The goal isn’t to eradicate money worries entirely. Some amount of anxiety around money is healthy. Then, the challenge is not banishing the anxiety but moderating it — which can require practical, measured action. That could mean looking for a new job, hiring a financial planner, consolidating debt, or asking a friend to sit next to you for moral support (or enforcement) while you finally open the bills you’ve been avoiding.

Some Anxiety Around Money Is Useful

Money, and the issues around money, are notoriously anxiety-provoking, and our coping mechanisms are usually unhealthy  - for example, aggressive avoidance — a more slow-simmering form of agita that merely (and literally) compounded the problem.Money doesn’t just represent safety and security and stability. It is safety and security and stability. It is also unavoidable. This means your feelings about money are along for the ride, too — no matter how much energy you expend trying to escape them.

Money Anxieties

<ul><li>Figure out how you actually feel. Yes, you’re anxious, but what kind of anxiety? When do you feel anxious? Where do you feel anxious?</li><li>﻿Once you become more aware of your anxiety, try to pinpoint the specific financial concerns that it stems from. Then, you can start checking them against reality.</li><li> Money — and anxiety around it — is often integrated into our lives at an early age, before we can even articulate material needs and desires. Therefore, our feelings about it are not necessarily rational to our contemporary lives. </li></ul>

Dealing With Financial Anxiety

Perhaps the most brutal truth about money anxiety is that money actually is worth worrying about. For all the psychological acrobatics and emotional coping mechanisms, the best solution to financial anxiety is and will always be improving the reality of your finances — which is, of course, significantly easier said than done. You can manage your financial anxiety and discover how childhood trauma shaped your understanding of money, but you can’t opt out of money-related stress, because you can’t opt-out of money.

Money Is Worth Worrying About

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