Oct. 31, 2025
Entrepreneurs Syndrome & How It Could Be Impacting Your Health In A Big Way - 13
Entrepreneur Syndrome – Why Your Drive Could Be Slowly Breaking Your Health
You’ve built your career, carried the pressure, and pushed harder than most ever could. But what happens when that same drive starts working against you?
In this must-listen episode, we dive into Entrepreneur Syndrome and the hidden health risks that men over 40 face when ambition meets neglect of the body. We break down the silent ways stress, long hours, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol are putting your heart, energy, and longevity at risk.
You’ll get concrete, science-backed strategies to:
• Spot the Silent Killers: Understand why high blood pressure and cholesterol often show no symptoms until it’s too late, and how to catch them early.
• Manage the Emotional Rollercoaster: Learn why burnout, imposter syndrome, and constant pressure drain your energy and what to do about it.
• Lead Yourself Like You Lead Your Business: Discover the practical steps to build recovery, nutrition, and stress strategies that actually stick.
• Protect Your Heart While You Grow Your Career: Simple habits to keep your performance high without sacrificing your health.
If you’re a driven man who wants to keep your body as strong as your business, this episode will give you the wake-up call and the roadmap to start taking care of yourself the right way.
Take control of your health before it takes control of you.
To hear more success stories and join the waiting list for The Call To Rise, go to www.thecalltorise.com.
Coach Brian Parana
Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?
Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.
Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:
To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com
Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.
- Entrepreneur syndrome hits men in their 40s harder than they realize. The same drive that built their business can quietly raise your blood sugar, your blood pressure, cholesterol, and stress, putting you at risk, your heart at risk, and all that hard work at risk. In this episode, we break down how to protect your health without slowing down your life.
- Happy to have you back, man. I want to talk to you about something that I see a lot. Honestly, so many guys that I work with have built successful businesses, careers, climbed the ladders, done the things, collected the cash, done all that, but they come to me with more than just weight loss goals.
- They come to me with my doctor told me my cholesterol is high, my blood pressure is high, I'm on this medication, that medication, I'm trying to take this shot to lose weight, I'm all this stuff. Now, you've worked hard to get where you are. You've carried the weight, the pressure, the tough calls, the decisions, the long nights.
- You've pushed past and pushed through where others would have stopped. But maybe lately, you might be noticing that your body isn't keeping up the way it once did. You're tired, brain fog, lack of productivity, especially in some of those key times where you could have just kept going, sleep is poor, and if you do a workout, you really just don't make the effort that you once did.
- You haven't lost discipline or focus on trying to take care of yourself, per se. It's the same drive that helped you succeed, but it's ultimately taking control on your health. I call it entrepreneur syndrome. And you see this a lot. It's one of the biggest reasons why guys that are listening to this start to have some health setbacks in their 40s.
- This episode brought to you by the call to rise. Are you tired of every diet and workout only to lose motivation and gain the weight back? You've lost 30 pounds but gain 40 back. It's not your lack of drive. It's you don't know what you're doing. Your clothes don't fit. Don't look the same in the mirror that you once did.
- Your bellies hanging over the belt. Your suit doesn't fit. and the doctor says you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or here's this medication to do this or that, and you are ready to not go that route, but make a serious change. And that's what the call to rise is.
- It's a 100 day fat loss challenge designed for men just as yourself. It gives you a simple, actionable, implementable system that you can do step by step. In 100 days, you'll have not only support, guidance from yours truly, other like-minded men. You'll lose fat and easy to understand nutrition approach, boost energy, get your confidence back.
- So, when you walk into the business room, you not only have your held high, but everyone's attention as well. You'll get a blueprint that will give you long-term success from now to 100 days to beyond. Get off the hamster wheel and answer the call to rise up. Go to www.thecalltorise.com and join the next challenge to finally win back your health.
- Let's jump back into the show for entrepreneur syndrome. It's not an official diagnosis really. It's just a pattern of behavior that shows up when the habits that helped you succeed actually start working against you. There are a few different ways that this shows up. Number one is imposttor syndrome.
- This is when you start to question whether you really deserve the success. You've been building success. You've been pushing hard, seeing the opportunities as they fall in line. That hustler type idea. You might feel like you've been lucky or also that you're one mistake away from being exposed. You want to overwork, take on more.
