66. Money’s Role in Stress & Rest
Money matters. But in Public Health, we don’t really talk about money. We might be more comfortable talking about it in the context of funding and grants but when it comes to creating our own relationship with money and our financial wealth, the conversation falls by the wayside. No matter who you are or the job you do, you have a relationship with money, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Do you understand money’s role in your emotional experience? Today’s episode is about money, but it isn’t about saving, investing, or how to use your money. Really, this is a Money 101 belief class because money plays an incredibly important role when it comes to stress and rest, and your beliefs about money really do make a difference in your emotional experience of life.
Tune this week to discover a new way of thinking about money. I’m showing you how to see your current relationship with money, why it might not be serving you, and how societal conditioning has played into your money beliefs. Plus, I’m sharing the evolution of my personal money story, so you can see that you can think about money any way you want to.
If you want to take this work deeper and learn the tools and skills to feel better, all while having my support and guidance each step of the way, I invite you to set up a time to chat with me. Click here to grab a spot on my calendar and I can’t wait to speak to you!
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What You Will Discover:
Why every single one of us has a relationship with money.
The messages we’ve absorbed about money throughout our lives, from capitalism, school, our parents, and just about everywhere.
Why you always get to intentionally think about money in a way that’s helpful and beneficial to you.
My money story and how it’s evolved over the past few years.
Money’s role in our experience of stress and rest.
How to get clear on your current beliefs about money and where they come from.
What you can do to start telling yourself a more empowering story about money and what’s possible for you in this area.
Resources:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey, you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for public health professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Hey you all, what is up? Today I’m really excited, we are talking about money. And in my head as I’ve been writing this episode I’ve just been replaying, I don’t know if you call it a chorus, I’m not a musician. But the part of the song from the O’Jays about money which I was going to sing but the last time I tried to make sound effects recording a podcast, it was so bad, my producers had to put real sound effects over it. So, I’m not going to do that to them or you all. But if you know what song I’m talking about, you know.
But today we’re going to really talk about what money is in relationship to your emotional experience. So, this episode’s called Money’s Role in Stress and Rest, that’s a mouthful. But it’s really kind of a money 101 belief class. It’s not about budget, or saving, or investing, or how to use your money, or how you shouldn’t. It’s a money mindset 101.
And next week I’m actually going to have a very special guest, Natasha Tekeste, on the show, she’s a money mindset coach. And we’re going to talk about specifically how folks in helping professions are socialized around money and their money beliefs. And how people socialized as women are told to belief certain things about money. And both those communities receive very specific messages about not just money but their role with money and what’s possible for them, and who they should be with money. And beliefs that aren’t necessarily helpful or ‘true’.
And actually, over the next, I guess the rest of the year I’m going to be having some really exciting guests on the show about once a month. Now, I am someone who if I listen to a podcast where it’s solo and they’re doing teachings and then all of a sudden they have interview, after interview, after interview every week, I personally as a listener don’t love that. And so, I’m spreading these out a little bit. But I also find interviews really helpful even as a listener. I do like that, I like hearing someone else’s perspective but we’re going to spread it out for you.
So just to give you a little sneak peek before we jump into today’s episode, in, let’s see, right around Labor Day, early September I’m going to have one of my best friends and parent coach, Ali Ryan on the show to talk about how parents can get more rest. So, if you’re a parent, that’s definitely for you. If you’re not a parent like I’m not a parent, I don’t have kids, and I still find talking with her so helpful. So, when that comes out I encourage you to tune in.
And then I’m really excited, this fall we’re doing a How We Rest series. And I’m interviewing four different public health professionals from very diverse different sectors in the field doing different types of work and talking about how they rest, what’s their experience with rest, what’s their challenges, what are their successes. So, you all can hear from other folks in public health just like you about their experience with rest which I’m really, really excited about. So, lots of fun stuff happening on the podcast.
But let’s get into today’s episode talking about money. Now, the most important thing to say to start off is money matters. But I find that in public health and those of us who work in public health we don’t really talk about money mattering as much. We do when we’re more open with it, when it has to do with funding. We might talk about it, be more comfortable talking about it in the context of getting more grants for our research. But when it comes to creating our own relationship with money and our own financial wealth, that is not really discussed.
And no matter who you are you have a relationship with money, whether you are aware of it or not. You might have an anxious attachment relationship with money, or an avoidant relationship with money, or a shame based relationship with money, or a confident relationship, or a secure relationship, or any other type, we all do. Because first of all we’re in a relationship with money. It is a part of our everyday experience.
And we absorb so many messages about money through our whole lives, from capitalism, from our parents, from school, from public health itself, from systems of oppression, from friends, from media, from all over. And our relationship with money changes over time. So, the purpose of today is to offer you a different way about thinking about money. And as always you get to decide what to believe. You get to decide what is helpful for you.
Now, here is a very shortened version of my money story. So, you can have an idea of where my money mindset was when I first started getting coaching myself and diving into my own money beliefs. I was very, very lucky. And I actually consider it a privilege that money was discussed in my home. And I didn’t even realize that this wasn’t normal. Until I started having roommates or partners who had a very different experience growing up where money was not discussed, I didn’t really realize it.
