While making money has its benefits, it can also negatively affect your mental health in a way that can be difficult to recover. Moreover, financial stress caused by bad spending habits increases your risk of developing anxiety or depression. As a result, you can find yourself stuck in a cycle to find motivation to manage your finances properly, which further weakens your mental health.
The Financial Stress of Overspending
Regardless of who you are, you want to be rewarded for your hard work. By spending your money on things you want, you get a brief moment to feel good about yourself. This high can be incredibly addictive especially if you’re struggling with mental health issues. In fact, purchasing things may feel like a drug as you can develop bad spending habits just to get the familiar adrenaline rush over and over again.
Spending money may make you happier in the short term, but it often gets worse as time goes on since you’re more likely to develop bad impulse control regarding your spending habits. What’s more? This lack of impulse control can happen because of mania’s or hypomania’s effect on your mental health. Similarly, your ability to study or work may be impacted by these mental health issues as well.
Due to these struggles, your income may take a hit. With your income decreasing, your anxiety elevates as the money you spend begins to outweigh what you’re making. Consequently, you may avoid keeping a close eye on your bank accounts or won’t open bills because of the anxiety. In addition to not checking on your bank account, your insurance may go up, which means you’ll have to pay more to keep it.
Money Affects Mental Health
Unfortunately, there are various ways money can impact your mental health, leading to specific health problems. For instance, certain situations can trigger specific issues such as anxiety and depression. Generally, you may even develop sleeping problems because of constantly worrying about money. Lacking money also makes it challenging to find help since you can no longer afford it. These resources may include necessities such as food and water or treatments like therapy and medication. Likewise, financial stress can negatively affect your relationships and social life. Thus, you may struggle with loneliness and feelings of isolation as you can no longer afford help or to do things that you want to do.
Emotions Associated with Money Management
Spending money is way more complex than just making you feel good or bad. In fact, you may struggle with various emotions by simply thinking about it. Specifically, spending money can lead to conflicted feelings of guilt even if you can afford whatever you’re purchasing. Likewise, you can feel guilty seeking help for your health or financial problems even when it’s needed. Sadly, this guilt can lead to feeling ashamed as stigmas surrounding mental health and poverty are still prominent.
Comparatively, you may struggle with anxiety from external pressure especially if you’re the breadwinner in your household. You may struggle to support yourself and your loved ones because of your money problems. Besides that, you may find it difficult to seek the benefits system as that can be even more stressful on its own. This anxiety can lead to burnout if you’ve been dealing with mental health and money issues over a long period of time. Likewise, being a victim of financial abuse can negatively impact your feelings surrounding money as well.
Improving Mental Health and Financial Stress
You must understand your feelings about money as it can help alleviate any financial stress you have. For example, dealing with money struggles in your childhood can affect your overall feelings surrounding money today. By asking questions about your money habits through self-reflection, you can begin to improve your money management. Some questions you can ask yourself are when and how often you spend money, and what aspects of managing your money worsen your mental health.
Since there’s a link between anxiety and money management, you can’t improve one and not the other. Simply put, you must address both of these issues at the same time to get better. One way to treat these issues is by keeping a diary to keep track of your spending and your feelings around it before and after a purchase. By doing this, you gain better clarity in knowing your habits around money and its effect on your mental health so you can improve your money management.
Disclaimer: This article is intended simply to provide information. It does not replace the medical advice of a physician or other medical professional. Please speak with your doctor or therapist if you have any questions or concerns.
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