Financial anxiety can happen to anyone. Let’s talk about the one thing I teach my clients to help them navigate financial stress.
Approximate read time: 12 minutes
Annie came to me through a friend. Her friend saw Annie spiraling, constantly anxious about money, constantly talking about her financial stress, returning every conversation to a desperate request “What do you think I should do?!”.
“I have to do something!!!” Annie said at the beginning of our very first conversation. “This debt is killing me, I can barely make ends meet, I can’t ever seem to save any money, I’m working two jobs now, and no matter what I do I can’t ever get ahead! What’s the point of working this hard if I don’t have a goddamn thing to show for it!?”
Annie’s comments are not uncommon. Financial stress can present itself in several ways:
-Impatience
-Self-Doubt
-Defaulting to making more money
-Inability to think about the future
-Obsessively task-oriented
Impatience
Feeling like you have to do everything RIGHT NOW. This impatience is motivated by some pretty good things, though, and can keep us driving towards getting ourselves out of the situation we’re in, BUT it can also lead to “right-now” thinking. Present-focused decision making is often lightning fast, reactive, and deeply emotional.
The irony isn’t lost on me, of course. We want so desperately to get ourselves clear of the situation we’re in RIGHT NOW that we might make choices that make it even harder to get out of tight spots in the future.
Present-focused thinking CREATES financial stress in the future
Annie told me a story about her impatience:
“The divorce was brutal. I know everyone says that, but mine really was. He just pushed everything to its breaking point, including me AND my attorney. Every little win for me drove me crazy, so by the end, I just wanted it to be over. I knew then, and I know now that that was his strategy, to wear me out. And in the end, it worked, of course. I agreed to too much. My attorney was livid, and tried to talk me into continuing to fight him, but I just couldn’t. I had nothing left. So I agreed to less time with the kids, less money in the settlement, less of everything, just to get it over with. I couldn’t imagine another day being that exhausted and that stressed out, so one day I just signed. It’s impossible that I did that, but I did it. I remember thinking ‘I just have to get this over with… I can’t keep doing this…’”
We’ve all been where Annie was at some point in our lives. We’ll do anything, EVERYTHING to stop the pain, and that impatience very often means future versions of ourselves take on a lot of risk.
Self-Doubt
This is the sense that you cannot trust yourself with money and that no matter what you do, you’re making the wrong choice.
There are several reasons why we succumb to self-doubt over time. One reason you might find yourself doubting decisions is because you’ve heard an invasive (and wrong) message over the years… the message that there are good and bad choices to make with money, and you just have to be smart enough to figure out which choices are right and which are wrong.
During one of our sessions, Annie told me another story about making the right choices.
“I took the job at the catering company because it paid well, or I thought it did. I remember when we were kids my mom was always working these horrible jobs that paid nothing and made her feel like nothing, so when the catering job came up, I jumped at it. And it did pay well, I guess, but not for the b******t they put me through. I worked A LOT. I didn’t see my kids, and no matter what I did I could never get caught up, never work enough. It feels so stupid now.”
Whenever we solve for one thing (taking a high paying job is the “right” choice), we are making emotional decisions. Stuck in the trap of right and wrong, we lose the ability to see the complexities of our decisions. Your life, like Annie’s, is far too complex, messy and beautiful to be able to solve for just one thing. But our overwhelmed, anxious, impatient brains default to that simplistic black and white thinking because it might feel impossible to do anything else.
Defaulting to making more money
“I know what I need to do… I just need to make more money!” Annie said during one of our earlier sessions. “I’m not sure how I can, but I just need to… how long can’t keep doing this. I can’t not see my kids AND still not have enough money!”
Like the impatience we talked about above, this gut-driven instinct to “just make more money” makes a of simplistic sense.
Money is stressing me out = I need more money.
This also reinforces the scarcity mindset, however.
Even when we consider all the times before that we’ve made more money, gotten a raise, had a windfall or tax return and can prove to ourselves that those influxes of money made little difference to our stress levels, it doesn’t matter! We’ve been told “just make more money” so many times we actually believe it’s true.
This is especially important as we age, because there is absolutely a top limit to our earning years. In our youth, our earning potential looks nearly infinite, but all too soon, the decades of chasing income catch up and there is no more income left to chase.
Inability to think about the future
This is not a personality defect, but an artifact of a stressed-out brain. And if you can’t think about the future you certainly can’t plan for it.
“I’ve got to get out of this!” Annie said. So when I asked her what her life might look like after she’s paid off her debt, caught up on her bills and can feel like she can trust herself with financial decisions, she froze.
Getting out of debt, building savings, and trusting yourself with your money are things I work towards with my clients, but they are not goals. The resolution of a negative is not a positive, it’s neutral.
That means that coaching is meant to get clients like Annie to their STARTING POINT. I often am not part of the achievement of goals, because my coaching is no longer necessary and my clients can reach those goals by themselves!
I can teach anyone to trust themselves with their money, build and adapt financial systems to their lives, but after that I’m not needed.