Now, this is not to say it was discussed in the most helpful way, sometimes but sometimes not but it was still discussed, it wasn’t taboo to talk about. And because of that I think it really helped me be able to kind of explore understanding money, and feel empowered to learn more about it. Now, as I said, it’s not that all the money beliefs I inherited from my family were helpful. It’s not like my parents set me up for everything I needed to know about money by the time I left home. I didn’t even open my own credit card until I was 25.
For some of you it might not have been till you were 30 or 35, but the only reason for me, I felt empowered to even do that was because I felt empowered to buy a book to learn about money. And the reason I even felt empowered to buy that book, to look for that book and I did it confidently, I wasn’t doing it out of shame or fear was because I think money was discussed in my house. And yet I still absorb a lot of unhelpful money mindset beliefs. Yes, including from my family because we absorb what our parents think about money.
But I also absorbed messages from school over the years, of patriarchy, toxic capitalism, media, friends, all over. And actually, a lot of my unhelpful money mindset came from growing up in my religion, in Christianity. And I’m still working on my money mindset now. And I want to know, I was raised in a family that had access to money. I had this weird experience and actually I don’t even know if I should say weird. The only reason I think it's weird is because I don’t know one person who had a similar experience to me.
So, it’s very possible it’s not weird and lots of people have this experience but I’m just not aware of that. But my parents neither of which had university four year college degrees did not necessarily have a lot of money. They were not considered rich by their jobs. My mom worked as a dealer at a casino and my dad was a commercial janitor for places like Kmart. So, their income was more working middle class. And we also want to recognize that I’m 33, almost 34 and my parents had me a little bit older.
So, when I was growing up and they had their jobs, the context in which you have your job was different, the cost of living was different. The labor laws were different, some in worse ways and some in better ways. So that context also does mater. But I would say their income was more working class middle class. It kept food on our table, a roof over our head, we had to save for vacations. We really didn’t take many, we took road trips instead of flying.
I don’t know, I mean my parents might disagree but I don’t ever remember there being a worry about not being able to pay our bills or have food on the table. But I did find out later in life that a couple of funny things, they’re funny now but I guess when I was in preschool, I love learning. My mom told me I had come home from preschool, I only went twice a week and begged her to go more days. And I guess she was like, “We can’t afford it.”
I also found out later that my mom had to volunteer at my dance studio so she could afford my dance classes. I just thought all the parents volunteered for fun. Now that I’m older I’m like, yeah, right, why would they do that for fun? But I didn’t really realize that growing up. And then on the flipside, I had grandparents who did successfully build financial wealth especially later in their life. So, they paid for my college and my grad school and helped me buy the condo I live in otherwise I would not have access to any of that.
My parents’ income would not have allowed for my education to be paid for at all. I would have either done community college, or instate and taking out loans, or not gone. And I for sure don’t think I’d be living owning a condo. So, the reason that I share that backstory a little bit is to share that when I started to reflect on my money mindset, what I realized is I had kind of two conflicting set of money beliefs. So, I grew up believing both, that money is available and abundant and that money is scarce and limited.
I grew up believing it is hard work to make money. I saw my dad get up at 4:00am every day to work. He didn’t have access to healthcare through his job. He had no paid time off. And I also grew up believing that money was easy. I saw my grandparents make money through investing on the stock market. So, my money mindset was mixed and confused, and included both ends of the spectrum.
And your money mindset might be mixed and confused. It might be very extreme on one end or very extreme on the other or might be very sprinkled throughout. Only you can decide that and know that from looking at your money mindset. But doing this money mindset work, really understanding and looking at, what do I believe about money? Where did I get those beliefs? And what do I want to believe instead? Are these money beliefs serving me, are they helping me? And if not, what do I want to believe instead? And if so, do I want to keep it?
And it allowed me to make that decision on purpose. So, today’s episode is not to tell you what to believe about money but help you examine your thoughts about money, see if they are helpful, decide on purpose what to believe. Okay, with that in mind let’s start with why we think money creates stress. First I want to distinguish between physiological stress responses and what we tend to socially call stress.
When we say socially to each other we are stressed, often what we are actually just describing is an emotional experience we are having like feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. That is different than a physiological stress response which is when your brain thinks you are in danger and goes into a survival response to keep you safe, into a fight, flight or freeze response. And sometimes when you have that physiological stress response you are truly experiencing a survival concern like not being able to feed your family this month.
But sometimes your brain goes into that stress response physiologically and you’re not truly facing a threat, a survival danger, that’s not happening, your brain is perceiving it but it’s not accurate. So, we’re going to talk more about this. But oftentimes when we feel stress about money it’s not that we’re having a physiological stress response in which we are truly in danger for survival, it’s that we’re having an emotional response like overwhelm or anxiety.
We think what creates our emotional experience like overwhelm or worry with money is the amount of money we have. So, we think, well, if you have a lot of money then you won’t be anxious or won’t worry. And if you don’t have a lot of money then you can’t feel happy, or secure, or peaceful. And that’s not true. There are so many people without a lot of money who are extremely happy and do not experience overwhelm or anxiety. And there are so many extremely rich people who are very anxious and very depressed.
