Founder Mindset: how to keep the winter blues at bay

In a world filled with cynicism, rocked daily by news creating uncertainty, to find the energy and self-belief to spark oneself with positivity is not a matter of denying reality, it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where perseverance builds hope of a better, brighter future. The mindset of a startup founder has to be like this, open to possibilities, believing in their ability to create a success from their endeavours whatever the prevailing tailwinds.

A month into 2026 and the Christmas break and festivities are faded memories. Time spent relaxing with friends and families is over and it’s back to business as usual. Dark nights, wet and cold weather shape a challenging backdrop to the new year when we return to work with renewed enthusiasm and energy.

But not everyone is fired up to restart. It is completely normal to feel a bit of a hangover after the holiday season, and I don't just mean from the beers. January can feel like a sudden, cold plunge back into reality after the weeks of December’s anticipation, social gatherings, and indulgence.

We often set ourselves up for the new year, believing we’ll finally start a fresh chapter and set of routines. But when January 1 feels like just another Tuesday, it can lead to a sense of deflation. The ‘New Year Blues’ stem from the pressure we put on ourselves to reinvent our lives with bold resolutions the moment the calendar turns.

There is also the impact of social withdrawal after a couple of weeks filled with leisure, parties and family time, the sudden quiet of January can feel lonely, and the biological shift from lack of sunlight - seasonal affective disorder (SAD) - which can physically affect your mood and energy levels. So how do you sustain a mindset of positivity?

Having lost his mother to suicide, and lived through two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte devoted his life and his art to creating a world of positivity. Perhaps his most well-known piece is The Son of Man, a self-portrait. The painting consists of a man in an overcoat and a bowler hat standing in front of a low wall, beyond which are the sea and a cloudy sky. The man's face is largely obscured by a hovering green apple. The man's eyes can be seen peeking over the edge of the apple. About the painting, Magritte said:

At least it hides the face partly well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

The painting and his words have always made me smile with their intelligence and poignancy. Magritte tells us to keep a positive mindset and a focus on the future. His other paintings reveal similar messages from a lifetime of creativity.

Life is wasted when we fill our heads with a banal explanation of possible negative outcomes. We all need to reject the tyranny of self-imposed pessimism and fearmongering brought on by the uncertainty of facing the future. We need to reject the toxic focus on the worst outcome, a downbeat mode of existence, which syphons away our happiness, to a mode encouraging us to pursue positivity and self-awareness beyond simple clichés.

Glass half-full or half-empty? This notion is the result of philosophies (materialist or idealist), that claim that the real world is knowable. Life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living. We need to resist the defeatism of easy despair. We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

For founders, the new year is a fresh start to build upon the momentum or pivot, having had time to reflect. Some founders keep their feet on the ground and grab the work to be done with both hands. They are realistically optimistic. For others, they crave short-term success. The wanting starts out innocently. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, to deliver us from the life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of life-as-it-could-be, all the while vacating the only sanctuary from the storm of uncertainty raging outside the windows of the here and now.

It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. If we are not careful with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in an expectant near-life existence. As Ann Dillard says how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. We become animated by the sense of wavering between being kept for something possibly prodigious or terrible - ‘sooner or later to happen’ - to either destroy or jump start our venture.

It is, of course, a dramatised caricature of our common curse — the treacherous 'if only' mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece. This is simply a hallucination.

Create  a different perspective on January. Think of January not as the month of striving to bring new levels of high performance, but as the month of hibernation and planning. In nature, nothing blooms all year round. It’s okay to move slowly right now. Bouncing back isn't about a sudden explosion of energy, it’s more like re-energising.

Since we are already a few weeks into January, the initial shock has likely worn off, and now it's about overcoming the stagnation of the ‘New Year Blues’. Moving away from a pessimistic mindset isn't about forcing yourself to be happy all the time, it’s about shifting your paradigm from everything will go wrong to things might go well, and even if they don't, I can handle it.

Here is a breakdown of practical steps you can take to reshape your thinking patterns to escape the mental inertia and reboot your founder mindset:

1. The low-friction reset When you're feeling blue, your brain isn’t engaged, so lower the barrier to entry for everything and simply make a start:

• The ‘5-Minute Rule’: Commit to any task for just five minutes. Usually, the hardest part is just breaking the trap of ‘doing nothing’

• The ‘One Small Thing Rule’: Instead of a massive resolution, pick one tiny, low-pressure task today.

