How I Keep My Sanity While Building a Startup

Let's talk about something nobody in tech wants to admit: building a startup will break your mind if you let it.

I'm not being dramatic. I've been there. Five years ago, I'd lost every meaning in life. It didn't make sense to continue. That's not a metaphor.

Today I run NeoSapien, a conversation intelligence company. We raised from Shark Tank India, and we're scaling toward Series A. I work six days a week, sleep at 2 AM, and manage an 11-person team building hardware, firmware, and AI infrastructure simultaneously.

And I'm sane. Mostly. On good days. Not because I figured out some hack. Because I treat sanity like I treat shipping product: as a system that requires daily maintenance and honest debugging.

Here's what actually works.

Your Body is the Only Thing That's Always Present

When you're building something, your consciousness lives in abstractions. You're in meetings, in code, in pitch decks. Everywhere except your body. This is where suffering starts.

I learned this the hard way. During our worst shipping crunch, I was sleeping at 4-5 AM, back at 9-10 AM. The body keeps score. Your nervous system gets dysregulated. Anxiety creeps in. Then you're fighting two battles: the external one and the internal one.

My fix is stupidly simple. Pull-ups, dips, squats. Minimal but consistent. I have a black belt in karate and a national silver medal, but the daily practice isn't about performance. It's about resetting my nervous system through physical effort.

When you do a pull-up, you can't think about your product roadmap. When you're holding a plank, you can't worry about investor meetings. Your mind has no choice but to come back to the present.

Breathwork is a Control Interface for Your Nervous System

I do 10-20 minutes of what most people call "meditation" but is technically a mix of breathwork (pranayam) and body scan. I told people for years I meditate daily. Turns out I was doing breathwork. The rebranding was humbling. Anyway: I scan from head to toes, notice sensations without judgment, and when my focus drifts, I bring it back. That's it.

Here's why breath matters from first principles: unlike your heartbeat or digestion, you can consciously control your breath. It's a direct bridge between your autonomic and conscious nervous systems. It's your only leverage point.

Box Breathing for Acute Stress

Inhale 4 counts, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4. Repeat four times. Before important calls, before tense meetings. Your cortisol drops within 60 seconds. This is neuroscience, not mysticism.

Extended Exhale for Calm

Inhale naturally for 4 counts, exhale slowly for 8. The longer exhale activates your vagus nerve. Two to three minutes of this and your entire state shifts. A friend of mine who's building health tech is literally measuring this with IMU sensors, quantifying how breathing patterns change mental state in real time.

Om Chanting as Nervous System Hack

I chant Om namah shivaya (ॐ नमः शिवाय) regularly. Yes, the startup founder chants Sanskrit mantras. I know how that reads on a tech blog. But here's the thing: the vibration of "Om" naturally extends your exhale, engages your vagus nerve, and the repetition creates a meditative anchor. Your nervous system synchronizes with the rhythm. It works whether or not you believe in it, which is my favorite kind of practice.

The mantra means "I bow to Shiva," the destroyer of ego. When you chant it with that intention, you're not just doing a breathing exercise. You're training your mind to let go of the self-importance that causes most of your suffering. That's the difference between breathwork and pranayam: the intentionality.

Thoughts Are Data, Not Directives

There's a realization that changed everything for me: "These thoughts are not me and they cannot affect me."

It sounds simple. It took years to actually internalize. I discovered Buddhist philosophy during a particularly difficult period in college, and the concept of dependent origination hit me like a freight train.

Here's why this matters practically. You have a thought: "I'm failing as a founder." Your mind treats this thought as truth. This triggers anxiety, which triggers self-doubt, which confirms the thought. You're stuck in a loop.

The fix: recognize that thoughts arise dependently. When you notice you're caught in a thought-loop, gently return to the breath. You're training your mind to notice that it's thinking, rather than becoming the thought.

This is freedom. And it's hard. At first, your mind will feel more chaotic when you sit with it. Good. You're noticing the chaos that was always there.

Buddha ultimately rejected concepts, including Buddhism itself. Words are ultimately empty. Absolute truth can only be experienced, not conceptually understood. The middle path (Mulamadhyamakakarika) teaches you not to get lost in the map and forget the territory.

Watching Your Own Mind

All of these practices, body scan, breathwork, mantra, point to one thing: developing the capacity to observe your own mind without being consumed by it.

There's a difference between meditating for calm and meditating for insight. Calm is the entry point. Insight is the destination.

The Observer and the Observed

In Kashmir Shaivism, there's a concept called pratibimba, the reflection. It's the ability to see yourself as both the actor and the observer. You're the one having the experience, and simultaneously the one watching yourself have the experience.

This isn't intellectual gymnastics. It's something you can train. During meditation, there are moments where thoughts just stop. Not because you forced them out, but because the gap between thoughts widens on its own. Gradually, there are no thoughts anymore, and there's just... nothing. Pure awareness without content.

