The Lockup Period: Financial Paralysis and the Psychological Cost of Waiting

MONEY AND IDENTITY • July 25, 2026

The Stock Price She Could Not Stop Watching

Rae keeps her phone face down on the kitchen counter now, a small rule she made for herself after the fourth night in a row she woke at 2 a.m. to check the after hours price. Face down does not mean out of reach. She still knows, within about ninety seconds, whether the number moved. Her company went public five weeks ago. The headlines called it a triumph. Her calendar still says founder, her badge still gets her into the building, and her net worth, according to the ticker, is higher than she ever let herself imagine it could be. She cannot spend one dollar of it.

Rae is a composite drawn from patterns across many clients. The specific ache she is describing, wealth that is legally hers and functionally out of reach, is one I hear constantly from driven women moving through a post-IPO lockup period. She built the product. She hired the team. She sat through the investor meetings where other people decided things about her company that she had spent a decade shaping. Now she sits through a different kind of meeting: the one she has with herself at 2 a.m., watching a number tick up and down on a screen, unable to do a single thing about it either way.

In my work with founders and executives moving through this exact window, I see the same pattern show up again and again. It is not greed, and it is not an inability to be grateful for good fortune. It is the specific, disorienting experience of being handed enormous financial news and then told, contractually, that you may not act on it for months. The mind does not know what to do with a fact that big and that frozen at the same time. Rae describes it as trying to sleep next to a fire alarm that never quite goes off and never quite stays quiet either.

This post names what Rae is living through: the lockup period that follows most public offerings, and the specific, often unacknowledged toll of watching a life-changing number you are legally barred from touching. It is educational content, not a diagnosis, and not a label for anyone. If money stress in your life has become severe enough to affect your sleep, your relationships, or your daily functioning for an extended stretch, please bring that to a licensed mental health professional or a financial advisor you trust. You can read more about what it means to build a self-trust protocol when your own instincts feel unreliable, and about why setting boundaries can feel impossible even when you know exactly what you need.

What the Lockup Period Actually Is

Before we can talk about what the lockup period does to a person, it helps to be plain about what it actually is. Nothing here is a mystery or a conspiracy. It is a standard, contractual feature of going public, and understanding its mechanics is the first step toward feeling less crazy inside it.

The reasoning behind the lockup makes sense on paper. If every insider sold shares the moment the market opened, the stock could flood and its price could collapse, hurting the very investors the offering was meant to attract. A lockup gives the market time to settle into a price that reflects actual demand rather than a panic of insiders cashing out simultaneously. There is also a tax dimension worth naming plainly and briefly: selling immediately, without any planning, can create a messier tax outcome than selling on a more considered timeline. None of that context is meant as an argument that the waiting is easy. It only explains why the rule exists at all.

What rarely gets named is the emotional weight of that gap between “worth” and “have.” Research examining financial well-being during a period of prolonged uncertainty found a clear link between financial instability and worse mental health outcomes, including a persistence of that strain well past the point where the immediate crisis had technically passed (PMID 40387129). A woman in a lockup period is not in a financial crisis in the traditional sense. Her balance sheet, on paper, has probably never looked better. But the instability of not knowing what that number will actually be worth once she can finally touch it produces a similar kind of strain, even while everyone around her assumes she is popping champagne.

The lockup period is not a punishment and it is not a personal referendum on whether a founder deserves her wealth. It is a mechanical feature of how public markets are built to behave. Understanding that distinction does not make the waiting comfortable. It does make it easier to stop asking what you did wrong, when the honest answer is that you did nothing wrong. You are simply standing inside a structure that was never designed with your nervous system in mind.

Why Watching a Number You Cannot Control Wears You Down

There is a simpler way to describe what happens to a person during a lockup period than reaching for anything technical: it is what happens to anyone, in any context, who is forced to watch something enormously important to them without being allowed to influence the outcome. You do not need a diagnosis to understand why this wears a person down. You need only remember the last time you waited on a piece of news you cared about and could do nothing to affect while you waited.

Waiting on an outcome you cannot control is different from ordinary stress, because ordinary stress usually has an action attached to it, something to do, some way to help the situation along even slightly. A lockup period removes the action entirely and leaves only the watching. Rae describes checking the price as something closer to compulsion than curiosity, a habit her hands perform before her mind has decided to allow it. This is common, not a personal failing, and it says more about the structure of the situation than it does about her discipline or her character.

