Debt is often seen purely as a financial concern but, like with any of life’s challenges, it’s important to acknowledge and manage the effect on your mental health and wellbeing, too. From anxiety and difficulty sleeping to low mood and reduced self-esteem, debt can impact every part of your life, causing difficulties in your work, your relationships and more.
It can be easy to get trapped in a cycle of poor mental health and poor financial choices, because anxiety and depression can cloud your judgement and affect your motivation, making it more difficult to manage your money effectively. This can become a downward spiral that feels difficult to get out of, but by focusing on protecting your mental health, you might be able to spin things in the opposite direction and start seeing a positive impact on your relationship with money.
Here are a few ways to protect your mental health and brighten your financial future.
When we’re dealing with financial difficulty or problem debt, shame is often the first emotion to rear its ugly head. We might feel regretful or embarrassed about finding ourselves in this situation, or beat ourselves up about decisions we’ve made in the past that have led to us having this experience. Shame is a normal human emotion, and can sometimes be helpful in motivating us to make different choices in future, but allowing it to take up too much time and headspace can be very damaging to our mental health, so we need to be careful about how much we allow it in.
If you find yourself dwelling too much on negative self-talk or feelings of shame and regret, you might find it helpful to actively challenge those thoughts when they creep in. For example, you might counter thoughts of ‘this is all my fault’ with ‘this is my responsibility to fix, and I am fixing it’.
Financial difficulty is rarely caused by one factor, and the solutions aren’t often simple, either. Make sure that you can differentiate between the factors that are within your control and those that aren’t, so that you don’t waste precious energy beating yourself up for things that weren’t your fault, or trying to change things that you can’t control.
Instead, make a list of practical changes you can make, and any habits you might need to form or break to get you on the right path towards a more positive financial situation. Focus your energy on these, and you will start to see results in both your material financial situation and your money mindset.
When making a plan to pay off your debt, it can be tempting, especially if you find yourself with debt due to mistakes that you’ve made with money, to be motivated by a wish to punish yourself rather than focusing on a good outcome for yourself. This can lead to overly restrictive budgeting, depriving yourself unnecessarily and setting yourself up to fail.
It’s fine - important even - to acknowledge where you’ve gone wrong in the past, in order to learn from your mistakes and stay accountable. But if your motivation to succeed in fixing your financial situation comes from a place of self-punishment, it can be hard to sustain and have a negative effect on your mental health and self-worth, which can be long-lasting. Accepting the mistakes that you’ve made and shifting your focus to look at what you could do differently is a much better way to protect your mental health and keep making progress on paying off your debt or reaching your financial goals.
As with anything relating to mental health, it’s important to remember that you don’t have to go it alone! There are lots of places where you can find support for your mental health, whether you look to find online communities to engage with, find a friend to confide in or seek professional help from a therapist or debt advisor (such as StepChange).
Remember that, even if your financial situation is due to mistakes you’ve made in the past, you are still deserving of advice and support, and that your mental health and wellbeing are still just as important as ever.
