Dealing With Month End Anxiety Or Overwhelm
When I was heavily in debt, month end was always the hardest time of the month for me.
That's when my desperation and shame about money would reach an all time high and I’d start panicking because I knew I didn't have enough money to cover my bills and something was going to bounce.
At the same time, I was petrified of people finding out the truth about my finances.
My friends, who knew what was happening, told me to do affirmations and visualization and that everything would shift when I did this.
I even started budgeting because I wanted to see a shift in my life.
Yet something interesting happened in my world – the more I affirmed, the worse I felt and the more critical and negative I became towards myself.
I was convinced there was something seriously wrong with me. I believed I was beyond help and that I was cursed when it came to money.
I’d stick to my budget for maybe 2 weeks but by the third week, I’d fall off the wagon and go on a major spending spree; I couldn’t stop myself, no matter how hard I tried.
When month end came, I was broke again and hadn’t managed to save a thing.
It was almost like I was possessed and I needed to blow all the money I had in my account.
Why does it sometimes feel like we're going round in circles when it comes to money?
And why does reduced spending not always lead to increased savings or investments?
A common theme that came up in the Fall I Love With Your Bank Account Challenge was this idea of paying off debt, only to find yourself back in debt or have other aspects of our lives fall apart.
Or increasing your salary only to find yourself saving even less money.
Or changing your spending habits, only to start spending money on all sorts of emergencies or family emergencies.
Why do we live in fear of month end and our bills?
Most importantly – how do we change these financial patterns?
STOP PRETENDING POSITIVE THINKING IS A CURE ALL
Affirmations are amazing, but research has shown that affirmations don’t always work, because we have deeper wounds around money that need to be worked on in a deeper way.
When we decide to push against these wounds, by doing affirmations, we meet resistance and our subconscious mind starts to fight what we’re feeding it and/or telling it.
The best way to change our thinking is to get the mind to start questioning itself so it can find its own truth.
FINANCIAL OUTCOMES DEPEND ON MORE THAN JUST OUR BEHAVIOUR
According to the Lazarus theory of emotions, we think a thought, feel an emotion and then behave in a particular manner.
So our behaviour is dependent not just on the actions we take but our thoughts and emotions as well.
And it’s not just our thoughts it’s also our memories, our ancestral memories that we carry within us, our spiritual beliefs etc.
I want you to think of all the thoughts, memories, emotions and beliefs that cause us financial pain as wounds to our psyche. These wounds keep us in survival mode and impact the way we take action as well the actions we do take.
These wounds are what keep us repeating the same financial patterns over time.
FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE DOESN'T JUST LEAD TO BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE
Just because you have a budget or you know how to budget, it doesn’t mean you’ll follow the budget because knowledge doesn’t lead to behavioural change.
If knowledge led to behavioural change, then we would all eat healthy, drink lots of water and exercise every day.
Knowing something, doesn’t mean we will apply that knowledge. Applied knowledge is totally different.
To heal our destructive financial patterns and month end anxiety and paying our bills, we have to heal our childhood, teen and ancestral wounds around money.
Click play on the video below to learn more about this topic
How do you feel about month end?
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
