Paying with our health: 4 tips to financial recovery

It’s official: Money is stressful. 

For the seventh year in a row, the American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that money is the top source of stress for American adults. More than a quarter of Americans say they feel stressed about money most or all of the time. Only 30 percent rate their financial security as high (8, 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale where 1 is not at all financially secure), and more than two-thirds believe that more money would make them happier.

People deal with stress in many different ways — sometimes healthy, often not. People commonly deal with anxiety by avoiding whatever it is that makes them anxious. Unfortunately, if you avoid dealing with your finances, you’ll likely create more financial problems, and more anxiety, in the long term.

Money matters are too important to ignore. Financial illiteracy is linked to money mismanagement and to debt. Debt, in turn, is associated with lower self-esteem, lower productivity and greater stress. Unsurprisingly, research has also linked financial strain to depression.

If you’re struggling with financial avoidance or financial denial, you can take action to get your money matters back on track.

Warning signs

How do you know if you’re avoiding reality when it comes to finances? Here are some of the clues:

• You try to put money and finances out of your mind.
• You avoid talking about money with family and friends.
• You avoid opening bank statements or credit card bills.
• You don’t know what your credit score is.
• You don’t know your net worth.

If you can relate to any of these feelings and behaviors, it may be time to take a hard look at your relationship with money.

Beliefs and attitudes

We develop our beliefs and attitudes about money early in life. Often, we aren't even consciously aware of what our beliefs are, let alone where we learned them. If you’re dealing with financial avoidance or financial denial, it can help to think critically about the money beliefs you learned in childhood. Think about what your parents taught you about money. Talk to family members about their money beliefs. Then try to challenge your existing beliefs about money.

Many people feel embarrassed about their debt, ashamed that they let bank statements pile up unread. But that shame keeps you stuck. Try to move past the self-blame so you can take some concrete steps toward financial health.

Take action

1. Keep tabs. Tracking your income and your spending is critical to healthy finances. If you’re not tracking money coming in and money going out, you don’t know if you’re spending your resources on the things that really matter to you.
2. Develop a spending plan. For some people the word “budget” like the word “diet,” calls to mind feeling deprived. Instead of figuring out where to cut back, think about what you want to spend. If going to concerts or sporting events is really important to you, you might decide to spend more money on those outings and less on dining out or cable television. By making such decisions more intentional, you’ll get the most bang for your buck.
3. Make it easy on yourself. Use automated systems as much as possible. Arrange to have a portion of your paycheck automatically deposited into your savings account and your retirement account. Set up automatic reminders to alert you when a bill is due. It’s a lot harder to make a bad decision when the decision is out of your hands.
4. Use tools. Technology makes it easier than ever to stay on track financially. A variety of software programs and apps can help you track spending and set spending and saving targets.

Seek professional help

It’s not easy to challenge your deeply held beliefs or to change ingrained behaviors. No matter how good your intentions, change is difficult. Psychologists are experts in helping people make lasting behavior changes. Research has shown that psychological treatment programs can reduce distress and anxiety and improve financial health among people with problematic financial behaviors.

Source: APA.org/helpdesk

Learn just how money stress affects your brain and health.

In the New York Capital region? 1. Get my book here or on Amazon.com. Healing the Brain: Stress & Money. 2. Contact me, David Balog, a licensed financial representative, for a free consultation. Call 646-667-4254 or email dbalog99@gmail.com.

Trump: Insomniac in chief?

Donald Trump is known for his lack of sleep (tweeting in the small hours of the morning). Problem is he's got a growing nation of insomniacs, frightened awake at his erratic, upsetting behavior. What is sleep and why do we need it to maintain health? This article from the Dana Foundation gives an overview. Learn about brain essentials in our book, Healing the Brain.

A good deal of progress has been made recently in understanding why sleep is so important. Recent studies have shown that both acute sleep deprivation (staying awake all night) and chronic sleep restriction (sleeping only a few hours/night for 1-2 weeks) impair many cognitive functions, from vigilance and attention to speech and humor appreciation. 

We also know that it may take more than one or two days to recover after chronic sleep loss, so oversleeping during the week-end may not be enough, if the accumulated sleep debt is large. There is also strong evidence that sleep need varies significantly among individuals, although why some of us can function well with much less sleep than others remains unclear. Other studies show that a night of sleep benefits the acquisition of new information the next day (new learning during sleep, instead, remains largely a dream). 

Sleep also leads to the consolidation and integration of memories, both declarative memories - those one can recollect consciously, such as lists of words or associations between pictures and places, as well as non-declarative memories such as perceptual and motor skills. These experimental results fit the common observation that after intensive learning, say practicing a piece over and over on the guitar, performance often becomes fluid only after a night of sleep. It is likely that when we learn and repeatedly activate certain brain circuits, many synapses end up strengthening, not only when you play the right notes well, but also when you do it badly, or fumble other notes. The result is that, while by practicing you get better and better on average, your performance remains a bit noisy and variable. 

After sleep, it is as if the core of what you learned had been preserved, whereas the chaff is eliminated - that is, sleep seems to notch-up the signal-to-noise ratio. Something similar may happen also with declarative memories: in the face of the hundreds of thousands of scenes we encounter in waking life, memory is particularly effective at gist extraction, where the details (the noise) may be lost, but the main point of what happened to us (the signal) is preserved. So far, it seems that the memory benefits of sleep, especially for declarative memories, are due primarily to NREM sleep, but in some instances REM sleep or a combination of NREM-REM cycles may also play a role. One should not forget that memories can also consolidate during wake. Moreover, to some extent sleep helps memory consolidation simply because it reduces the interference caused by later memory traces.

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