Scared of opening your loan statement because of how much interest has accumulated? Can’t stop wondering what not-so-great reports from Wall Street mean for your 401K?
Money problems are stressful, especially when there’s not enough of it — or you fear there won’t be enough of it in the future.
“It creates this feeling of helplessness and hopelessness,” Nancy Molitor, PhD, a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, tells NBC News BETTER. But one of the absolute worst things you can do if you find yourself in this type of situation is ignore the problem, she adds — “no matter what’s causing it.”
It’s kind of like that pile of laundry in your closet. It’s way easier to pretend it’s not there, but doing so means it’s only going to get bigger by the time you need to deal with it, she says.
Plus, money stress can do a lot of damage to your health. A new, large dataset that looked at how the recession of the late aughts affected our bodies may provide some of the strongest evidence yet.
The study, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed changes in heart health in a group of 4,600 individuals from before, during, and after the recent financial crisis. (The data was collected for the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis [MESA] between 2000 and 2012.)
On average for everyone in the study blood pressure levels and blood glucose levels — both indicators of worsening heart health — increased during the recession. But the changes were most dramatic in two groups of individuals: those under 65 (people of working age) and those over 65 who were homeowners. Both groups include those who may have more closely felt the effects of the recession.
While previous data has looked at associations between people who report financial stress and health, this study is unique because it was able to capture specific markers of health risk at multiple points in time both before and after the financial crisis (telling a more complete story of how that related stress might bear on our health), explains study author Teresa Seeman, PhD, Professor of Medicine Epidemiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles.
“The MESA data were perfectly aligned to allow us to examine data from before the Great Recession and other data for the same people immediately after [it].”
Any stress can take a toll on your health, but money stress may be particularly toxic
Some stress is the kind you experience when you’re in immediate physical danger, which heightens your senses and gives you extra energy to take action (and protect yourself) thanks to the stress hormones your body releases in response, Molitor explains.
But when there is no immediate physical danger — if the threat is perceived — those hormones that get released end up wreaking havoc on your body. More problematic still is when those stressors are chronic ones that you deal with day after day, week after week — as is the case a lot of the times when it comes to money worries, Molitor says.
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“It’s a kind of never-ending, seemingly endless loop of problems that gets created if the person doesn’t deal with the dilemma,” she says. That type of prolonged chronic stress response is associated with developing problems, like obesity, type 2 diabetes, stomach ulcers and cardiac problems.
“And uniquely, chronic stress about money seems to activate that [fight-or-flight response] system at a very high level,” she notes. That means more hormones get released that cause more damage to the body.
Indeed, studies show that people with more debt tend to report having higher levels of stress and depression. Other studies suggest financial insecurity (such as loss of a job), or even just worrying about becoming financially insecure, can increase the amount of physical pain people report feeling, and increases the amount of over-the-counter painkillers people report taking. Other research shows people with more financial stress are more likely to have metabolic syndrome, a series of poor health markers that put you at risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease and early death.
Article source: https://www.nbcnews.com/better/business/how-stop-stressing-over-money-so-it-doesn-t-hurt-ncna874791