The Day We Had to Tell 100 People Their Jobs Were on Hold - And What Saved Me
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
By Eli Cohen
Co-Founder of MediTailor
I remember the exact moment it hit me.
Israeli companies were beginning to announce they were sending employees on חל"ת – an unpaid leave of absence – as the world locked down in early 2020. I was the founder of Passportogo, a European immigration services company I'd grown to 150 people. I did the math quickly: we were going to have to do the same to roughly 100 of them.
That was the first time I experienced a panic attack.
Not a dramatic collapse. Something quieter – a tightening, a deep alarm going off inside me. I'd built companies before. I'd failed twice and lost money doing it. But nothing had prepared me for this particular weight: 100 livelihoods, a regulatory environment that had vanished overnight, and a timeline I couldn't see. The uncertainty was total.
What followed wasn't one catastrophic decision. It was something harder – days of relentless pressure with no relief in sight. The stress didn't show up as a problem I could sit down and solve. It showed up as noise. Intrusive thoughts. Repeating fears. A fog that made it nearly impossible to think straight or trust my own judgment. I'd start a thought and lose it halfway through. I'd make a plan and doubt it immediately. Leading people while genuinely unable to see what was coming – that was unlike anything I'd felt before.
And here's what I've since learned: you can't unknow that feeling. You carry it. You know, forever after, exactly what it feels like when the floor disappears beneath you.
I found my way out almost by accident. Somewhere in those days, I started meditating. Not through any structured program – just closing my eyes a few times a day, focusing on my breath, gently pulling my thoughts toward something calm and positive. Thirty to fifty minutes at a time. It felt a little strange at first, sitting quietly while everything around me felt like it was falling apart.
But within days, something shifted.
I'm not sure meditation hits everyone the way it hit me. For me, though, the effect was almost shocking. The intrusive thoughts slowed down. The fog started to clear. I was able to think again – not because the situation had changed, but because something inside me had. I got a hold of myself. And then I got a hold of the situation.
That experience left me with something I keep coming back to: thoughts aren't reality. They feel real – urgent, heavy, like the final word on everything – but they rarely match how things actually unfold. During COVID, it genuinely felt like the world was collapsing around us. And yet, looking back, real good came out of that period for our company and for me personally. The disaster I kept imagining never quite arrived.
So we're better off choosing our thoughts on purpose. Not to pretend things aren't hard – they were. But because positive thinking isn't delusion. It's a choice to protect your ability to show up and lead when it matters most.
Meditation gave me that. And I was so surprised by how quickly it could shift a person's internal state that I became convinced it should be available to anyone who needs it.
That's what became MediTailor – an AI meditation app that learns your emotional patterns and personal goals, then builds a practice tailored to who you're working to become. The company I started after COVID is, in a very direct sense, the thing COVID taught me to build.
Sometimes the season that nearly breaks you is the one that shows you what to build next.
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