We tend to conflate emotional security with other types of security and safety. For example, money can create the ability to stay food secure, meaning when you have access to money you can buy the amount of food you and your family needs to consume daily to stay alive. But that doesn’t mean it creates emotional security, it doesn’t guarantee you will feel happy, and content, and peaceful about your money. You can still feel worried, and overwhelmed, and anxious.
There are people who do not have to worry where their next meal is coming from and still feel extremely overwhelmed and worried about their money, who feel shame and depression. Now, again this does not mean money doesn’t matter, it totally does. And in our very capitalistic individualistic lack of social program support society, specifically in the US, it matters for a lot of people who do not have their basic needs met. We are not minimizing or dismissing that at all.
What creates your emotional experience about money in relation to money are your thoughts about money. So, if you have $100 left in your checking account and you are thinking, oh, shit, what am I going to do? I’m so terrible with money, I shouldn’t have spent that money yesterday, I’m such an idiot, you’re so irresponsible. That line of thinking, those thoughts will create your emotional experience, maybe shame or anxiety.
Someone else could have that same exact experience, the same exact $100 in their checking account and think instead, I can figure this out, I’ll make this work, I’m doing the best I can, I totally know I needed to spend that money yesterday, that was the right choice. And those thoughts create their emotional experience. They might be feeling a little confident, or secure, or optimistic. That’s different than the physiological stress response, although they can totally overlap.
One person with a $100 left in their bank account might go into a physiological stress response because their brain thinks that means they are in danger of not being able to feed their family. And that danger might be real. Someone else with $5,000 left in their bank account might go into a stress response because their brain also thinks they’re in danger of not being able to afford food. And that danger may or may not be real, that might be perceived danger.
Our brains in the modern world often thinks are true dangers and threats that are actually not true threats or dangers. Our brain often goes into a physiological stress response believing our physical safety is at threat, or survival is at threat when we are not. And the better we get at managing our mind and discerning where our brain is really truly trying to protect us from something that we do need to be alert to versus our brain kind of just has a faulty switch that it keeps going off.
And we are safe, and we’re secure, and we’re not in danger, the better we’re able to discern that, the more emotional security we can create for ourself. And someone who may only have $100 in their account and their brain alert system goes off, and saying, danger, danger, and maybe that alert is ‘accurate’. Maybe they truly are at risk for not feeding their family. Their ability to manage their experience is going to impact their emotional experience. Here’s what I mean.
If you are shaming yourself and beating yourself up you are going to create anxiety and shame that will make it harder for you to think creatively, plan and execute action even if you truly are in a situation where you are in ‘danger’. If you are telling yourself you can figure it out, you can trust yourself, and those thoughts create confidence, hope, even if you are in a stress response, those thoughts you think and those emotions you generate will help you take helpful action and move you forward.
And you’ll feel differently. It doesn’t mean you’ll feel sunshine and rainbows, but you will have a different emotional experience. Now, here’s the thing, for most of us, most of you listening, your biggest challenge with money is actually your emotional experience and not your physiological stress response for a real threat or danger. What you think about the money you have, how you use your money, how you don’t use your money, your ability with money.
Everything you think about money and your relationship to it and your ability with it determines how you feel and the actions you take. Let’s say your circumstance is you look at your credit card statements or budget over the last month and you realize you spent $800 on eating out. Now, if your thought is, I am so fucking irresponsible and that thought creates shame, that shame is going to drive your actions, whether it’s avoiding your budget because shame makes you want to hide, you don’t look at your credit card statements moving forward.
You don’t monitor how you spend, you don’t decide on purpose if you want to be okay with that or not. You don’t decide on purpose what your money values are and where you want to spend money. And then you spend money out of fear or you restrict your spending out of fear. The result you create for yourself is that you don’t create a healthy relationship with money where you decide what’s responsible for you.
Someone else could have spent $800 on eating out this month and have the thought looking at that, I could decide if this is how I want to spend my money. And ask, do I want to spend my money this way? And feel empowered and from that empowerment they look at their budget, at their credit cards, they reflect on the experiences they want to have, and their values, and their goals and decide on purpose how to spend money. And don’t judge or shame themselves for what they decide.
And the result they create for themselves is they decide what’s responsible for them. Because here is the thing, money is a neutral tool. Money does not cause your emotions. Money is a tool. It is neutral. And by neutral I do not mean it has zero meaning and doesn’t matter. I mean it is something that exists in the world and then humans give it meaning. Before we had paper money or coins people used other things to exchange goods, before money was created or used.
So, it is a tool that we give meaning. We decide how much it’s worth, how much its value, it’s a tool. It’s neutral and then humans give it meaning. We all give it different meanings. And it’s not that we give it neutral meaning, that doesn’t matter. No. In the world we live in money does matter. You interact with money every single day. But you get to decide in what ways it matters to you. And whatever you decide, remember, money does not cause your emotions.
Money, the lack thereof money or the abundance of money does not create emotional freedom. Your thoughts and feelings about the money you do or do not have creates emotional experiences and emotional freedom if that’s what you’re creating. Money can create financial freedom for sure. And it took me a long time to separate these two things because especially in public health we believe and are told that money is the answer to everything. And because public health doesn’t have a lot of it then we have a lot of problems.
