5 innovators: How we deal with stress, you can also

Courtesy www.cnnmoney.com

When you’re starting a business that aims to reinvent how people live, things can get stressful. Five young innovators shared how they handle the pressures with CNNMoney. Their tips might help you.

Dancing it out

For Payal Kadakia, founder of ClassPass, the answer is dance.

“Dance is a creative outlet for me,” says Kadakia, whose ClassPass app allows users to book fitness classes at different studios in cities around the world.

“I remember even early on, my team always knew when I wasn’t dancing, because I would become less creative,” Kadakia says. “Something would get lost in me when I wasn’t performing because it was my outlet, and more importantly it was my inspiration for everything that we were doing.”

Running meetings

If dancing isn’t your thing, heading out for a run might help decrease stress and clear your head.

“I think the best way to solve a problem is to think about it for a little while and then to go for a jog,” says Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, a free online trading app.

“As soon as I do, the problem starts to unravel,” Bhatt says. “That’s something I do pretty much every day around lunch time. I’ll go for a jog for an hour, come back and get to the bottom of something that I quite hadn’t known how to work together.”

A breath of fresh air

Whitney Wolfe, founder of Bumble, an online dating app where women make the first move, agrees that going outside can help ease work worries.

“Some routines that I find are a good way to step away from the day-to-day: Go for a run, go for a swim, go outside,” Wolfe says.

“Just being outside alone, the fresh air kind of brings you back down to earth, because it’s easy to get carried away in whatever you’re working on,” she says.

Running away your problems

Adding physical activity to your routine might take discipline but it also offers a lot of benefits, says James Hirschfeld, co-founder of Paperless Post, an online site where users can send event invites by email and traditional mail.

“The first thing that I do every single morning is I go running for 3 miles,” says Hirschfeld. “And people often say, ‘That’s very disciplined of you,’ but the truth is it’s really not a question of discipline.”

“It’s a question of anxiety management,” Hirschfeld says. “It really clears my head in the morning so I can come into work and then face all the challenges without bringing what I woke up with into the office.”

He said he also finds working with Paperless Post’s design team to be relaxing.

Quality time with the family

Spending time with loved ones is another stress-busting secret.

“There’s so little time for anything aside from hanging out with the fam,” says Joey Zwillinger, co-founder of Allbirds, a textile company that wants to offer sustainable products.

“I like to drop my kids off at school and every single weekend I’m on the bike with the kids in the back in a little caboose, and I never have my phone with me when I’m with the kids — or I never look at it, at least — and so it’s kind of like this disconnection from the fast-paced stuff that I’m dealing on a day-to-day basis with work,” he says.

Zwillinger said he also jogs in the woods and hills near his home to unwind.