close your loops before they close you.

Mental fatigue doesn’t arrive dramatically.

It doesn’t kick the door in and announce itself.
It seeps in slowly. Quietly. Invisibly.

You wake up tired even after sleeping.
You feel busy but ineffective.
You sit down to work and immediately want to stand up again.

For founders, this becomes normal so quickly that it barely registers as a problem.

We blame workload. We blame markets. We blame timing. We blame ourselves.

But most of the time, the real issue is simpler and more dangerous.

We are carrying too many open loops.

An open loop is any unresolved task, decision, or obligation that your brain has not closed. Emails unanswered. Conversations postponed. Strategic decisions left hanging. Promises half-kept. Ideas started and never finished.

Each one costs very little on its own.
Together they drain everything.

The human brain hates unfinished business. Psychologists call this the Zeigarnik effect. Unfinished tasks stay active in the mind, demanding attention even when you are trying to rest or focus elsewhere.

Now combine that with decision fatigue, the gradual erosion of mental clarity that comes from making too many choices in a day, and you have the perfect conditions for founder burnout.

This is not a motivation problem.
It is not a resilience problem.
It is not a mindset problem.

It is a structural problem.

Founder culture encourages opening loops and punishes closure. New ideas are praised. New initiatives are celebrated. Saying yes is rewarded. Saying no is framed as fear or lack of ambition.

We tell people to grind harder. To push through. To sacrifice more.

As I’ve written in You Cannot Out-Work a Dead Body, the body does not negotiate. You can ignore its signals for a while, but eventually it will force a conversation you were too busy to have willingly.

The same applies mentally.

Ignoring open loops doesn’t make them disappear. It simply pushes the cost into your nervous system.

Anxiety. Irritability. Brain fog. Poor sleep. Short temper. Procrastination.

Founders often interpret these symptoms as personal weakness. In reality, they are signs of unmanaged cognitive load.

Passion makes this worse, not better.

In Passion Will Burn You Out, I argue that passion is brilliant at starting things and terrible at sustaining them. Passion opens loops enthusiastically. Purpose is what decides which loops are worth closing.

Without purpose and structure, passion creates chaos.

This is why so many early-stage founders feel constantly overwhelmed while achieving surprisingly little. They are doing too much thinking and not enough finishing.

Closing loops is not glamorous work. It doesn’t look impressive on LinkedIn. It rarely gets applause.

But it is one of the most powerful skills a founder can develop.

When you close a loop, something immediate happens:

Mental noise drops.

Focus returns.

Energy stabilises.

Not because you became more disciplined, but because your brain no longer has to keep reminding you about something unresolved.

Multiply that by ten, and you don’t just feel better. You perform better.

Structure exists for this reason. Not to control you, but to protect you from yourself.

A good structure limits how many loops you are allowed to open at once. It forces decisions. It creates endings.

This is also where mental health and performance intersect in uncomfortable ways. Founders are encouraged to tolerate constant low-grade stress as the price of ambition. But chronic cognitive overload is not a badge of honour. It is a slow erosion of judgment.

If you are building a business, your clarity is an asset. Treating it as expendable is reckless.

The hardest loops to close are rarely the biggest ones. They are the emotionally loaded ones. The awkward conversation. The strategic call that might upset someone. The admission that something is not working.

Avoidance is understandable. It is also expensive.

The longer a loop stays open, the heavier it becomes. What could have been a ten-minute task turns into a week-long source of stress. What could have been an honest conversation becomes a festering problem.

This is why founders feel relief, sometimes shockingly intense relief, when they finally deal with the thing they’ve been avoiding. It feels disproportionate because it is. You are not just completing a task. You are reclaiming attention.

Closing loops does not mean doing everything. It means choosing what you will finish and allowing the rest to die.

That is leadership.

If you are early in your startup journey, learn this now. Do not build your business on a foundation of constant mental debt. Build systems that force completion. Build rhythms that respect recovery. Build structures that reduce decision load.

And above all, stop confusing endurance with effectiveness.

If this article resonates, explore the wider Hard Truths collection. Each piece tackles a different uncomfortable reality of building something meaningful without destroying yourself in the process.

And if you want help putting structure around your thinking, your work, and your energy, there is a free guide available on the site that walks through these ideas in practical terms.

Because ambition without closure doesn’t lead to success.
It leads to exhaustion.