And listen, money can solve a lot of problems, even in public health. Money can solve a lot of problems in our individual lives but it does not solve emotional problems. It does not solve for emotional freedom. We believe money is the answer to emotional freedom, to emotional problems but it’s not. Lots of rich people who have enough money for the rest of their life, that money has not solved their emotional problems.
And many, many people who are not considered rich who maybe make the average US salary or below have very stable emotional experiences and might be experiencing emotional freedom. What creates your emotional experience around money is not the money itself, it’s your thoughts and feelings about it. And the same is true about your experience of rest in relation to money because remember, rest is a mindset. Rest is the emotional freedom and empowerment.
What creates rest around your money, around your relationship with money is not how much money you have. It’s your thoughts and feelings about the money you have. And this is really hard to get because we are told over, and over, and over, and over again that money is the key to happiness, that money is the key to emotional freedom but it’s not. We receive so many messages about money that influence our beliefs about money. And we think they are just truths.
And next week when Natasha’s here we’re going to talk a lot more about these but I’m going to share a few now. We are told that if you have a lot of money that that means you’re a bad person. But we’re also told that having a lot of money is the only way to feel happy and have no stress so then that’s a bit of a catch 22. Well, if you have a lot of money then you’re greedy and selfish. But you need a lot of money to feel good.
We’re also told if you don’t have a lot of money that inherently means you’re lazy, that you’re a mooch or taking advantage of the system. We are told that you should be thankful for what you have and don’t ask for more. We’re told that the amount of money you have reflects what type of person you are. And then we receive different messages based on your identity. So, one example, studies have shown that women are taught to save money and be frugal while men are taught to take risks and invest.
There are other messages you might receive based on your identify, some of which I might be aware of and some of which I might not even be aware of because I don’t have the same experience as you. For example, folks who are disabled, they might have internalized some ableism and have beliefs that, well, because there is accommodations that they’re required that cost the organization money they can’t request for a salary raise. That’s not true but those are the beliefs we’ve been told based on our lived experience or identity.
And we’ve been told to believe every financial expert out there, that they know, they have the knowledge and we don’t, we have to believe what they say, even if it doesn’t align with our values, goals and desires. Right now, in my money mindset journey the stage I am at is doing this work on my money mindset around business. And there’s all these business ‘experts’ about how you market, and how you sell, and how you set goals, and how you use your money.
And I’m finally getting to a place where I’m realizing a lot of that shit that they’re saying doesn’t align with my values, doesn’t align with who I am, who I want to be, what I want to do. And I’m challenging my brain even though everywhere I turn it’s like you have to listen to x, y and z. I am empowering myself to decide what I want to believe even if it goes against what the ‘experts’ say. We receive a lot of messages about how you should be with money.
Well, you should budget. Well, you should invest. Well, you should aim to buy and not rent, that should be everyone’s goal. Well, you shouldn’t spend money every single day at Starbucks, you should always make it at home. You should, you shouldn’t blah, blah, blah, constantly. All of those shoulds are not truths, they are not facts. They are all subjective. You can find people all over who have decided to buy and regret it and wish they were renting. You can find people all over who are renting and love it and are glad they don’t buy.
You can find people all over who are glad they stopped buying coffee at Starbucks and make it at home and people who are happy to keep spending money at Starbucks and they don’t care about making it at home. It’s all subjective. These beliefs you hold a lot of which with the money mindset is so unconscious because you haven’t been prompted to really look at your thoughts. You’ve internalized a lot of those beliefs from the world around you.
And those beliefs you hold and that you operate from around money is creating your emotional experience with money. Is determining whether or not you are resting with money if you have a healthy relationship with money. Money is something that is a part of our everyday life. It matters and it is important. It does have impacts on health outcomes, on community outcomes we are not denying that. But it does not control your emotional outcomes. We have to detach those two things.
Once you do that you get to decide on purpose what your philosophy is with money, what are your money values? What role do you want money to play in your life? What relationship do you want to have with money? As a tool you get to make empowered decisions about how you want to use money. You get to decide what financial wealth means to you even if it doesn’t mean the kind of standard practice of buying a house, and settling down, and saving for retirement.
Maybe for you it means not buying a home, traveling all the time and not saving for retirement. There is no right or wrong, it’s what’s right for you and only you get to decide that. You get to decide how to integrate money in your life in ways that align with your values, your desires, your goals, and what you want, and what feels good. And that’s going to change over time. And to give yourself permission to allow that change you have to really become intimate with your money mindset.
Money can become a friend and not your enemy. And no matter what, you’re still going to have the 50/50 emotional life. There’s no amount of money that allows you to escape from the human experience of having all the emotions. And ultimately what we all want is to feel good about our money, about where we are in our money journey, about how we use our money, about our decisions about money.
And that emotion of feeling good, or proud, or empowered, or confident about our experience with money is not determined or dependent on your salary, on how much you invest, on if you own a home or anything else. It’s determined by your beliefs and what you think about not only money but yourself in relationship to money. Your relationship to money, how much money you have, how you use money is not a reflection of your morality as a person.