Research on resilience and future-focused anxiety found that the harder a person finds it to tolerate uncertainty, the more that difficulty predicts anxiety about what is still to come, and the more that anxiety, in turn, erodes overall well-being (PMID 40685469). That same research also found that resilience, the capacity to keep functioning through a hard stretch, appeared to soften this chain somewhat, suggesting that the goal during a lockup period is not to eliminate uncertainty, which is not possible, but to build enough steadiness elsewhere in life that the uncertainty has less room to spread.

Novelist Mohsin Hamid has written about the particular vertigo of watching a life change shape in real time, faster than a person’s sense of self can keep pace with it, and that vertigo is close kin to what a founder in a lockup period experiences daily. The number on the screen is moving faster than her identity can update to match it. She built a company. She did not build a stable relationship with a stock ticker, and nobody teaches that skill in business school.

What tends to make this worse, not better, is the cultural assumption that a founder in this position should simply feel lucky and stop complaining. Gratitude and distress are not opposites, and a woman can hold real appreciation for what she built alongside a genuine, physically felt strain from watching a number she cannot influence swing by hundreds of thousands of dollars in an afternoon. Neither feeling cancels the other. Both are simply true, and pretending only one of them is allowed tends to push the harder feeling underground rather than resolving it.

How Lockup Stress Shows Up

Ruthie made her company’s Series C round with a slide deck she wrote herself at 1 a.m., three kids asleep down the hall, and she has never once considered herself a person who rattles easily. Ruthie is a composite drawn from patterns across many clients. The exact shape of what she is living through, extraordinary composure at work and a private unraveling everywhere else, is something I see constantly among driven women moving through the months after their company’s public debut.

Her lockup period runs 180 days. She is 40 days in. She has started checking the price before she checks her email, before she checks the weather, before she has said a word to her family in the morning. It is not that she thinks checking will change anything. She knows, rationally, that nothing she does today will move that number by a fraction of a cent. The checking happens anyway, a reflex her body performs faster than her judgment can intervene.

Ruthie’s sleep went first. She used to fall asleep within minutes, worn out from actual work. Now she lies awake running scenarios about where the stock might land on the day her shares finally free up, doing math she has already done a dozen times, as though a thirteenth calculation might produce a different, more comforting number. Her concentration during the day has become noticeably patchier, small emails taking three drafts instead of one, though nobody at the office has noticed, because she still shows up polished, prepared, and apparently unbothered.

Research on attachment anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty found that people who struggle more with not knowing how a situation will resolve are more likely to develop compensatory behaviors, repeated checking chief among them, as a way of managing the discomfort of the unknown even when the checking itself provides no actual control (PMID 40516160). Ruthie’s compulsive checking is not a discipline problem. It is a completely understandable response to a situation engineered, structurally, to deny her any real influence over an outcome she cares about enormously.

What makes this pattern especially hard to name out loud is how it looks from the outside. Ruthie is, by every visible measure, thriving. She closed two new partnerships this quarter. Colleagues describe her as unshakeable. That description is not wrong about her competence, and it is also blind to the fact that competence and quiet distress are not mutually exclusive. A woman can run a board meeting flawlessly at 10 a.m. and check a stock app forty times before dinner. Both are true of the same day, sometimes the same hour.

The Phantom Wealth Problem

There is a specific kind of dissonance that comes from being, on paper, extremely wealthy, while living a daily life that has not changed in any tangible way. Rae still packs her own lunch. Ruthie still drives the same car she bought four years before her company ever filed to go public. Neither woman has purchased anything to mark the milestone, because neither of them can access the money that supposedly marks it. The wealth exists. It is simply not theirs to use yet.

The phantom wealth problem produces a strange kind of loneliness, because it is a hard thing to talk about without sounding either ungrateful or out of touch. Try explaining to a friend that a number worth millions of dollars is causing you genuine distress, and watch the conversation stall. Most people, reasonably, assume that having money solves the problem money-related stress implies. Phantom wealth breaks that assumption, because the number and the access to the number are not the same thing, and only one of them currently exists in a form she can use.

That hunger, the wanting of something true and solid rather than something merely displayed, is close to what both women describe wanting most during the lockup period. Not more money. Not a bigger number. Just certainty, a floor under their feet that does not move every time the market opens. Writer Colson Whitehead has written about the particular ache of a life measured in numbers that keep shifting underneath a person’s sense of who they are, and that ache is exactly what phantom wealth produces: a life that looks resolved from the outside and feels entirely unresolved from within.

Research on worry and mindfulness found that people who reported higher trait mindfulness, meaning a steadier, more present-focused relationship to their own thoughts, also reported less sleep-related worry, suggesting that some of the felt intensity of an uncertain wait can be shaped by how a person relates to their own thinking about it, not only by the external facts of the situation (PMID 40598180). This does not mean Rae or Ruthie should simply think their way out of a structurally difficult situation. It does mean that how they relate to the waiting matters as much as the waiting itself, and that this relationship can be built rather than simply endured.