We can’t think about the future if we’re stuck in the present
Annie was absolutely stuck in this present bias. It’s an easy trap to fall into. After all, the only version of you that can feel any pain or discomfort is the Right-Now (present) version of you. So of course we care for ourselves in the present! Self-care is (mostly) for the Right-Now version of you, but so is procrastination.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between self-care and procrastination. Trying to define these terms in such binary, black-and-white ways does no favors for our decision-making
Your life is too beautiful, messy, and complex for there to be perfectly right or wrong decisions.
Obsessively task-oriented
It’s not uncommon that during times of stress our connections to others takes a hit. You may even feel isolated from the people closest to you.
In times of stress we can often default to task mode. Get this done, get that done, work, work, work. And again, I get that this seems like a logical way out of stress. Work harder! For many of us in our productivity-obsessed culture, the default to task mode is lighting fast. But there is a top limit to how hard we can work.
And as we hyperfocus on tasks, we automatically lose our connection to others.
How to finally resolve financial stress
Sure, you’re going to hear “make a budget”, “have an emergency fund”, and “pay off debt” from traditional financial wisdom, but did you really need to be told that? Probably not.
The primary thing I teach my clients that reduces their financial stress?
I teach them how to trust themselves with their money.
There is no difference between being resilient and trusting yourself… they are exactly the same thing.
To make (and keep) a budget, grow an emergency fund, and pay off debt you’ll need to be able to trust yourself.
Imagine what Annie’s life would have looked like if she had trusted herself in her decision making about taking the catering job? Would she have been able to look for another job that checked a few more boxes for her rather than just jumping at the first job she saw?
If Annie had been able to trust herself, to know that she had her own back, she might have been able to make slightly slower decisions around child care, her ex, and what she agreed to during the divorce.
Self-doubt is the opposite of trusting ourselves
If Annie had been able to trust herself, would she have felt the need to beat herself up or force herself?
Defaulting to “I just need to make more money” too would probably have been unnecessary if Annie knew she could trust herself. By hyperfocusing on just making more money, she effectively put blinders on herself. Those blinders mean she can’t see any other option besides making more money.
Trusting ourselves (with money, or all the things) means our decision making slows down. Your brain is incredibly fast at decision making, and that fast decision making is almost always going to focus around RIGHT NOW. Slower choices (even just a second longer) means our brains have the chance to think about the future. And sure I’m talking about 10 years from now, but also tomorrow morning!
Making our lives easier in the future seems costly to our stressed brains because we tend to take care of the right-now version of ourselves. After all, that’s the version of us that self-care is for, but it’s also the version of us that procrastination is for too.
My hope is that by now I’ve convinced you that trusting yourself is the way through financial stress, but I hear you asking “ok cool, Hanna, but HOW?”
Learning to trust yourself
This may sound counterintuitive, but I’d like you to practice trusting yourself OUTSIDE of your financial life, at least for a little while. If we jump right in to practicing financial resilience we build failure into this practice.
Thinking about the future is difficult for our brains. It’s not that your brain is doing something wrong. It’s just that there’s a lot of variables so our brains kind of just give up and don’t think about the future.
But thinking about the future is critical because we need to be able to think about it to plan for it. Here’s our conflict:
“I need to think about the future, but thinking about the future is hard.”
So let’s talk about one tool (really it’s just a game) for building trust in yourself that isn’t financial!
The game is called “Second Wave Self Care”, because it is designed to make thinking about the future easier while also making your life easier.
The rules to Second Wave Self Care (SWSC) are simple:
You’re going to look for task that:
- is at least a little uncomfortable for Right-Now You.
- will make life easier for you tomorrow (not weeks, months or days from now)
- is microscopically small.
Why does it need to be a little uncomfortable?
Because we’re training your brain that you can survive little hard things. Resilience is built cumulatively so it doesn’t have to be life or death. More on this when we talk about the most important step below. The smaller your SWSC tasks are the better it will work.
Why does it need to be for tomorrow-you?
Because if we try to go too far out, our brains get overwhelmed. Tomorrow is easy enough to think about, and we get the chance to reap the rewards of that little task sooner than if we we’re aiming for 10 years from now. If you want to really ramp up the efficiency of this part, imagine yourself tomorrow making use of this nice thing you’re doing for yourself. So if my SWSC task is to fold one towel, I visualize myself using the towel tomorrow as I’m folding it today.
Why does it need to be microscopically small?
Because if we practice this game on tasks that are too big, we raise the stakes. The purpose of this game is not to get chores done (although that does happen). The purpose of this game is to teach your brain that you can survive small things, and that those small things do have a positive impact on your daily life.
The most important step.
As you complete the task, you need to ask yourself “Did I Die?”
This is the most important step even though it is a bit silly. Asking yourself “Did I die?” works to regulate our stressed-out brains because our brains actually check to see if we died. I realize this sounds like nonsense, but that brief check-in gives our brains a little break, just for a moment. Plus, we are reinforcing to our brains that we can survive difficult things, which further reinforces resilience!
Here are some examples of SWSC tasks my clients have completed:
-Backing the car into the parking spot
-Setting up coffee the night before
-Laying out workout clothes
-Setting out a roll of toilet paper before it’s needed
So what do you think you’ll notice as you make your right-now self just a little annoyed while making your life easier tomorrow?
Which small financial tasks could you practice SWSC on?
In conclusion
The one and only thing you need to navigate financial stress is to trust yourself!