It does not reflect how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are, whether you’re valuable or worthy, no. It is just a reflection of your current thoughts about money which can change. Thoughts are optional, they aren’t truth, you get to choose what to believe. And what you believe creates your emotional experience. So, if you want a different emotional experience with money, if you don’t want to feel anxious, and worried, and overwhelmed with money, you do not have to make more money.
You do not have to win the lottery. You have to examine your thoughts and decide to change them. That is how you will feel better in relation to money. So, I know that was a lot, but this is the foundation for next week’s episode with Natasha which we are diving way deeper into this. So, tune in next week, don’t miss it. We’re going to talk a lot more about your money beliefs, talk about some specific beliefs. And you will leave that episode with Natasha feeling super empowered to decide for you what’s right for you. Alright, you all, have a great week, talk to you next week.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Hey you all, what is up? Today I’m really excited, we are talking about money. And in my head as I’ve been writing this episode I’ve just been replaying, I don’t know if you call it a chorus, I’m not a musician. But the part of the song from the O’Jays about money which I was going to sing but the last time I tried to make sound effects recording a podcast, it was so bad, my producers had to put real sound effects over it. So, I’m not going to do that to them or you all. But if you know what song I’m talking about, you know.
But today we’re going to really talk about what money is in relationship to your emotional experience. So, this episode’s called Money’s Role in Stress and Rest, that’s a mouthful. But it’s really kind of a money 101 belief class. It’s not about budget, or saving, or investing, or how to use your money, or how you shouldn’t. It’s a money mindset 101.
And next week I’m actually going to have a very special guest, Natasha Tekeste, on the show, she’s a money mindset coach. And we’re going to talk about specifically how folks in helping professions are socialized around money and their money beliefs. And how people socialized as women are told to belief certain things about money. And both those communities receive very specific messages about not just money but their role with money and what’s possible for them, and who they should be with money. And beliefs that aren’t necessarily helpful or ‘true’.
And actually, over the next, I guess the rest of the year I’m going to be having some really exciting guests on the show about once a month. Now, I am someone who if I listen to a podcast where it’s solo and they’re doing teachings and then all of a sudden they have interview, after interview, after interview every week, I personally as a listener don’t love that. And so, I’m spreading these out a little bit. But I also find interviews really helpful even as a listener. I do like that, I like hearing someone else’s perspective but we’re going to spread it out for you.
So just to give you a little sneak peek before we jump into today’s episode, in, let’s see, right around Labor Day, early September I’m going to have one of my best friends and parent coach, Ali Ryan on the show to talk about how parents can get more rest. So, if you’re a parent, that’s definitely for you. If you’re not a parent like I’m not a parent, I don’t have kids, and I still find talking with her so helpful. So, when that comes out I encourage you to tune in.
And then I’m really excited, this fall we’re doing a How We Rest series. And I’m interviewing four different public health professionals from very diverse different sectors in the field doing different types of work and talking about how they rest, what’s their experience with rest, what’s their challenges, what are their successes. So, you all can hear from other folks in public health just like you about their experience with rest which I’m really, really excited about. So, lots of fun stuff happening on the podcast.
But let’s get into today’s episode talking about money. Now, the most important thing to say to start off is money matters. But I find that in public health and those of us who work in public health we don’t really talk about money mattering as much. We do when we’re more open with it, when it has to do with funding. We might talk about it, be more comfortable talking about it in the context of getting more grants for our research. But when it comes to creating our own relationship with money and our own financial wealth, that is not really discussed.
And no matter who you are you have a relationship with money, whether you are aware of it or not. You might have an anxious attachment relationship with money, or an avoidant relationship with money, or a shame based relationship with money, or a confident relationship, or a secure relationship, or any other type, we all do. Because first of all we’re in a relationship with money. It is a part of our everyday experience.
And we absorb so many messages about money through our whole lives, from capitalism, from our parents, from school, from public health itself, from systems of oppression, from friends, from media, from all over. And our relationship with money changes over time. So, the purpose of today is to offer you a different way about thinking about money. And as always you get to decide what to believe. You get to decide what is helpful for you.
Now, here is a very shortened version of my money story. So, you can have an idea of where my money mindset was when I first started getting coaching myself and diving into my own money beliefs. I was very, very lucky. And I actually consider it a privilege that money was discussed in my home. And I didn’t even realize that this wasn’t normal. Until I started having roommates or partners who had a very different experience growing up where money was not discussed, I didn’t really realize it.
Now, this is not to say it was discussed in the most helpful way, sometimes but sometimes not but it was still discussed, it wasn’t taboo to talk about. And because of that I think it really helped me be able to kind of explore understanding money, and feel empowered to learn more about it. Now, as I said, it’s not that all the money beliefs I inherited from my family were helpful. It’s not like my parents set me up for everything I needed to know about money by the time I left home. I didn’t even open my own credit card until I was 25.
For some of you it might not have been till you were 30 or 35, but the only reason for me, I felt empowered to even do that was because I felt empowered to buy a book to learn about money. And the reason I even felt empowered to buy that book, to look for that book and I did it confidently, I wasn’t doing it out of shame or fear was because I think money was discussed in my house. And yet I still absorb a lot of unhelpful money mindset beliefs. Yes, including from my family because we absorb what our parents think about money.