- You push harder just to prove to yourself that you're good enough. When you see yourself in the mirror, you want to look and feel that energy, that kind of pressure that keeps your body in constant overdrive. It raises your cortisol levels. It drops your testosterone. Your energy takes a hit. You start relying on caffeine, any type of stimulus you can to get that adrenaline up just to get you through the day.
- My second one is founder syndrome. This is common for guys who've already built something from the ground up and you've been in control from day one. It's hard to hand things off. I find myself in this too. I've been doing just solo for 15 years. I've owned gyms, have been online health nutrition coaching, and have helped thousands of people, but I've always feel like I can do it best.
- And that's not necessarily true. I can find subject matter experts that can help boost my abilities and fasttrack my process because I might be able to do it faster now than someone else. But if I teach them, then I can let them start taking over some of those other aspects just like you would an employee or a co-orker or if you own a team in a sense you're managing a team, you can delegate appropriately.
- But this mindset, if you don't get out of that and you just constantly, I'm going to do it faster and better and I can just do it all by myself. It can keep you stuck in the weeds. Brain never shuts off. It's constantly worried about the next 24/7 and never actually getting any rest.
- Now, this stress builds up and it does raise blood pressure levels. It slows down recovery and it really just eats away at the ability to focus and stay on point with what you need to do that day, your most important tasks. Then there's what I call the lost entrepreneur. You've achieved a lot, but you're not as fired up as you used to be. You keep busy, but you're not sure what you're chasing anymore.
- You've had some level of success, but you're getting no significance out of it. You've lost that direction that used to pull you forward. When this happens, your habits, your routines, your behaviors fade and you start to even upsense self- sabotage and I'll get back to it or I get back on track or I'll find that energy or I'll never ever comes.
- All these fall under a same similar umbrella where you are putting the output in but you're actually running on fumes and empty tank. And this happens with a lot of guys. I find that when they finally get to the point of accepting that they need help in their particular life, especially around their health, nutrition, fitness, and living healthily that they are overwhelmed because they've been so focused in this one area of business and [clears throat] success there.
- And it it's it's a it's a very common theme. And one of the big things that I do with my clients is slow things down. Think about a a CEO. What are they most notable for? The vision. They give direction. They give the oversight. They understand where the ship is heading. They're not in the engine room of the the boat putting putting coal in.
- could think of it like back in the old days. We're not putting coal into the oven to to keep that engine powered up. No, they they're up on top looking out over the the seas to navigate to look at the stars to drive that ship point it in the right direction. So, what's happening your body when you live in this constant pressure? You're not making a diamond at this point.
- Okay? You are not letting your body recover. Chronic stress, as we said, leaves the cortisol. It's a stress hormone that builds up over time and deteriorates you from the inside out. This lower testosterone, the lack of sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night worried about how your business is doing. What's the next best decision that you need to make and these poor sleep habits just keep you mentally fogged, overstimulated with caffeine? Or how about you add in skipped meals because this one meeting got stacked in the time that you were
- going to eat something even if it was going to be fast food or just whatever the office was getting. Now this poor nutrition of bad choices or high calorie foods or high carb not quality food stacks and then we pair that with long hours in front of a screen whether it's a computer screen a phone screen this is the perfect recipe for a crescendoing of fatigue a building of inflammation inside at the cellular level and weight gain.
- You probably know what this feels like. The energy drops in mid-afternoon. You wake up like you haven't slept a wink. There's a complete lack of desire for you to do a workout. Forget that. And to to have that motivational drive just isn't there. The truth is your body's been in a fight orflight mode for years. It's tired.
- A simple phrase after I start talking to people is this question that pops up. You you can pause it and rewind or whatever. But the question is, are you living in a stress response? Why do I say that? Because you can just see the this under current pulling the person away from their goals.
- Just think of an ocean current, a rip tide. It pulls you out away from the shore where you want to head and gets lost out into the open sea and you're fighting against it, swimming against it. And that's not how you do it, right? You have to swim with it and then get off to the side and go a different route. Can't go against it. You certainly don't want to go with it per se. We swim to the side.
- And if you keep pushing through it, they don't stay the same. They actually get worse. And this will be seen in some of your doctor's visits. This will be seen in your body not responding like it had your muscles being more achy or sore or just lack of ability to push through another hour of work.
- Forget being attracted to your spouse. You're too tired to do anything there. I've seen it over and over with these guys that I work with and it forces them to slow down. Your body literally puts up a roadblock in front of you and says stop. Now I I do want to talk about two silent killers that lead and come from this entrepreneur syndrome.