This experience, even briefly, shows you something profound: the mind doesn't need to be busy. Consciousness can rest. And once you know that, the anxiety that you "should be doing something" starts to dissolve. Then your phone buzzes and you're back in the chaos. But still. You tasted the silence. That changes things.

Non-Attachment to States

Here's the trap most people fall into: they meditate, feel peaceful, and then chase that feeling. Congratulations, your ego just learned to meditate. It's still running the show, it just has better branding now.

The actual practice is noticing how that peace arises, peaks, and fades. All states are temporary. Even meditative ones. The freedom isn't in holding onto any particular state. It's in recognizing that all states arise and pass, and that you are the awareness in which they appear.

The Shiva Sutras put it directly: even samadhi without support is empty. The goal isn't the blissful state. The goal is recognizing that all states are waves on the same ocean.

Love as a Practice, Not a Feeling

Here's something that doesn't show up in most founder playbooks: unconditional love is a sanity practice.

I don't mean the greeting-card version. I mean love as a decision. A daily choice you make regardless of what you get in return. Give first, then you receive.

I've been with my girlfriend for four years. Early on, we made a simple decision: love isn't transactional. You don't withhold it because the other person isn't giving enough. You don't keep score. You just give.

This sounds like relationship advice, but it's actually about your nervous system. When you stop approaching people from neediness or desperation, when you stop keeping a mental ledger of who owes you what, something shifts. You stop burning cognitive cycles on resentment and expectation. That energy becomes available for everything else.

When you don't approach relationships from desperation, you create freedom for the other person. That freedom is rare and valuable. Most people don't have someone like this in their life. And giving that freedom actually attracts love rather than pushing it away.

Be a Source of Light

The practical expression is simple: be a source of light in other people's lives. Not in a performative way. In the way where you show up during someone's difficult times without demanding anything. Where you give first. Where you make the people around you feel seen.

Give hatred, receive hatred. Give love, receive love. It's not mysticism. It's just how human systems work.

Your partner is not your teacher, not your guru. They are your partner. Partners help each other become their best selves. If they truly want the best for you, they'll support your personal goals. And if someone doesn't appreciate your love, that's their loss, not your duty to fix. You keep giving anyway. Not out of weakness, but because that's who you chose to be.

Seeing the Divine in Everything

I listen to lectures on Vedanta and Buddhism regularly. Not just Advaita Vedanta, but the Integral Vedanta that Sri Ramakrishna propagated, the kind that doesn't reject the world but sees the divine running through it. The core insight is deceptively simple: you are not your body and mind. There's a deeper self beyond the fluctuations of daily experience. That self is the same in everyone and everything.

Once you sit with that idea long enough, something shifts in how you see the world. The person who cut you off in traffic isn't an obstacle. Your difficult investor isn't an adversary. Your competitor isn't an enemy. They're all expressions of the same consciousness, playing different roles. (This is much easier to remember when you're not actually in traffic.)

This connects to a bigger picture that I keep coming back to. Nature is a vast, interconnected system. Stars and snowflakes, planets and people, galaxies and everything in between. Surprisingly complex phenomena arising from relatively simple underlying components and rules. The same bio-electric patterns that shape your thoughts also shape how cells organize into organisms. The same mathematical structures appear at every scale.

Alfred Adler nailed the human dimension of this: all human problems are interpersonal relationship problems. But all happiness also comes from interpersonal relationships. Community feeling is crucial, especially in this era of globalization where it's dying out. Excessive individualism is the disease. Seeing the divine in others is the cure.

When you start seeing the divine in everything, not as a belief but as a way of paying attention, the world stops being something that happens to you. You realize you're part of the same fabric. And that realization, genuinely felt, is the most calming thing I've ever experienced. More than any breathwork or meditation technique.

The Shiva Sutras describe reality as a single consciousness appearing as multiplicity. Your awareness right now, reading these words, is not separate from the awareness of the person sitting next to you on the train. The boundaries are functional, not fundamental. And once you see that, how can you not be compassionate?

Prayer and the Illusion of Control

I pray. I'll just say that directly because most founders won't.

It's not about asking for outcomes. (Although if the universe is taking requests, a smooth Series A would be great.) It's about acknowledging, on a daily basis, that you are not in control of everything. When you're running a startup, the default delusion is that everything depends on you. Your decisions, your effort, your willpower. And a lot of it does. But not all of it.

Prayer is the practice of surrender. Not surrender as in giving up, but surrender as in releasing the illusion that you're the sole author of what happens. Market timing, investor decisions, customer behavior, the health of your team, a pandemic, a recession. You control your effort and your response. That's it.

Once you genuinely accept that, something loosens in your chest. The weight doesn't disappear, but it redistributes. You do the work with full intensity, and you let go of the outcome. That's Karma Yoga in practice, not as philosophy but as a daily survival mechanism.

