60% of Young Founders Say Mental Health Disrupts Work Weekly

By Nathan Brooks

Sixty percent of Canadian business owners under 40 say mental health challenges interfere with their work at least once a week. That figure comes from the Business Development Bank of Canada's 2025 survey, and it jumps out from an overall rate of 36% across all owners. One in three respondents—35%—sought professional help for a mental health concern in the previous year.

The numbers land as Calgary's entrepreneurial ecosystem grows, and they raise a practical question for founders and the organizations backing them: what does this change for how support gets delivered?

What's weighing on founders?

The pressures behind the BDC data are familiar to anyone running a company. Financial uncertainty, burnout, anxiety, decision fatigue, relationship challenges, parenting, and the difficulty of balancing business growth with personal life top the list.

These pressures don't stay contained in the individual. Stress and exhaustion affect decision-making. Unresolved tension influences co-founder relationships and team dynamics. As the Calgary.Tech analysis puts it, recognizing these connections doesn't mean every business challenge is a mental health issue—it means the person making the decisions is part of the system, and their well-being matters.

That framing matters for practitioners. If you're an investor or accelerator operator, founder well-being isn't a soft topic separate from portfolio performance. It's upstream of the decisions your founders make every week.

What does therapy with entrepreneurs actually look like?

Therapy offers a structured space to work through the personal and professional challenges of building a business. Depending on a founder's needs, that might involve:

• Recognizing patterns that influence decision-making
• Navigating leadership challenges, co-founder tension, and team dynamics
• Developing tools to manage stress and regulate emotions
• Establishing boundaries that support work and personal life
• Challenging assumptions or expectations that are no longer helpful
• Building more sustainable approaches to leadership

It doesn't need to be open-ended or disconnected from the realities of running a company. Goals can be practical and responsive to what a founder is experiencing right now.

The distinctions between support formats matter too. Coaches and mentors help founders navigate business strategy and professional development. Therapy provides a confidential space to explore emotional, behavioural, and relational challenges. These forms of support complement one another—they're not substitutes.

What are entrepreneurs taking away from it?

According to Calgary-founded Collectively Tangled, entrepreneurs who attend therapy report progress in stress management, self-awareness, leadership confidence, emotional regulation, communication, and work-life alignment.

One founder described the experience directly: "I have gained practical tools to manage stress, challenge unhelpful thought patterns, approach difficult decisions with greater clarity, and become more intentional about balancing my responsibilities as a founder with my personal life."

Those outcomes aren't about eliminating stress or becoming immune to uncertainty. They're about recognizing how you respond to pressure and developing more options for responding differently. Therapy can't remove the uncertainty inherent in entrepreneurship. It can help founders understand what's within their control, identify unhelpful patterns, and approach difficult situations with greater awareness.

Which signs should founders watch?

The analysis flags specific changes worth attention:

• Having less patience with your team or family
• Finding everyday decisions more difficult
• Struggling to concentrate or access your creativity
• Feeling guilty when you're not working
• Losing interest in things that used to feel rewarding
• Constantly pushing through, waiting for the next milestone to feel better

These signs don't automatically mean burnout. But they're worth exploring, and the suggested self-check is blunt: what about the way I'm currently working isn't sustainable?

The so-what

Entrepreneurship will always involve pressure, uncertainty, and difficult decisions. The goal isn't to eliminate every challenge—it's to make support accessible before challenges become overwhelming. For ecosystem builders in Calgary and beyond, that means asking not only what founders need to build successful businesses, but what they need to sustain themselves along the way. A stronger ecosystem invests in more than ideas and capital; it recognizes the people behind the businesses.

Jenn MacDonald is a Partner at Collectively Tangled.