Money Myth Number 6: There’s nothing I can do, so there’s no point in looking at my money situation
I’ve been here. Knowing that my money situation is bad. So bad in fact, that there’s nothing I can do. I can’t stand to look at it. I’m locked into working where I work, living where I live, paying what money I owe. There’s nothing I can do. There’s no point in trying - I’ll just try to ignore it for now.
And it’s completely understandable that anyone would think like this. It can be terrifying to look at the gory state that our money has got into. In the short term, it’s much more pleasant to ignore it, and reassure ourselves that looking won’t help, because “There’s nothing I can do.”
And there’s always the hopeful thought that we might just scrape by. We might earn, or find, or win, or be given some money which will solve all our problems.
But scraping by doesn’t often happen. Usually, the situation just gets worse. And we never really stop worrying about it, no matter how well we distract ourselves. The whole time, there is a vague black cloud pushed to the back of the mind, taking up a lot of the brain’s thought processes.
Money stress takes up a lot of mind space because threats to our money situation are felt as threats to our survival, and there is nothing more important to the most basic parts of our brains than our survival. So the brain worries – “How bad is it really? What’s going on? Can I afford this? Am I almost bankrupt? Is it not that bad? I can’t look! “
Be brave. Face the gory mess. Yes, it may well be scary and confronting. But once your brain knows the scope of the problem, the basic survival part will stop worrying. That will allow the more complex parts of your brain to start finding the solutions that will work for you.
