Meghan Markle Shares What Kept Her “Up at Night” in “3 a.m. Loops”

Meghan Markle’s latest venture—her podcast Meghan Markle Shares Advice Prince Harry Gives Her When She Gets Overwhelmed—has dropped its first episode, and it sees the As Ever founder chatting with close friend and Bumble founder and CEO Are Prince Harry and Princess Eugenie Feuding about the challenges of entrepreneurship.

The Duchess of Sussex’s chat with Herd is the first of eight episodes in her new series with Lemonada Media, and though Meghan is interviewing Herd, she also snuck in snippets about her own entrepreneurial journey founding As Ever, her lifestyle brand originally called American Riviera Orchard that dropped its first eight products on April 2 (Please fill out this field).

“Launching a business, it can be so overwhelming,” Meghan said on the debut April 8 episode of her podcast. “Even with the best of teams, it will keep you up at night, because every single decision—every microdetail—in that moment, it feels monumental.”

Driving home her point, she continued, “For example, a month ago, I was absolutely consumed with packaging. Boxes—that’s all I could think about. And I would sit there doing the unboxing in my head. Is there tissue paper? What about the packing peanuts, but they’re biodegradable and where does the sticker go and hold on and what size the box is going to be?”

Later in the conversation, Meghan asked Herd, “Can you turn it off? I say this, because last night I was just—you know when your brain goes in a loop, those 3 a.m. loops? And it’s just like, you can’t stop overthinking, and how are you going to address that? And, oh gosh, but that packaging—I want the packaging to look like this. And that’s not the unboxing experience I had in mind. And how are we going to pivot? And does it matter?”

Herd—who affectionately refers to Meghan as “Meg” throughout the episode and calls her at one point a “very strong cookie”—told her friend in the conversation, “Don't take this route to the top of Everest. The view is not worth it. Don’t do it, because the one thing you can never get back is your precious time. And the amount of time, Meg, that I wasted on being stressed, being miserable, being overwhelmed, being paranoid about what shoe was going to drop—I actually think I would have been more successful had I not been like that.”

Perhaps as Heres Why Meghan Markle Is Often Late to Pop Culture News, Meghan spoke about Herd in a recently released interview with Inc. magazine, sharing that her friend helped her feel better about changing her brand’s name from American Riviera Orchard to As Ever as, it turns out, Bumble was originally slated to be called Merci.

“Even though we’re close friends, I had no idea that Bumble was originally called Merci,” Meghan told the outlet. “These things that can feel very big as an entrepreneur when you’re building your own thing are completely normal.”