive without you for a short period—it’s whether it can survive if you burn out and disappear for a long one. Taking time off now is how you make sure it’s the former, not the latter.

When I talk to early-stage founders now, I tell them this: design your business so you can walk away for a week and come back to something that’s not on fire. That means delegating before you think you’re ready. That means documenting processes you think you’ll never forget. That means trusting your people to step up, and letting them feel the weight of that trust. It’s not easy. It’s not comfortable. But neither is resilience.

The truth is, resilience isn’t built in the moments you power through. It’s built in the moments you step back, let others take the wheel, and trust that the system you’ve built will hold. And if it doesn’t? Then you’ve just been given the most useful feedback you could get—not about your team, but about your leadership.

I wish I’d learned that before my body forced me to. But sometimes the only way we learn the value of rest is by hitting the wall. If you can avoid that lesson the hard way, do it. Book the time. Leave the laptop. Trust the team. Let the business breathe without you.

Because when you return, you won’t just be rested—you’ll be more resilient. And so will the company you’ve built.