Financial Avoidance is Probably Increasing Your Money Anxiety
Financial Avoidance is Probably Increasing Your Money Anxiety
Feel anxious looking at your money?
Avoiding it is probably making that worse.
When I first say that to people who are money avoidant, they often don’t believe it. How could it be possible? If looking at my money is the source of my anxiety, how could it be possible that not looking at it is an even bigger source of anxiety?
Time and time again, after working with people to address debt, budgeting, and overall money avoidance, one of the most consistent observations we receive from clients is about how more regular interaction with their money is actually decreasing their anxiety, and how, when they occasionally slip into a busy period of time where they don’t have time for regular check ins, that’s where the anxiety starts to ramp up again.
The remarkable thing they’re starting to realize is that the antidote to that anxiety about money is actually money interaction, not money avoidance.
Why is this the case? There are a lot of reasons, but like many avoidant behaviors, we create a million excuses for why it’s too stressful to sit down and work with our money when the reality is that our subconscious brain knows we need to do it, and that the longer we wait to do it, the more overwhelming it’s going to be.
For most of us, it’s the pressure of the subconscious brain – the one that says “okay, enough, it’s more stressful to keep avoiding this than to start to face this” that finally pushes us into action around money management, debt payoff, etc. But often, by the time that mechanism kicks in, a financial hole may have been dug that is now quite difficult to get out of, and it often results in one day of making drastic decisions to change our money situation, followed by pretty much the same old money avoidant behaviors.
In this respect, it’s a bit like doing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, or mowing the lawn–when attended to regularly, it’s a lot easier to do. The longer we wait, the more it starts to feel like an insurmountable task. Then, when we finally do take it on, though it feels good in the moment, it’s easy to revert back to our old ways of anxious-avoidance.
So, if you find that stress and money avoidant behaviors tend to go hand in hand for you, it’s important to find entry points and routines around money interaction to help it happen more often. Below you’ll find some tips to build those.
4 Tips to Tackle Your Financial Avoidance:
1. Make your entry point to money interaction small, regular and neutral.
When you’re first starting this process, a huge mistake can be to try and take on everything you’ve been avoiding about money at one time. That not only feels overwhelming – it IS overwhelming. And for many, if you can work up the courage and energy to tackle money in a big way, it’s often not sustainable – it leads to grandiose gestures and planning around how you’re going to fix all your money problems, but with little day to day follow through.
I often encourage folks to start with one of the following exercises just to practice daily, regular, money interaction.
The point here is not to move the needle on your spending or savings behavior, it’s to start to move the needle on your avoidant behavior and anxiety.
Years ago, I worked with a student who had such severe anxiety about coming to school and being at school that we made a plan for her to become my before school teacher’s assistant. The agreed upon purpose of that time was to give her a way to come to school and just sit in a neutral space for 30 minutes, and from that space, decide whether she could carry on with the rest of the day. That’s it. Sometimes we’d talk, sometimes she’d draw, and sometimes other students would come in to get help or talk, and realistically sometimes she didn’t show up.
But the key element was that the time wasn’t for her to help me, or for her to get caught up on work she’d missed, even though she had a ton of it. The point was to make the step between her and her first period class smaller, and less anxiety-inducing. It was for her to practice walking into an environment that caused her anxiety, and to give her a safe place to land on the other side. Of course, from a behavioral perspective, I knew it was more likely that she’d decide to go to first period if first period was 50 yards away than if it was 4 miles away, but I also knew that the only way to get her 50 yards away from first period was to help her create a regular routine where she could be met on the other side of the school entry way with a place to calm her amygdala down.
Step one is not about changing your money behavior; it’s about creating a micro-money routine that feels safe enough to enter into daily, or even multiple times each day.
2. Start to Build Your Plan of Micro-actions.
If you’ve done 30+ consistent days at step one, then it’s time to start thinking about moving the needle on your money situation.
The smaller the parts you can break this process into, the more likely you are to do them, because they are far less likely to feel overwhelming.
