I hate to admit it but Money has overwhelmed me a lot lately. I think of myself as someone who is generally level-headed when it comes to money. But let’s face it: times are tough. The stress has gotten to me. Here’s something important that I know: stress makes money problems worse. When we let stress take over our brains, we don’t think as clearly. We react, instead of acting from an intentional place. So I find myself wasting money when I need to be saving it. Or I find myself overworking to the point of exhaustion because I feel like I need more money right now. If I want to get my finances back on track, then first I have to get my brain back on track. So, here are five things that I do to de-stress about money: 1. Assign Days for Dealing with Money I have specific days of the week and month that I deal with money. I mark them on the calendar. During those days, I turn my focus and attention to my finances. I concern myself with the details of earnings and savings, debt repayment, and budgeting. I build a lot of self-care into those days. They are stressful days. I make sure to eat healthy. I take a lot of breaks. However, I don’t turn away from my finances on those days. Instead, I empower myself with direct knowledge about what’s happening with my money. Then, confident that I know where my money stands, I don’t think about it on the other days of the month. When I start to worry about money, I remind myself, “you can worry about that on Tuesday.” I let it go. This way, I’m not money-stressed every day of the year. If I worried about money every single day, I would burn out quickly. 2. List What’s Going Financially Right Our minds often focus on the negative. However, in the midst of then negative, there are always good things. Forcing my mind to focus on those positive things helps a lot when money stress overwhelms me. Therefore, I’ll pause and list the things that are going right financially. Be careful, a critical voice in your head is likely to say, “yes, but …” For example, I might write, “I just got a new book contract.” The critic says, “yes, but your advance isn’t big enough.” Learn to set the “but, yes” voice aside. This list time is the time to emphasize what’s going right. 3. Brainstorm My Skills and Accomplishments As you can probably tell by now, I like lists. Listing my skills and accomplishments is one of the ways that I deal with money stress. More specifically, I will list out all of my talents and achievements that relate directly to money. I include the small things. “I have a savings account.” “I read a book about personal finance this week.” “I earned my first money from babysitting when I was twelve years old.” Additionally, I […]

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