• Seek out ‘Micro-Joys’: Lean into the winter aesthetic rather than fighting it. Simply find your feet and ground yourself with something personal to you.

2. Catch your thinking errors. Pessimism is often fuelled by automatic thought patterns which skew how we see stuff:

• Permanence: Believing a problem will last forever. Shift: Remind yourself This is a temporary setback, not a permanent state.

• Pervasiveness: Letting one bad thing ruin everything Shift: Isolate the event.

• Personalisation: Blaming yourself for things outside your control. Shift: Look at external factors.

3. The best-case scenario exercise. Pessimists are experts at ‘catastrophising’, playing out the worst possible outcome in their heads. Maintaining a positive mindset isn't about ignoring life's bad weather, it's about learning to be a better pilot while flying through it. It’s a skill you build, not a permanent state of mind you just switch on. To balance the scales, look through the lens of three scenarios:

• Worst-case: What is the absolute worst that could happen?

• Best-case: What is the most amazing outcome?

• Most likely: What is the realistic middle ground?

Visualising the best-case scenario interrupts the loop of negativity and helps you realise the most likely outcome is rarely as bad as you fear. Your brain is a storytelling machine. If something goes wrong, it often defaults to a disaster script. Try shifting the language and mental imagery, challenge your inner critic.

4. Aim for three wins. Our brains tend to highlight what we can’t do. Counteract this by listing three small wins. They don't have to be monumental. This trains your reticular activating system (the brain's filter) to look for the good stuff. Pessimism is a filter that only lets in negative data. To change the filter, you need to consciously collect positive data. For example, every night, write down three things that went well today. This trains your brain to notice opportunities instead of just threats. 

Pessimism often leads to a sense of helplessness, where you feel like nothing you do matters. Combat this by focusing on what you can control and take one small, productive step. Action is the natural enemy of pessimistic rumination

5. Prioritise natural light The winter blues are often triggered by a drop in serotonin and an increase in melatonin due to lack of sunlight. Try to get outside within two hours of waking up, even if it’s cloudy. Just twenty minutes of natural light and fresh air can help reset your circadian rhythm.

6. Create Hygge. Pronounced hoo-ga is the Danish mindset to making a long, dark winter feel like a gift rather than a chore. It’s a mindset of intentional coziness and finding joy in the simple, quiet moments. The Danes often have a specific corner of their home dedicated to Hygge based comfort, a ‘no-phone zone’, a retreat used strictly for reading, journaling, or just sipping tea and watching the rain or snow. Hygge is about the process, not just the result.

7. Togetherness (social Hygge).While Hygge can be solitary, it’s traditionally about low-stress social connection. Invite two or three close friends over. No fancy dinner, just a big pot of home-made soup, and a board game or good conversation. The goal is closeness and sharing.

8. Eat for your brain. Winter often brings cravings for heavy carbs, but those can lead to sugar crashes that worsen your mood. Since we get less sunshine vitamins in winter, consider eating Vitamin D-rich foods like salmon, eggs, and mushrooms, and Omega-3s, found in walnuts, flaxseeds, and oily fish. These are vital for brain health and mood regulation.

Summary Maintaining a positive mindset during the dark months of Winter is less about forcing a smile and more about cultivating mental resilience through small, intentional habits. When the environment is grey, we have to create our own palette of colour.  It’s okay to have off days.  Authentic optimism is acknowledging the struggle but choosing to believe that a solution exists.

Seek to learn from experience, and develop a questioning attitude and an open mind for new perspectives. The reflective learning cycle is iterative, it doesn't stop after one rotation, you apply what you learn, then continue to reflect and develop further. How did your actions affect the situation? How do your observations today fit with the benefit of hindsight? Step into an honest critique of your actions.

It is completely normal to feel a dip in energy or mood as the days are short, dark and cold. The cloud of winter blues casts a shadow. But Instead of seeing winter as a period of being stuck, try reframing it as a time for rest and preparation. Trees aren't ‘doing nothing’ in January, they are resting and consolidating energy for spring.

When the big picture feels gloomy, focus on small, sensory wins. As Albert Camus said, In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.