Bad Money Days? A 3-Step Framework To Bounce Back In No Time
Here’s a funky paradox: everyone has bad money days now and then and you know it. Not only that, deep down inside you also know this is normal—something to be expected. And yet, when it’s your turn to navigate on the choppy waves of one of such days (-1000 brownie points if it’s a Monday!) it feels as if you were the only person on planet Earth dealing with “money issues”. Talking about bizarre, huh? In this post, I’ll share a super easy, 3-step framework to deal with bad money days.
There are times in life (and in finance) when nothing, absolutely nothing seems to be working out. You’re late for work, get stuck in the commute, forget to defrost dinner before leaving the house (hello, takeout) and your car decides that, yes, today is the best day to remind you about that pretty unavoidable oil change. If you add to this mix a bunch of newspaper headlines claiming the imminent arrival of a new recession, and a credit card that gets rejected not once, but twice on the same day, you can probably see why it’s so easy to go from “ugh, this is a bad day” to “OMG, this is my life and I am doomed”.
Fortunately, not everything has to be doom and gloom. In fact, bad money days may make you feel uncomfortable and off, but they are the best way to get a quick lesson in perspective.
Just think about it for a second. When you are having a today-nothing-feels-right kind of day, the first thing that goes out of the window is your ability to see things clearly, just as they are. Instead, you start to perceive the world through the cloud lenses of a mood –suddenly, what yesterday wasn’t a real challenge, today feels like the end of the world. Or in more poetic terms: you lose sight of the forest and look only into the trees. Money stress (and the ensuing anxiety) tends to push your perspective and your willingness to see things as they are down through a rabbit hole.
The best way to get through this? An emergency plan that features a couple of things.
The Emergency Kit for Bad Money Days
First of all, a gentle reminder: no, the voice in your head that insists on highlighting all the things that aren’t working right now is not right.
If you are like 99% of humans, I’m sure the first thing you hear when things feel off is that pesky voice in your head, calling you all sorts of names and insisting you are the most unskilled, unsavvy, and ungracious human on planet Earth.
While hearing that voice is unavoidable (that’s just how the brain works), believing (or acting) on those claims is optional.
I recognize this is a painful situation, but do your best to listen without immediately reacting. After the cascade of judgment finishes, think of a situation where you’ve experienced the opposite of what the voice is saying. For example, if all you hear is “you don’t know anything”, recall a situation where your skills and savoir-faire solved a problem (hint: it doesn’t have to be a big problem!).
Once that mean, inner voice gets addressed, you are good to move on to the following 3-step framework that will allow you to reformulate the whole situation.
Rethinking Bad Money Days: A 3-Step Framework
ONE – List all the wins of the day.
Even if they sound small or unimportant: add them to the list. Did you get the kids out of the house on time? Write it down. Did someone say something nice about you at that 9.00 am meeting? Write that one as well. Was today a gorgeous, sunny day? Duly recorded. You get the drill.
Recording your wins (yes, even the small ones) is the perfect antidote against our brain’s natural tendency to focus almost exclusively on the negatives. In fact, our nervous system is so used to highlighting the risks and potential downsides of everything first that we often forget all the amazing things we have already accomplished, big and small.
This is why remembering your wins and keeping them front and center whenever you’re having a bad money day is a guaranteed mood improver.
TWO – Bring back past money accomplishments that made you proud.
Things like the day you realized you only have a couple of monthly payments left to cover your debt, or how you felt when you received the approval notice on your current mortgage. Regardless of the specifics, the key is to recall that moment as if you were re-living it again.
If you can’t think of a big-money success, a small-ish one (such as that Thursday when you finally managed to resist a late-evening impulse buy) counts just as much. What matters here is visualizing a moment when you felt almost unstoppable.
THREE – Understand the type of thought behind your feelings… and tweak accordingly.
Thoughts are the building blocks of a bad money day. More specifically, restrictive, fearful thoughts around money and the way the latter goes into your hand. In my experience, most restrictive money thoughts can be grouped into 3 broad categories:
- Thoughts about money already gone. For example, when you can’t stop thinking about a purchase that “you shouldn’t have made.
- Thoughts about money that isn’t here yet. For instance, you may worry about that next paycheck (will it be enough?).
- Thoughts about money currently in your power. Again, a good example of this overthinking your investment portfolio allocations: what if that’s not the winning formula and you end up losing money?).
Try to identify the category that adjusts to the contents of your thoughts. If your thoughts fall within the first group, the emotion that is circulating through your body now is probably regret. If they fit the second or the third category, you might be experiencing a mild case of anxiety.
Identifying the set of emotions intertwined with your thoughts is the first step to de-escalating the sense of overwhelm that comes with a bad money day.