But I also absorbed messages from school over the years, of patriarchy, toxic capitalism, media, friends, all over. And actually, a lot of my unhelpful money mindset came from growing up in my religion, in Christianity. And I’m still working on my money mindset now. And I want to know, I was raised in a family that had access to money. I had this weird experience and actually I don’t even know if I should say weird. The only reason I think it's weird is because I don’t know one person who had a similar experience to me.
So, it’s very possible it’s not weird and lots of people have this experience but I’m just not aware of that. But my parents neither of which had university four year college degrees did not necessarily have a lot of money. They were not considered rich by their jobs. My mom worked as a dealer at a casino and my dad was a commercial janitor for places like Kmart. So, their income was more working middle class. And we also want to recognize that I’m 33, almost 34 and my parents had me a little bit older.
So, when I was growing up and they had their jobs, the context in which you have your job was different, the cost of living was different. The labor laws were different, some in worse ways and some in better ways. So that context also does mater. But I would say their income was more working class middle class. It kept food on our table, a roof over our head, we had to save for vacations. We really didn’t take many, we took road trips instead of flying.
I don’t know, I mean my parents might disagree but I don’t ever remember there being a worry about not being able to pay our bills or have food on the table. But I did find out later in life that a couple of funny things, they’re funny now but I guess when I was in preschool, I love learning. My mom told me I had come home from preschool, I only went twice a week and begged her to go more days. And I guess she was like, “We can’t afford it.”
I also found out later that my mom had to volunteer at my dance studio so she could afford my dance classes. I just thought all the parents volunteered for fun. Now that I’m older I’m like, yeah, right, why would they do that for fun? But I didn’t really realize that growing up. And then on the flipside, I had grandparents who did successfully build financial wealth especially later in their life. So, they paid for my college and my grad school and helped me buy the condo I live in otherwise I would not have access to any of that.
My parents’ income would not have allowed for my education to be paid for at all. I would have either done community college, or instate and taking out loans, or not gone. And I for sure don’t think I’d be living owning a condo. So, the reason that I share that backstory a little bit is to share that when I started to reflect on my money mindset, what I realized is I had kind of two conflicting set of money beliefs. So, I grew up believing both, that money is available and abundant and that money is scarce and limited.
I grew up believing it is hard work to make money. I saw my dad get up at 4:00am every day to work. He didn’t have access to healthcare through his job. He had no paid time off. And I also grew up believing that money was easy. I saw my grandparents make money through investing on the stock market. So, my money mindset was mixed and confused, and included both ends of the spectrum.
And your money mindset might be mixed and confused. It might be very extreme on one end or very extreme on the other or might be very sprinkled throughout. Only you can decide that and know that from looking at your money mindset. But doing this money mindset work, really understanding and looking at, what do I believe about money? Where did I get those beliefs? And what do I want to believe instead? Are these money beliefs serving me, are they helping me? And if not, what do I want to believe instead? And if so, do I want to keep it?
And it allowed me to make that decision on purpose. So, today’s episode is not to tell you what to believe about money but help you examine your thoughts about money, see if they are helpful, decide on purpose what to believe. Okay, with that in mind let’s start with why we think money creates stress. First I want to distinguish between physiological stress responses and what we tend to socially call stress.
When we say socially to each other we are stressed, often what we are actually just describing is an emotional experience we are having like feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. That is different than a physiological stress response which is when your brain thinks you are in danger and goes into a survival response to keep you safe, into a fight, flight or freeze response. And sometimes when you have that physiological stress response you are truly experiencing a survival concern like not being able to feed your family this month.
But sometimes your brain goes into that stress response physiologically and you’re not truly facing a threat, a survival danger, that’s not happening, your brain is perceiving it but it’s not accurate. So, we’re going to talk more about this. But oftentimes when we feel stress about money it’s not that we’re having a physiological stress response in which we are truly in danger for survival, it’s that we’re having an emotional response like overwhelm or anxiety.
We think what creates our emotional experience like overwhelm or worry with money is the amount of money we have. So, we think, well, if you have a lot of money then you won’t be anxious or won’t worry. And if you don’t have a lot of money then you can’t feel happy, or secure, or peaceful. And that’s not true. There are so many people without a lot of money who are extremely happy and do not experience overwhelm or anxiety. And there are so many extremely rich people who are very anxious and very depressed.
We tend to conflate emotional security with other types of security and safety. For example, money can create the ability to stay food secure, meaning when you have access to money you can buy the amount of food you and your family needs to consume daily to stay alive. But that doesn’t mean it creates emotional security, it doesn’t guarantee you will feel happy, and content, and peaceful about your money. You can still feel worried, and overwhelmed, and anxious.
There are people who do not have to worry where their next meal is coming from and still feel extremely overwhelmed and worried about their money, who feel shame and depression. Now, again this does not mean money doesn’t matter, it totally does. And in our very capitalistic individualistic lack of social program support society, specifically in the US, it matters for a lot of people who do not have their basic needs met. We are not minimizing or dismissing that at all.