Both/And: The Lockup Is Protecting You and The Waiting Is Genuinely Hard

Here is a genuine both/and, not a tidy resolution where one truth erases the other. It is true that the lockup period serves a legitimate purpose. It protects the stock from a flood of insider selling that could tank its price. It gives the market time to settle. It is a valid, defensible structure that exists for reasons that have nothing to do with punishing the people bound by it. That is true and it matters.

And it is also true that the waiting is genuinely hard, in a way that deserves to be named rather than minimized because the structure behind it is defensible. Rae is not wrong to find the daily checking exhausting. Ruthie is not weak for losing sleep over a number she cannot touch. A rule can be sound and its human cost can still be significant. Neither fact requires the other to be false.

Holding both truths at once, rather than collapsing into either “this is fine, stop complaining” or “this is unbearable, the whole system is broken,” is most of the actual work of this stage. Rae does not need to choose between accepting the structural logic of the lockup and being honest about how much the waiting costs her. She needs both understandings at the same time, without either one quietly erasing the other.

Research on socioeconomic strain and mental health outcomes offers a useful, if unexpected, angle here: even in situations where financial resources are not actually threatened, uncertainty and disrupted expectations around money and security are associated with worse mental state outcomes, indicating that the psychological cost of financial unpredictability is not solely about the amount of money involved (PMID 40493041). Rae’s wealth is not at risk in any meaningful sense. The unpredictability she is living inside, day to day, is real regardless, and it deserves to be treated as real rather than dismissed because her bank balance will likely be fine in the end.

The both/and here is not a compromise position. It is simply accurate. The lockup protects the market. The waiting still wears a person down. A founder can say thank you for the outcome and still say this part is hard, in the same breath, without either statement undoing the other.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Lockup Period Is Never Framed as a Mental Health Event

It would be incomplete to talk about the lockup period as though it were purely a private, internal experience, separate from the systems that surround a founder the moment her company goes public. Investment banks, legal teams, financial advisors, and the broader culture of entrepreneurship all shape how this period is discussed, and almost none of them discuss it as anything other than a legal and financial technicality.

The professionals who guide a founder through an offering are focused, understandably, on compliance, valuation, and market mechanics. None of them are trained to ask how she is sleeping. There is an unspoken expectation, baked into the culture around entrepreneurship, that a founder who has “made it” should simply feel grateful and quiet, and that raising any distress about the process risks looking ungrateful or, worse, unserious about the scale of her own good fortune. This leaves many women moving through the lockup period entirely alone with a private experience nobody around them expects them to be having.

Consider how differently this would be treated if the emotional content were separated from the financial one. A person forced to watch, for months, a number of enormous personal significance shift unpredictably, with zero ability to act, would be recognized in almost any other context as living through a genuinely stressful situation. Attach a dollar sign to that number, however, and the stress becomes invisible, reframed instead as an enviable problem, one polite conversation would rather not linger on.

This omission is not accidental. It reflects a broader cultural discomfort with acknowledging that money and mental state are connected at all, particularly when the money in question is substantial. The result is that founders, especially women founders who may already feel pressure to appear composed and grateful in an industry that rewards exactly that performance, are left to manage significant private strain with no established language for naming it, let alone asking for support around it.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem has written about characters whose fortunes shift them into a new social category before their inner life has any framework for the change, and that lag between outward circumstance and inward readiness is exactly the gap the systems around a founder tend to ignore. Nobody hands her a map for what to do with the feeling. They hand her paperwork instead, and assume the paperwork is the whole story.

This is not a call to villainize bankers or lawyers who are simply doing the job they were hired to do. It is a call to notice the gap in the system: nobody involved in the mechanics of an offering is positioned, or expected, to ask a founder how the waiting is actually landing in her body and her daily life. That gap connects to broader patterns worth understanding, including how codependency shows up in driven women who have learned to prioritize everyone else’s comfort over naming their own distress, and how people pleasing as a response to old patterns can make it especially hard for a driven woman to admit that a supposedly enviable situation is quietly costing her.

The Way Ahead

If Rae’s 2 a.m. checking or Ruthie’s patchy concentration felt familiar, here is what tends to genuinely help, offered as an invitation rather than a prescription, because no single approach fits every founder living through this particular kind of waiting.

