Entrepreneurship is uniquely stressful. Entrepreneurs often cannot avoid entrepreneurial stressors (e.g., uncertainty, workload, resource constraints) and these stressors can deter natural recovery activities (e.g., detachment and sleep). Yet, entrepreneurs may be able to lessen the negative impact of stress on their well-being, health, and productivity by engaging in recovery. In this editorial, we outline how scholars can employ recovery interventions to ameliorate some of entrepreneurship’s ill effects and support entrepreneurs’ health, well-being, and productivity. We aim to move the focus of scholarly inquiry from documenting the health and well-being challenges of entrepreneurs, toward identifying and implementing solutions to support entrepreneurs.

In spite of enthusiastic encouragements, theories of entrepreneurship still poorly explain the influence of physiological resources and dynamics on entrepreneurs' abilities to perform cognitive tasks known to enable entrepreneurial action. To advance research in this area, we develop and test new theoretical notions about sleep's effects on entrepreneurs' abilities to imagine promising new venture ideas, and to form initial beliefs about the attractiveness of such ideas. Results from three studies, including a self-comparison study over time and a randomized sleep deprivation experiment, show that a good night of sleep positively influences entrepreneurs' abilities to perform cognitive tasks at the very basis of entrepreneurial pursuits, whereas shortchanging sleep can yield suboptimal performance.

Investors in early-stage companies want to detect and select high-potential opportunities to maximize their long-term returns. However, in uncertain and risky early-stage investment contexts, company information is often opaque, and decision-making timeframes are compressed. Although there is an abundance of prior work on how investors make structured decisions based on their experience and expertise, there is a very limited understanding of how time-based factors can sway investment decisions. The circadian process is the 24-hour sequence that serves as an individual's internal timer influencing not only sleep cycles, but also attention and performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks. Understanding how the circadian process impacts early-stage investment holds implications for optimal investment decisions. We build on social cognitive theory and propose that investor-level factors (i.e., chronotypes) and environmental factors (time of the day) interact to influence the amount of information investors search for, and consequently, their investment decisions. We hypothesize and find that investors are influenced by the time of day they make early-stage investment decisions. Lark investors make better investment decisions in the morning, whereas owl investors make better decisions in the evening. Information search effort mediates this relationship.