Make them present and maybe a tiny bit future focused. Spending a lot of time at this stage thinking about why you don’t have any savings or how you got into debt is not actually very productive. Similarly, spending a lot of time thinking about retirement or buying a house if you’re buried in a pile of credit card debt is also likely to just kick that avoidant-anxiety into high gear. What small action could help improve your money situation today? What might you want to try and accomplish this week with your money?
What kind of “small action” are we talking about?
Depending on your financial situation, what you need to move the needle on your money situation may be different than what someone else needs.
The following examples aren’t suggestions for your situation, but rather, designed to illustrate the size of the action you might want to consider taking on as a next step:
Don’t ask all of these of yourself at once. For example, if your next step is to open a savings account, focus on that this week. Perhaps next week or the week after, your next step can be to automate a $10 transfer per month into that savings account. And 2 months from now, you might increase that to $15 per month.
The key here is to pay really close attention to making the steps small enough at first that you can reasonably tackle them without anxiety stopping you. If you create a task that you don’t accomplish – ask yourself: how can I break this into two manageable parts and do the first one?
What is interesting about micro-actions is at some point, they often will lead to more actions, and you’ll do more than you set out to. Don’t resist that when it comes, but it’s important to also not expect it or be disappointed if it does not immediately have that impact.
You might ask yourself to only open the savings account this week, but once you’re on the bank website doing it, you might also find that it’s not much more difficult to set up that automated transfer now.
You might plan to cancel one subscription, but once that momentum is going, you might feel called to cancel a couple more.
The key is that the extra step is not the expectation. You can do it if you want to, but to get today’s gold star, all you have to do is the single small task. If you happen to WANT to do more, do, but if you just do the smallest task, that’s still a big deal, and it’s enough for today.
In the “pile of dirty dishes” analogy, the ask is simply to walk over to the sink and wash one plate. If you also happen to wash a fork while you are there, that’s just extra credit 🙂.
Remember that the idea or the goal here is to build small, intentional action items that help transform your feelings about interacting with your money from anxious and avoidant into neutral, and eventually positive.
3. Just keep doing it, adding small intentional money interactive steps.
It’s funny, we make money out to be this thing that’s different from other things. Like somehow, the steps required to become better with our money are different than the steps required to become better at anything else.
Think of it like a hobby or a sport. You don’t become good at it overnight, and you don’t become good at it because you made a new year’s resolution to become better at it. You become good at it because you learn about it, you receive coaching and support where needed, but most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, you become good at it because you practice it regularly.
Consider for a moment trying to become a better piano player or a better ballet dancer. If someone said to you, “What is a better way to become better at this, practice it every day for 5 minutes, or practice it four times per year for an entire 8-hour day?” – it’s a no-brainer that 5 minutes a day will make you better than 4, 8-hour days of practice with nothing in between.
It is, in fact, the exact same time commitment, but one will yield far better results. This is also true for money.
4. Notice how your consistent interactions shift your feelings about money.
One of my favorite client moments was talking to a client who, after a year of working with me, came to our meeting and told this story:
My financial planner heart did some backflips for the client in this moment. What a big deal – a huge moment for them to not only have this experience, but also to have such awareness of it and how much they had changed.
The quicker you go back to full engagement with money after spending more than intended, the less likely it is that the runaway train of anxiety takes over. You’re also more likely to spot a quick solution to alleviate the impact of overspending. And the better you build your routines around low-stress daily money interaction, the more likely you are to do this. And the more you notice it working, the more you’ll come back to it.
But notice another key element of this story… it happened after A YEAR of work on this. A year of advisor-supported work with this.
This change doesn’t happen overnight.
And whether you’re working with a financial coach or advisor, an accountability partner, or simply tackling it on your own, at the end of the day, it’s the daily habits, the daily interactions, and the regular engagement that will not only move the needle on your overall money picture, but that will actually alleviate that intense feeling of anxiety that follows some of us around when we go out of our way to avoid dealing with our money.
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