You may not realize how much of an impact your Financial Environment has on your physical health and your emotional well-being.
It is important to understand that being healthy is not expensive. Being sick is expensive.
If you are suffering from any kind of severe chronic sickness or disease, the costs of dealing with it can be quite a burden. Between the diagnostic testing that is required, various treatments that are prescribed and all of the doctor’s office visits – they can all add up quickly and if you don’t have the means to cover those bills, that financial stress alone can prevent you from regaining your health not to mention it contributing further to the decline of your health.
But even if you are not dealing with chronic disease, the truth is money and financial issues are a major contributor to the stress you may feel on a day-to-day basis. Financial worries can keep you up at night preventing you from getting the proper rest you need. They can cause stomach and digestive issues so you cannot absorb the nutrients you need They can cause your work performance to suffer because you are distracted and cannot focus properly on the job at hand.
What is important here is not to dwell on the negative side of this, but to realize this environment’s affect on you and to take steps towards improving it. While this is health program is not a financial advice program, it is important to address the problem on the level at which it exists for you.
If you are dealing with insomnia because you are worried about money, you can follow all the sleep advice in the Rest Well section and may help you sleep a little better. But if don’t address the financial problem that is causing you to lose sleep in the first place, your insomnia is never going to be resolved.
Firstly, do anything you can to take a step towards the solution to your financial problem. That might be as simple as getting some helpful information on the Internet or making a call to the bank to talk about how to start a payment plan. It might be writing down all of your expenses so you can track your spending habits and figure out where you might want to make some changes. It might be simply brainstorming ideas with someone on how you can generate some more money in your business.
Taking action, any action, even though it might not solve the problem immediately, will change your stress around it. Any action you take is a demonstration to yourself and to the world that you are acting responsibly; you are taking your power back and moving forward towards bettering your situation.
One of the best books out there about the psychology of money is T. Harv Eker’s “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”. His approach is to first examine your mindset around money and then teach you tools to better handle your finances. He talks about discovering your “money blueprint”, which is your psychological profile that determines how you deal with money and predicts the challenges or the success you will have with money.
He breaks people down into two types of people when it comes to their finances: you are either a “Spender” or a “Saver”. This tendency we have, almost 100% of the time, comes from one or both of our parents, or whoever might have raised you when you were a child.
You would think then that this would follow a simple pattern: Spenders raise their kids to be Spenders, and Savers raise their kids to be Savers. But not all the time. Many times a child will grow up to regard money in the opposite way of their parents out of sheer rebellion.
Suppose your parents both held the purse strings very tightly when you were growing up and you felt frustrated as a kid because you constantly heard things like “No, we can’t buy that right now” or “No, you can’t go to the movies. It is too expensive.” Then you might become a Spender because when you finally get control over your own finances, you want to say “yes” to buying things that you want because your parents always seemed to say “no” to you.
But suppose you saw Dad spending money freely and you saw it stressing Mom out because each month there wasn’t enough to cover the bills when they were due. Then you might become a Saver because you want a cushion so you can to avoid the kind of discomfort that you felt around not having enough money at that early age.
Being a Spender isn’t better or worse than being a Saver or vice versa. But being unconscious about your habit around money can lead to problems. You might be causing yourself a lot of stress by spending your money as soon as you get it rather than saving some of it for later on down the line. Or you might be missing out on some great opportunities for fun and enjoyment or you might be missing out on some great investments, if you hold onto your money too tightly.
Imagine how much strain is placed on a relationship when you and your significant other have opposite money blueprints. You will have arguments all the time about one of you buying like crazy and the other one never letting loose. So you can see that if you are unconscious to these “mindsets” around money, friction and stress can build to where it damages not only your financial situation, but your relationship as well.
The key is to examine your own tendencies, understand how it is serving you and then look at how the other way of doing things might also serve you in your financial situations.
*Exerpted from the Being Well Lifestyles Home Study Course by Dr. Jay Warren.
Drawing on over two decades of experience as a hands-on holistic practitioner, Dr. Jay Warren is a primary healthcare provider and licensed chiropractor in the San Diego area. He has spent tens of thousands of clinical hours helping his patients achieve their optimal health potential through holistic approaches bolstered by years of personal experimentation, education and research. Dr. Jay creates customized plans integrating exercise, nutrition and stress management strategies to overcome a myriad of health challenges. For more information, email drjay@drjaywarren.com or visit www.DrJayWarren.com.