If you are reading this, you are very likely to have a human brain. Though neurodiversity makes our brains unique, as humans we can generally agree that money is hard and emotional. Neurodiversity Celebration Week was last week, which you can learn more about here.
In “Money, The True Story of a Made-up Thing,” Jacob Goldstein writes, “Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. Money feels cold and mathematical and outside the realm of fuzzy human relationships. It isn’t….our choices about money gave us the world we live in now. In the future we’ll make different choices and money will change again.”
Money, the way we know it today, is a human construct that will change again and again. This is part of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution moves fast. Biological evolution is much slower. Our brains have not evolved to understand money the way it exists today, and that is a big part of why so many of us struggle. Below are a few things you can do to help your human brain deal with money.
1) Try to increase dopamine naturally
When we buy something we feel accomplished. Its like we won, we succeeded at acquiring a resource, and are then rewarded with a dopamine hit. But the dopamine hit is fleeting. Often, we don’t feel as good as we imagined we would after we have the thing, but the money is gone.
Instead, try to increase more natural forms of dopamine: sunlight, especially in the morning, connecting to community, learning something new and quality sleep are a few examples. You can read more about increasing dopamine here.
2) Pausing
Put a pause between you and a financial choice. The more of a pause you give your brain, the more of a chance you are giving yourself to make a choice from your thinking brain, rather than your instinctive or emotional brain. This means leaving something in your cart for 24 hrs before checking out, removing saved credit cards from your device, talking to a trusted friend or advisor before making a choice, or playing with your animals or kids.
3) Remembering Self vs Experiencing Self
I learned about the remembering self vs the experiencing self when I read “Thinking Fast and Slow”, by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman explains that there are two selves, the experiencing self, that feels a certain way about life as it is happening, and the remembering self which focuses on how we feel about our life when we think about events after they occur. His research shows that the two selves are often not aligned.
An example many of us can relate to is–how we feel on vacation, and how we feel years later when we think of our vacation can be quite different from each other. One way to hack this difference is to plan to do something special and exciting at the very end of your trip versus the beginning, as the remembering self will recall it much more vividly this way, and your vacation will live on in your brain with increased happiness.
Wishing you healing and success on your financial wellness journey.