The first shift is usually structural rather than emotional: deciding, in advance, on a fixed and limited window for checking the price, rather than letting the checking happen reflexively throughout the day. This is not about denial or pretending the number does not matter. It is about interrupting a compulsive loop that offers no actual benefit and considerable cost. Research on intolerance of uncertainty and future anxiety suggests that resilience, built through structure and steady routines rather than sheer willpower, can meaningfully soften the link between uncertainty and anxiety over time (PMID 40685469). A fixed checking window is one small, concrete piece of that structure.

The second shift is finding someone to talk to who understands the specific shape of this problem, rather than someone who will simply tell her how lucky she is. Financial therapists, executive coaches familiar with post-exit and post-IPO dynamics, and clinicians who work specifically with driven women can offer language and structure that a well-meaning friend usually cannot. Research on financial well-being and mental health during prolonged uncertainty points to why outside support matters here: the strain of financial unpredictability tends to persist well past the point most people assume it should have resolved on its own, which means waiting it out alone is rarely the fastest path through it (PMID 40387129).

The third piece is building a concrete plan for the day the lockup actually ends, well before that day arrives. Working with a trusted financial advisor to decide, in advance, what selling and diversification will look like once shares are released gives the mind something productive to do with all that anticipatory energy. It will not stop the waiting. It does convert some of the powerlessness into preparation, which tends to feel meaningfully different even when the external timeline has not changed at all.

The fourth piece, and perhaps the most overlooked, is simply naming the strain out loud to at least one person who will not immediately respond with “must be nice.” Research on attachment and intolerance of uncertainty suggests that compensatory behaviors like compulsive checking tend to ease when the underlying anxiety has somewhere else to go, including being spoken aloud rather than carried silently (PMID 40516160). Rae found real relief the first time she said, plainly, to one trusted friend, that the money was making her miserable in a way she had not expected and felt embarrassed to admit.

None of this requires either Rae or Ruthie to feel less grateful for what they built. Gratitude and exhaustion can share the same sentence. What tends to help most is treating the lockup period as what research increasingly suggests it is: a genuine period of psychological strain shaped by uncertainty and lost agency, not a minor inconvenience attached to good news. Building steadier daily structure, seeking support that understands the specific texture of this problem, and preparing concretely for what comes after all shift the experience from something endured to something managed. That slower, steadier work connects to what I write about in understanding relational trauma more broadly, in complex PTSD, in the signs you are healing from something hard, in anxious attachment patterns, in fearful avoidant attachment, in trauma bonding, in a complete guide to betrayal and trust, in narcissistic abuse recovery, in why a person keeps attracting a familiar dynamic, in how attachment patterns explain an outgrown marriage, and in trauma-informed therapy for driven women. The lockup period will end. What you build for yourself while you wait does not have to.

Warmly, Annie.

Related Reading

Shah, Rishika V., et al. “Financial Well-being and Impact on Alcohol and Mental Health Outcomes During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journal of Addiction Medicine, 2025.

Satici, Seydi Ahmet, et al. “Resilience, Intolerance of Uncertainty, Future Anxiety and Mental Well Being among Young Researchers.” Psychiatric Quarterly, 2025.

Gregorini, Camilla, et al. “The Role of Attachment Anxiety and Intolerance of Uncertainty in Gaming during Adolescence.” Comprehensive Psychiatry, 2025.

Hu, Yali, et al. “Association Between Sleep-Related Worry and Trait Mindfulness Among Shift Nurses.” BMC Nursing, 2025.

Wang, Jiangrong, et al. “Mental Disorders and Socioeconomic Outcomes in Women with Cervical Cancer, and Their Children and Co-Parents.” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2025.

References

Shah RV, Luk JW, Schwandt ML, et al. Financial Well-being and Impact on Alcohol and Mental Health Outcomes During the COVID-19 Pandemic. J Addict Med. 2025. PMID: 40387129.

Satici SA, Kutuk H, Okur S, et al. Resilience, Intolerance of Uncertainty, Future Anxiety and Mental Well Being among Young Researchers. Psychiatr Q. 2025. PMID: 40685469.

Gregorini C, Marino C, Giardina A, et al. The Role of Attachment Anxiety and Intolerance of Uncertainty in Gaming During Adolescence: A Two-Wave Longitudinal Study. Compr Psychiatry. 2025. PMID: 40516160.

Hu Y, Sun X, Yuan Y, Wang H. Association Between Sleep-Related Worry and Trait Mindfulness Among Shift Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Study. BMC Nurs. 2025. PMID: 40598180.

Wang J, Salomonsson S, Sonmez D, et al. Mental Disorders and Socioeconomic Outcomes in Women with Cervical Cancer, and Their Children and Co-Parents. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2025. PMID: 40493041.

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