I recently had a discussion with my cofounder expressing anxiety he was experiencing. You don't hear that often, even between founders who work tightly together. Most people are trained to speak around their internal state, rather from it (see: "It's fine.")
One of the challenges in growing a company is life happens alongside it making them increasingly difficult to negotiate. In my experience, anxiety in business is not a single waveform. It's two overlapping signals—one fast, one slow—that create interference with increasing amplitudes over time.
Short-term anxiety is the fast wave. It originates from the immediacy of tasks, deadlines, context switching, decisions piling up faster than time expands (see: Parkinson's Law). It's a difficult-to-avoid reality of being upstream from execution while operating in a system that persistently pulls you downstream. Tasks are concrete, comforting. They are also key to an organization to cooperate. Attempting to create space for strategy, requiring space and time to create incomplete (and certainly unsatisfactory) takes is displeasing and often scary.
Long-term anxiety is the slow wave. It builds through existence itself because responsibility in life and business usually compounds. Expectations rise and forward work shifts from solving immediate problems to cultivating multi-year, sometimes multi-decade arcs. Humans generate baseline anxiety by existing (see: Age, Kids, Death). Founders sometimes generate a thicker version because more people and more futures depend on their judgment. Calm periods can feel disorienting after long stretches of wartime execution. We have a dubious characteristic of manufacturing threats.
This isn't something most founders understand at the beginning because the emotional load of starting and then operating a company is not as relevant. It's not clear to me people would start companies if they could understand the incoming cost. The isolation becomes structural. Even recognition doesn't stop the overload.
In practice my approach to the oscillation is straightforward. Short anxiety responds to action. Just do the damn thing, over and over again. Long anxiety responds to zooming out that the amplitude shrinks and becomes proportional to the timeline it sits within (or what Buddhists call "Acceptance"). Imagine and commit to the longer timeline since you were going to be doing this for a while anyways.
Even then, every founder path has a natural expiration date. There's practical limits to start now or think bigger and many operators, including this one, burns through internal capacity. I believe the latter happens more often than noted.
Companies rarely collapse suddenly. They decay when the person steering them does.
It is human to work with anxiety, there's nothing unusual about any of this.