What creates your emotional experience about money in relation to money are your thoughts about money. So, if you have $100 left in your checking account and you are thinking, oh, shit, what am I going to do? I’m so terrible with money, I shouldn’t have spent that money yesterday, I’m such an idiot, you’re so irresponsible. That line of thinking, those thoughts will create your emotional experience, maybe shame or anxiety.
Someone else could have that same exact experience, the same exact $100 in their checking account and think instead, I can figure this out, I’ll make this work, I’m doing the best I can, I totally know I needed to spend that money yesterday, that was the right choice. And those thoughts create their emotional experience. They might be feeling a little confident, or secure, or optimistic. That’s different than the physiological stress response, although they can totally overlap.
One person with a $100 left in their bank account might go into a physiological stress response because their brain thinks that means they are in danger of not being able to feed their family. And that danger might be real. Someone else with $5,000 left in their bank account might go into a stress response because their brain also thinks they’re in danger of not being able to afford food. And that danger may or may not be real, that might be perceived danger.
Our brains in the modern world often thinks are true dangers and threats that are actually not true threats or dangers. Our brain often goes into a physiological stress response believing our physical safety is at threat, or survival is at threat when we are not. And the better we get at managing our mind and discerning where our brain is really truly trying to protect us from something that we do need to be alert to versus our brain kind of just has a faulty switch that it keeps going off.
And we are safe, and we’re secure, and we’re not in danger, the better we’re able to discern that, the more emotional security we can create for ourself. And someone who may only have $100 in their account and their brain alert system goes off, and saying, danger, danger, and maybe that alert is ‘accurate’. Maybe they truly are at risk for not feeding their family. Their ability to manage their experience is going to impact their emotional experience. Here’s what I mean.
If you are shaming yourself and beating yourself up you are going to create anxiety and shame that will make it harder for you to think creatively, plan and execute action even if you truly are in a situation where you are in ‘danger’. If you are telling yourself you can figure it out, you can trust yourself, and those thoughts create confidence, hope, even if you are in a stress response, those thoughts you think and those emotions you generate will help you take helpful action and move you forward.
And you’ll feel differently. It doesn’t mean you’ll feel sunshine and rainbows, but you will have a different emotional experience. Now, here’s the thing, for most of us, most of you listening, your biggest challenge with money is actually your emotional experience and not your physiological stress response for a real threat or danger. What you think about the money you have, how you use your money, how you don’t use your money, your ability with money.
Everything you think about money and your relationship to it and your ability with it determines how you feel and the actions you take. Let’s say your circumstance is you look at your credit card statements or budget over the last month and you realize you spent $800 on eating out. Now, if your thought is, I am so fucking irresponsible and that thought creates shame, that shame is going to drive your actions, whether it’s avoiding your budget because shame makes you want to hide, you don’t look at your credit card statements moving forward.
You don’t monitor how you spend, you don’t decide on purpose if you want to be okay with that or not. You don’t decide on purpose what your money values are and where you want to spend money. And then you spend money out of fear or you restrict your spending out of fear. The result you create for yourself is that you don’t create a healthy relationship with money where you decide what’s responsible for you.
Someone else could have spent $800 on eating out this month and have the thought looking at that, I could decide if this is how I want to spend my money. And ask, do I want to spend my money this way? And feel empowered and from that empowerment they look at their budget, at their credit cards, they reflect on the experiences they want to have, and their values, and their goals and decide on purpose how to spend money. And don’t judge or shame themselves for what they decide.
And the result they create for themselves is they decide what’s responsible for them. Because here is the thing, money is a neutral tool. Money does not cause your emotions. Money is a tool. It is neutral. And by neutral I do not mean it has zero meaning and doesn’t matter. I mean it is something that exists in the world and then humans give it meaning. Before we had paper money or coins people used other things to exchange goods, before money was created or used.
So, it is a tool that we give meaning. We decide how much it’s worth, how much its value, it’s a tool. It’s neutral and then humans give it meaning. We all give it different meanings. And it’s not that we give it neutral meaning, that doesn’t matter. No. In the world we live in money does matter. You interact with money every single day. But you get to decide in what ways it matters to you. And whatever you decide, remember, money does not cause your emotions.
Money, the lack thereof money or the abundance of money does not create emotional freedom. Your thoughts and feelings about the money you do or do not have creates emotional experiences and emotional freedom if that’s what you’re creating. Money can create financial freedom for sure. And it took me a long time to separate these two things because especially in public health we believe and are told that money is the answer to everything. And because public health doesn’t have a lot of it then we have a lot of problems.
And listen, money can solve a lot of problems, even in public health. Money can solve a lot of problems in our individual lives but it does not solve emotional problems. It does not solve for emotional freedom. We believe money is the answer to emotional freedom, to emotional problems but it’s not. Lots of rich people who have enough money for the rest of their life, that money has not solved their emotional problems.
And many, many people who are not considered rich who maybe make the average US salary or below have very stable emotional experiences and might be experiencing emotional freedom. What creates your emotional experience around money is not the money itself, it’s your thoughts and feelings about it. And the same is true about your experience of rest in relation to money because remember, rest is a mindset. Rest is the emotional freedom and empowerment.