- High blood pressure and high cholesterol. They often go undiagnosed. They develop without any type of noticeable symptoms. You don't realize it's actually putting you into a dangerous situation. Now high blood pressure approximately you know maybe 50% of men this is a CDC statistic which increases the risk of half the men have high blood pressure which increases the risk of high heart disease and stroke.
- That's huge to know and making sure that you are paying attention to all of that in this process. You do not want to have a heart attack or a stroke. That is devastating to your life, your career, your family, the people that have to take care of you, the medical bills that start showing up. Let's real quick go 120 over 80 for high blood pressure.
- That is going to be a part of what we want to focus on is 120 over 80. If you are at say 140 over 90, the doctor's probably going to be putting you on some sort of a medication. If we move it up even further, say 160 over 100, you could be a walking heart attack depending on how clogged up your arteries are.
- That's the real name of the game here in this situation of making sure that you are clear on what high blood pressure does to your body. Now, high cholesterol, this is the artery filling plaque buildup inside arteries. Usually, you think we the corateed arteries in your neck or around your heart. And that's where bypass come in.
- You don't want a bypass when you're in your 50s or 60s. Sure, that'll extend your life, but that already means that there's been this erosion of your health for a decade or two because of your food choices, because of your movement patterns, because of the how you manage stress, and it will likely shorten your life.
- Now, it's estimated that one in three adults have high cholesterol, but most don't know because they don't show any signs or symptoms, and they don't usually go to the doctor to get it. Most people I know rarely go to the doctor. And then it usually takes some sort of an issue or an instance where someone says, "Hey, I need to go to the doctor.
- I don't feel well." And that's when all of these things start to get shown and revealed because they finally pulled back the the curtain so to speak around the challenges that are there. Now, as entrepreneurs, we wear ourselves out with exhaustion, and that's a badge of honor. I've certainly worn it plenty of times.
- I identify as as a very driven person that makes things happen for myself, for my family, for my clients, get the results that I want in my life. even this podcast. And within two weeks, I had 10 episodes produced, thought up, the topic, written, produced, recorded, and then finally put into the the Apple podcast, Spotify and all.
- And that was it was a sprint. Take it was 400 and some minutes recorded audio in under two weeks because I said, I'm going to do this. I've been actually wanting to do this podcast for a long time. And then I finally had a an open day and off I went and here we are on our 13th episode and getting into a rhythm and pattern. I already I literally have the next 10 already titled a lot of them.
- I have some outlines of what I'm going to do and I'm I'm this is going to be I I I really had wanted to do a podcast and be able to talk and speak and show my abilities and my capacity. Uh I am funny I think sarcastic at least and I like I'll actually probably be inviting other people on as obviously guests but also doing some client hot seats maybe even some other people hot seats to help them further understand what think of it is like an assessment and so going back to doing a lot of work and a little bit of time that's the mindset of go and you
- pride yourself on this of constantly being busy being needed, being indispensable, but it leads to burnout, anxiety, physical health issues like some of that we already talked about, but think of it burnout or stress, your eye twitches, that's not normal. Your skin breaks out into hives or rashes or you have some sort of a a cerosis or something, that is usually a stress issue.
- If your hair on top of your head is turning a little more salt and pepper than it ever was, that's a stress issue. If anxiety builds, you have this internal stress that builds and crescendos in terms of uh your phone bings and rings and vibrates and you get stressed internally and overwhelmed with that. or you see your email, how many unread emails you have and anxiety of trying to go through those and answer them builds.
- That's not normal. Now, it it does take a toll on your body and we have to figure out ways to get out of this go mode because it's not sustainable. Now, one of the most proactive steps you could take to have obviously regularly scheduled health checkups at least every six months or one year to go in for an annual and get some blood tests done.
- Actually talk with a doctor for more than 5 minutes, please. And get an undertone of where your health actually is. Most importantly, make sure your body weight's at a healthy amount. If you're 10, 20, 40 pounds overweight, you are at incredible risk of disease in your body. Now, with going to the doctor, we can catch these potential issues.
- One of the interesting things is when you go in to the doctor and you have high blood pressure or cholesterol levels, they're going to give you a medicine. And the reason is is that doctors can quickly triage the situation with medicine, right? You go in, the doctor says, "Wow, your blood pressure is off the charts too high.