Sleep is Non-Negotiable

7 hours. 2 AM to 9 AM. Non-negotiable.

Yes, the guy writing about mindfulness sleeps at 2 AM. I'm aware of the irony. But I do my best deep work at night. The world is quiet, Slack is dead, and my focus is uninterrupted. I protect those 7 hours like I protect production uptime. Because that's exactly what it is.

Every time I've compromised on sleep, I've paid for it in decision quality, emotional regulation, and raw cognitive throughput. The math doesn't work any other way.

Protect Flow State Like Production Infrastructure

Breaking someone's flow state has a cost. I tell my team this directly: "If your flow breaks, there's a real cost associated with it."

Here's what I actually do about it: calendar blocking. I reserve focus time and expect my team to do the same. We moved to a co-working space where we have the entire floor to ourselves, specifically for the quiet. Even internal conversations shouldn't disturb someone in flow.

The principle is simple: context-switching is the enemy of deep work, and deep work is the only thing that compounds.

Manage Anxiety Through Action, Not Avoidance

My framework for fear is straightforward: write down what you're afraid of, then plan a response to each scenario.

"What if the startup fails?" Get a job. Won't die. Might have to explain to my parents what I've been doing for the last few years, which is honestly the scarier scenario.

"What if we can't raise Series A?" We have revenue. We extend runway. We adapt.

The regret of not trying is much worse than the regret of trying and failing. The worst thing that can happen is going back to your current situation. No perfect timing exists. The best time is always right now.

This isn't toxic positivity. It's rationalization: taking a formless cloud of anxiety and turning it into a list of concrete scenarios with concrete responses. Once you do that, the anxiety has nowhere to hide.

Fewer People, Higher Quality

My social circle is small by design. I don't take advice from extended family. I avoid gossip and unnecessary conversations. (Okay, I absolutely gossip with my girlfriend. That's non-negotiable and honestly therapeutic.) But outside of that, friends and family either understand the obsession or they don't. There's no middle ground.

This sounds harsh but it's actually about respect. I want to keep a culture, both in life and at work, where only great people are present. People who show respect and empathy. People who don't drain your cognitive budget with drama.

Your environment is an input to your mental state. Optimize it.

But here's the paradox I keep coming back to, courtesy of Adler: all human problems are interpersonal relationship problems. And all human happiness comes from interpersonal relationships too. Fewer people doesn't mean no people. It means the right people, held closely, with genuine love.

The "Wanting It Bad Enough" Filter

Here's the thing I keep coming back to, the meta-principle that sits above everything else:

Most people want "some" peace but not enough to do what's necessary. Most people actually want to massage their ego, which is the opposite of peace.

If you're not meditating, you don't want the peace badly enough. If you're constantly checking your phone, you don't want the focus badly enough. If you're not sleeping 7 hours, you don't want the mental clarity badly enough. If you're not practicing compassion, you don't want the relationships badly enough. I fail at several of these on any given week, by the way. The framework is honest. I never said I was consistent.

This isn't judgment. It's clarity. Once you accept it, you stop blaming circumstances and start making choices. Everyone has at least half an hour daily and time on weekends. The real question: do you care enough to prioritize it?

If something truly matters, time will be found.

What This Actually Looks Like Under Pressure

When we're shipping devices, fundraising, hitting deadlines simultaneously: that's when practice matters most.

I don't eliminate stress. I change my relationship to it. Pratibimba: the ability to see yourself as both the actor and the observer. That's the practice in one word.

The Honest Part

I should be clear about something: I don't have this figured out.

I went to a therapist recently. Main finding: lack of fulfilling activities outside work. Tendency to work even on Sundays. Gaming doesn't satisfy me anymore despite loving it as a kid. I was placed on the ADHD spectrum, pending further assessment. So yeah, the guy writing about meditation and self-awareness had to pay someone to point out the obvious.

I've told friends "I do nothing besides work" and meant it. I've felt the unsustainability of it. I know the pattern is potentially harmful.

The practice isn't choosing between total relaxation and all-consuming work. It's watching yourself and noticing when you're out of balance, then gently returning. Not everything in your personal life needs to provide professional value. Some things can be done purely for enjoyment.

I'm still learning that last part.

The System

If you want the distilled version, here's what I actually do consistently:

None of these are revolutionary. All of them compound.

The Only Question That Matters

Sanity isn't being always calm. It's not never feeling stress. It's not enlightenment or having it all figured out.

Sanity is: noticing when you're dysregulated, having tools to return to center, recognizing thoughts as phenomena rather than truth, loving without keeping score, seeing the same awareness in every face you encounter, and anchoring to your body and breath when everything else is chaos.

Start with five minutes of body scan. One box breathing exercise. One conscious meal. One night of protected sleep. One moment of genuine, unconditional kindness toward someone who didn't ask for it.

Then notice what shifts.

The question isn't whether you have time to practice. The question is: how badly do you want to keep your sanity?