What creates rest around your money, around your relationship with money is not how much money you have. It’s your thoughts and feelings about the money you have. And this is really hard to get because we are told over, and over, and over, and over again that money is the key to happiness, that money is the key to emotional freedom but it’s not. We receive so many messages about money that influence our beliefs about money. And we think they are just truths.
And next week when Natasha’s here we’re going to talk a lot more about these but I’m going to share a few now. We are told that if you have a lot of money that that means you’re a bad person. But we’re also told that having a lot of money is the only way to feel happy and have no stress so then that’s a bit of a catch 22. Well, if you have a lot of money then you’re greedy and selfish. But you need a lot of money to feel good.
We’re also told if you don’t have a lot of money that inherently means you’re lazy, that you’re a mooch or taking advantage of the system. We are told that you should be thankful for what you have and don’t ask for more. We’re told that the amount of money you have reflects what type of person you are. And then we receive different messages based on your identity. So, one example, studies have shown that women are taught to save money and be frugal while men are taught to take risks and invest.
There are other messages you might receive based on your identify, some of which I might be aware of and some of which I might not even be aware of because I don’t have the same experience as you. For example, folks who are disabled, they might have internalized some ableism and have beliefs that, well, because there is accommodations that they’re required that cost the organization money they can’t request for a salary raise. That’s not true but those are the beliefs we’ve been told based on our lived experience or identity.
And we’ve been told to believe every financial expert out there, that they know, they have the knowledge and we don’t, we have to believe what they say, even if it doesn’t align with our values, goals and desires. Right now, in my money mindset journey the stage I am at is doing this work on my money mindset around business. And there’s all these business ‘experts’ about how you market, and how you sell, and how you set goals, and how you use your money.
And I’m finally getting to a place where I’m realizing a lot of that shit that they’re saying doesn’t align with my values, doesn’t align with who I am, who I want to be, what I want to do. And I’m challenging my brain even though everywhere I turn it’s like you have to listen to x, y and z. I am empowering myself to decide what I want to believe even if it goes against what the ‘experts’ say. We receive a lot of messages about how you should be with money.
Well, you should budget. Well, you should invest. Well, you should aim to buy and not rent, that should be everyone’s goal. Well, you shouldn’t spend money every single day at Starbucks, you should always make it at home. You should, you shouldn’t blah, blah, blah, constantly. All of those shoulds are not truths, they are not facts. They are all subjective. You can find people all over who have decided to buy and regret it and wish they were renting. You can find people all over who are renting and love it and are glad they don’t buy.
You can find people all over who are glad they stopped buying coffee at Starbucks and make it at home and people who are happy to keep spending money at Starbucks and they don’t care about making it at home. It’s all subjective. These beliefs you hold a lot of which with the money mindset is so unconscious because you haven’t been prompted to really look at your thoughts. You’ve internalized a lot of those beliefs from the world around you.
And those beliefs you hold and that you operate from around money is creating your emotional experience with money. Is determining whether or not you are resting with money if you have a healthy relationship with money. Money is something that is a part of our everyday life. It matters and it is important. It does have impacts on health outcomes, on community outcomes we are not denying that. But it does not control your emotional outcomes. We have to detach those two things.
Once you do that you get to decide on purpose what your philosophy is with money, what are your money values? What role do you want money to play in your life? What relationship do you want to have with money? As a tool you get to make empowered decisions about how you want to use money. You get to decide what financial wealth means to you even if it doesn’t mean the kind of standard practice of buying a house, and settling down, and saving for retirement.
Maybe for you it means not buying a home, traveling all the time and not saving for retirement. There is no right or wrong, it’s what’s right for you and only you get to decide that. You get to decide how to integrate money in your life in ways that align with your values, your desires, your goals, and what you want, and what feels good. And that’s going to change over time. And to give yourself permission to allow that change you have to really become intimate with your money mindset.
Money can become a friend and not your enemy. And no matter what, you’re still going to have the 50/50 emotional life. There’s no amount of money that allows you to escape from the human experience of having all the emotions. And ultimately what we all want is to feel good about our money, about where we are in our money journey, about how we use our money, about our decisions about money.
And that emotion of feeling good, or proud, or empowered, or confident about our experience with money is not determined or dependent on your salary, on how much you invest, on if you own a home or anything else. It’s determined by your beliefs and what you think about not only money but yourself in relationship to money. Your relationship to money, how much money you have, how you use money is not a reflection of your morality as a person.
It does not reflect how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are, whether you’re valuable or worthy, no. It is just a reflection of your current thoughts about money which can change. Thoughts are optional, they aren’t truth, you get to choose what to believe. And what you believe creates your emotional experience. So, if you want a different emotional experience with money, if you don’t want to feel anxious, and worried, and overwhelmed with money, you do not have to make more money.
You do not have to win the lottery. You have to examine your thoughts and decide to change them. That is how you will feel better in relation to money. So, I know that was a lot, but this is the foundation for next week’s episode with Natasha which we are diving way deeper into this. So, tune in next week, don’t miss it. We’re going to talk a lot more about your money beliefs, talk about some specific beliefs. And you will leave that episode with Natasha feeling super empowered to decide for you what’s right for you. Alright, you all, have a great week, talk to you next week.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
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