- I'm going to give you some blood pressure medication or same with the cholesterol. It's 240. We're going to give you some cholesterol medicine and it's going to lower it down in the next week significantly. Whereas we all know that you need to have lifestyle behavior changes. The doctor knows that too. But in the limited time that they get to see you every year and have an ongoing conversation or the client load or the insurance demand or the bills that they need paid or their student debt that is just a mountain worth of effort to get
- rid of, then they need a lot of other clients and all. They can give you the blood pressure medication. You can walk away and it be ultimately a band-aid of some sort, but it's a helpful band-aid. It's a really sticky band-aid. It keeps infection in a sense outside of that wound, but the wound doesn't necessarily heal per se, meaning the root causes of the blood pressure or the cholesterol don't get resolved.
- Obviously, we have some obviously practical tips here. We need to schedule the regular checkup. Make sure that you go, you don't have to wait until something feels off or wrong to get in with your doctor. We need to manage stress, have different stress relief activities. Yesterday we did the last actually last two days we did trick or treat. We were wicked.
- I was the wizard of Oz. My daughter was Alphaba, green face and all green hands. And my wife and second son Everett Amar and Everett were flying monkeys. My son Maxwell third one he was the professor Dr. Dilund, I believe it was the professor, the goat professor. And then my oldest, 16, he too cool for school. He was actually Buzz Light there.
- Levi is a big Buzz Lighter. He's a onesie and Crocs. Buzz Light your Crocs. That was us. But we did that. We went out Saturday and Sunday and just I got 21,000 steps yesterday from walking so much and being outdoors. And that was a huge stress relief. I didn't have to think about work. I just focus on fun. balanced diet. We've gone over that.
- We will go over sleep. That is going to be a dedicated episode in the future. Of course, staying active. I have a series, at least two, possibly three coming up on strength. Just a little teaser, but we're going to do some strength exercise and how to build in proper strength routines if you're unsure. Now, let's go back to why some of you struggle.
- The same mindset that helped you win in business, being independent, driven, capable to push yourself through anything and everything, right? You've ran through so many brick walls. Think of how many problems and situations you've overcome. Thousands and thousands of clicks, tens of thousands of micro decisions happen even every single day to get to the outcome of a successful business.
- But it's it's really hard to slow down when your body's actually asking for it. And usually that again is when things break. Now, let me tell you about Nick. He came to me. He's 47. He runs a small but successful business in marketing. He's got a couple employees and they're doing a couple zeros every single month and ultimately growing their business.
- Now, he's married with two kids in high school and his day starts off pretty darn early. They're like 5:00 a.m. and ends pretty darn late around 8:00 p.m. You probably know those long days. Breakfast is usually coffee and a protein bar. This is before we met. Lunch happens at his desk. It's usually whatever the office wants as takeout.
- And then dinner is whatever fits in between the calls, the practices of soccer, whether it's fast food, fast casual, order in usually cuz there's no time to actually cook anything or at least the presumption of that. But things he always said that he'll get back to taking care of himself or training when things slow down and and that's just never happens, right? Well, Nick started noticing he was waking up tired, even more so even after a full night's sleep.
- And that groggginess led into the rest of the day. He wanted to set up a little nap studio in his office and and take a little midday nap. His clothes were, you know, just not buttoning anymore around the waistline. He'd get headaches. these headaches that would actually last more than just 10, 20, 30 minutes, but actually half a day.
- And they'd come from his shoulders up into the back of his head and his neck and crawl over top of his brain in a sense, almost migraine-like. And this would shut him down for especially in the middle of a day when he has to do this meeting or that. I mean, he he'd cancel some meetings occasionally when it was the worst. But he finally one day it just the tension headache went to almost migraine level.
- He said, "All right, I'm going to the doctor. I gotta figure this out." He finally schedules the appointment, goes in and the blood pressure was 152 over 96 and cholesterol was 240. Those are dangerous levels. Doc said, "You're not in quotations sick yet, right?" He wasn't exhibiting, saying, being 80 lbs overweight and and having type 2 diabetes and suffering really bad health issues, but he's on his way to experiencing that.
- These are clear red flags that it's going to hit him hard at some point if he doesn't change. Now, Nick, his dad, unfortunately, passed at the age of 52 of a heart attack. He had a quick think about his kids, his family, and that he actually hadn't had a real weekend off with his family either.
- So, what changed for Nick? Well, he had a sudden impact of disinformation of high blood pressure, high cholesterol from doing the work on his business, but not staying up with his health. And that's what led him to me. And certainly we changed a lot of his ways around how he took care of himself, around his health, around how he focuses on nutrition, and he's living some of the better years that he's had, getting ready to round 50, healthier than he was when he was even 40.
