(ThyBlackMan.com) Money problems, when they arise, seem permanent. The financial stress leaves you feeling anxious about the future. You may be having some work at hand or some other things to manage, but declining mental health due to a financial crisis makes it harder to concentrate. As a result, people lose income and feel trapped in a downward spiral.
No matter how bad your financial stress has become or how scary your bills look, there is a way out, even if you don’t want to believe this at the moment, there is a way out.
All you have to do is to follow these tips which can help ease the stress of the financial crisis and regain stability.
Open up
When you face financial stress, there’s a strong awkward feeling that makes you keep things to yourself and deal with the problem alone. Money is a taboo subject in many families and some people strongly oppose the idea of revealing their financial situation. When you struggle financially, the stress can damage your self-esteem and fill you with hopelessness.
Talking about your problems with a trusted friend or a loved one can help you get a clear picture of what you’re facing. You may even come up with solutions that you had not thought of. Talk face-to-face with someone you trust, it’s a great way to find relief from financial stress.
Money works as a safety net. When you have money, you feel peaceful, but when you don’t have money, the financial stress builds up and makes you anxious and angry. Your problems may feel overwhelmingly big enough to make you feel worse, but things can get better if you open up. There are people and organizations to support during such difficult times, reach out.
Evaluate the reality of your situation
To ease the financial stress, you may be ignoring everything that brings your financial picture in front of your eyes. Maybe you’re avoiding calls, bills, and possibly denying the fact that you’re in the middle of a financial crisis. That’s where things are going wrong.
Running away from your problems or keeping everything on mute isn’t going to reduce stress. The first step to build a plan to look at your financial status from all viewpoints. Detail your income, spending, and loans. You can easily find bank statements to check what the root cause of the problem is. If it’s low income, a poorly performing business, an asset, or unnecessary expenditure, it’s time to start tracking your finances. The process may seem daunting and may force you to face the harsh reality, but that’s what you need.
If you’ve already analyzed your financial situation in-depth and found that even after eliminating all the unnecessary expenses, things can’t be under control, you have two choices. Reduce your spending further, increase your income, or do both. How you plan about achieving your goals is to draw a clear vision.
Practice stress management
There can be many reasons behind financial stress but one should remember that there are also many possible solutions available. Once the problems are identified, developing plans to target specific problems can help you come out of the financial stress. Your plans can be about living without loans, lowering down your monthly budget, cutting on some expenses, declaring bankruptcy, seeking help from government schemes, or finding a new job to create an additional source of income.
Events that affect your financial status can happen at any time and that’s why it is important to review your situation and plans regularly. If certain strategies are working well for you and some are not then you can shift your focus and efforts to where it matters the most.
Eat Healthy
You don’t have to spend a lot in order to eat healthy. You can get a healthy diet on a budget. All you need to do is to replace unhealthy food with healthy substitutes and add vegetables, fruits, and other food items rich in nutrition to improve your mood and boost energy.
Financial problems hit where it hurts the most. They make you feel like a failure and lose self-esteem. The impact is long-lasting and is enough to suppress your sense of self-worth. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to help you cope with financial stress and one of the most rewarding ways is eating healthy.
The human body is complex, but it has unbelievable capabilities to fight anxiety and stress. Sadly, due to our highly stressful lives, our stress response hormones remain on alert all the time, not allowing our body to fully recover. These physiological changes can be managed by a healthy diet. When you prioritize protein, avoid processed food, keep track of emotional eating and caffeine intake, you allow your body to gain an edge over such stressors.
Overcome Procrastination
Yet while you already have a plan to deal with financial stress, you won’t get there if you can’t act. You may think that you work better under pressure, and that’s why you wait till the last moment and feel satisfied when the job is done. According to psychologists, that’s the wrong approach. The sense of working better under pressure is mostly false. It leads people to fall into the trap of inaction. As long as there’s no fire, you won’t move an inch and that’s when you start losing willpower.
Follow these easy steps to overcome procrastination which is often the root cause of the monetary crisis and financial stress. If you’re dealing with frequent money problems, here’s what you need to do to get there not just in your head but in reality.
Get started even if it is for 10 minutes. Focus on something keeping distractions away. Set deadlines after thinking a lot about the work. Set ‘visible’ deadlines, which means setting a fixed date instead of saying ‘next week’ or the weekend. You can also break down big goals and create milestones to keep the motivation flowing.
There are times when you just don’t feel like it, but instead of putting something off for tomorrow or some other day, do what you can easily do now. Financial cruising may not disappear instantly, but with small steps, you can easily overcome financial stress for today and tomorrow.
Staff Writer; Vince Vernon
Tech guru at heart… Still touches base on Money, Technology, Business, Health, Finance, and the list goes on…