How Your Thoughts Shape Financial Anxiety

“I won’t be able to pay my bills this month.”

“I’m falling behind financially compared to my friends.”

“I’m going to lose my job and won’t be able to find another one.”

What people think about their financial world has a strong impact on their emotional life and financial health. Since thoughts like those listed above are anxiety-provoking, many people then avoid financial issues and end up less prepared for the future.

Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) aims to help people better identify thoughts related to painful emotions and unhelpful actions and begin to see stressful situations more realistically. At the heart of CBT is the cognitive triangle, which illustrates the connections between thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Each of these three components influence one another. In this article, we will focus on how thoughts influence emotions and behaviors. Importantly, focusing on thoughts is one component of effective CBT. Additional strategies will be covered in future articles.

When someone experiences a stressful financial situation, they tend to have thoughts that occur quickly and are negatively slanted–termed negative automatic thoughts. For instance, when someone receives an unexpected medical bill, they may think “I’m never going to be able to afford that!” and feel highly anxious. This anxiety may propel them into throwing the bill in a stack of papers and ignoring it.

The first step in untangling these stressful thoughts and feelings is to break them down into separate components. For example:

Situation: Received an unexpected medical bill

A couple of detailed points that make this process most effective:

-The situation is described in neutral, objective language

-The thought is a statement, not a question, and is always a sentence

-In contrast, the emotion is always a single word (angry, anxious, sad, surprised)

Simply identifying the different components of the stressful situation can help people feel better about the situation and begin to understand unhelpful patterns. Give it a try yourself! This worksheet will help you begin to understand your negative automatic thoughts about money. In Part Two of this blog post, we will explore how to challenge anxiety-producing thoughts about money.