- Here's where we can start making some real changes. Pay attention to your body, of course. In episode 11 on behavior change, we talked about a lot of these different things to help improve nutrition, energy, lifestyle, right? Episode 12 was the first client call that actually got a a good place to start.
- Now, number two here is redefine what success means. You can have all the money in the world, but if you've got one foot in the grave, it doesn't matter. You're not taking it with you anyways. You need to redefine what health and business and financial all works together and ultimately leads to a quality of life that you can continue living.
- You 40 Nick at 47, he should still have roughly 30 more years of quality life ahead of him before things go south. The average man living 76 years old. Number three, schedule recovery like you schedule meetings. You do have to have a set time where you actually just lay in bed. Have eight hours of laying in bed time every day. That will most certainly help quite a bit in this situation here.
- Now, you want to learn to delegate, right? If you are in that driven mindset of just not being able to uh hand things off, I'm I'm constantly in this debate myself of what can I delegate versus what can I do. I say producing this podcast was super easy, but if I had another teammate that I could just record the episode and hand it off, I certainly could record faster, easier, and spend less time doing it.
- have someone else do the behind the scenes work. Now, number five is get guidance. All right, the the car analogy. Your check engine light is on. You're not going to go to YouTube and just Google whatever you can get your hands on to see how to problem solve, troubleshoot this.
- You're just going to take the car into the shop and get it serviced. I think of you wouldn't expect someone to grow a company without having a plan, without having support from mentors, coaches, a team of employees helping you. And don't expect your body to perform without some form of a coaching, accountability, support, and actual direction that aligns with your busy life.
- That's what I do with the men in the call to rise is build systems that perform for them and not drain them. So, that's the entrepreneur syndrome, guys. I just wanted to pull out those two things of high blood pressure, high cholesterol in your 40s. They do start adding up and it can be a big impact on your overall health if you're not paying attention.
- So, get checked and make sure that you're aware of what those are. Moving into the fast five questions, we're going to piggyback on some of the things that we talked about today with burnout and blood pressure and all this stuff. So, question number one is how common is burnout among entrepreneurs and business leaders? Well, studies show that most entrepreneurs feel burned out at some point at least once a year or maybe different seasons in their career.
- Think of a tax professional going to be pretty burned out at April or October. Think of a retail system going to be pretty burdened in the holiday seasons. Think of just a startup. They're always going to be burdened. Running fast operating processes on lower budget and ability and and team members. Number two, what's the connection between burnout and physical health problems? Well, we talked about a little bit, but the cortisol levels go up, sleep goes down, inflammation goes up, blood pressure can go up, cholesterol
- levels can go up, insulin resistance, that ties into type 2 diabetes, can go up. Number three, how many men in their 40s actually have high blood pressure and don't even know it? Well, the CD says possibly one out of two men over 40 could have high blood pressure. This was a study done in 2021 to 23 and and many didn't even recognize that they had any symptoms at all.
- So, even I don't know if they still have in the grocery stores the blood pressure cuffs. Sit down at one of those if you can next time. Number four, what about cholesterol? How big of a problem is it that men have for this age group? Well, when most men hit 40, one in three already have high cholesterol.
- This is again according to CDC a study done in 2017 2018. Even if you're not overweight, you can have high LDL levels, which is the low density lipo. The the this stuff gets clogged in your arteries and starts to build up plaque and potential heart attacks later on. Number five, how big is the heart attack risk for men in their 40s and 50s? Well, it's the number one cause of death is heart disease.
- CDC again reports one in four heart attack deaths happened before age of 55. Most men had at least one preventable risk factor such as the high blood pressure, cholesterol, or smoking. So, it's something you guys have complete and utter control over. If you're listening to this and realize how easy it is to let your health slip while chasing success, take this as your wakeup call, gentlemen.
- Most men wait until something actually breaks. They have to go to the hospital. They have a chest pain. They fall on the floor. Don't be that guy. at the very least for you, but even more importantly for your family or your business or your team, your employees, your your co-workers, the people, your friend, right? Get ahead of it. Focus on nutrition.
- Focus on the things that we've talked about to protect your body, your health. And if you're ready to take the next step, you can check out the call to rise. I'm happy to bring on proven guys that know their health is at risk and they have a full plate because the truth is your health is very important to you and it's not something you want to risk and you certainly don't want to die young.
- I'll see you in the next episode.
