You’ve been grinding your business aspirations for months now, gaining huge success and living the dream. There’s just one problem: the stress has become so great that it’s starting to affect your mental and physical health. You’re eating poorly, gaining weight, and you can’t ever seem to relax. What’s to be done?

The entrepreneur lifestyle certainly isn’t for everyone, but those who do pursue it find that stress management becomes a key tool in their success. Managing your stress as a businessman or woman can ensure you’re not overloading yourself and causing burnout. Burnout is a real phenomenon, and once you’ve achieved it, you can actually lose interest in what you’re doing!

Let’s take a look at five ways you can stay stress-free as a busy entrepreneur.

1. Make Time For Yourself

There seems to be a belief in entrepreneurial circles that you must work ‘round the clock in order to gain success. While you’re probably going to be putting in more hours than someone with a 9-5 desk job, that doesn’t mean time off should be treated lightly; in fact, you should prioritize time for yourself when you’re building a business.

The bottom line is that you can’t focus 100% of your energy into work. It’s simply not healthy. You could be causing extra stress on both your mind and body, and if there’s no time to yourself, you could lose relationships and key parts of who you are. Often, relationships suffer because we’re too focused on work and making money. At the end of the day, the relationships we build are some fo the most important aspects of overall happiness.

Take some time off for yourself, even if it’s just one day that doesn’t involve work. You’ll come back to your business ventures feeling rested, recharged, and more committed than ever.

2. Find Support

You might find that the entrepreneurial path is a bit lonely at first. As engrained as business-building is in our society, venturing off to start your own company can still be off-putting to the average person. You might even find that friends and family don’t support your ventures at all!

When you don’t have the support of friends and family, who do you have to turn to? Luckily, there are thousands of online communities and chat rooms where you can vent, find advice, and even make new friends who share your aspirations. Support matters when you’re an entrepreneur; even if it’s not from the people you thought it would come from.

3. Change How You View Mistakes

One of the main sources of stress for entrepreneurs is mistakes and setbacks. Guess what? Those are pretty much guaranteed when you’re building a business, especially if it’s your first one. You can follow the books, do everything right, and still run into problems or make the wrong decisions. And that’s ok.

We seem to have a negative relationship with mistakes and “failure”, but the truth is, mistakes are nothing more than learning opportunities. You didn’t know enough before you made the mistake, but now you do. Take that knowledge, understand that you’re not perfect, and move forward stronger and wiser than you were before.

Mistakes will cause you stress no matter what, but when you change how you view them, you change their impact on you. If you’re looking at mistakes through the lens of failure, you’ll always feel worse about them.

4. Create Strong Relationships

Building a strong network as an entrepreneur is crucial to your success. Without one, you won’t have other like-minded people to fall back on, bounce ideas off of, or provide services. Word of mouth is still one of the best ways to grow a business, so you should definitely be taking any networking opportunities that present themselves.

You’d be amazed at how much you can learn from the people in your network. They can teach you new skills, stress-management techniques, business practices, and so much more. Don’t forget to attend seminars and events to get to know new entrepreneurs!

5. Always Educate Yourself and Keep Growing

You should always be learning and growing as an entrepreneur. You can never stop learning new things to help your business and your personal growth efforts. You learn from the people around you, from mistakes and setbacks, and from the pursuit of knowledge.

If there’s something you’re insecure about that’s causing you stress, learn about it. You’ll find much more peace and satisfaction in knowing that you took the time to discover what exactly that source of stress and insecurity was and how to fix it than if you just let it fester.

Make active learning a part of your entrepreneurial lifestyle. The more you learn and grow, the more confident you’ll be in your business ventures and the more respected you’ll be in your network of like-minded business people.