Your Wealth Or Your Health: The Relationship Between Money & Wellness

In trying to look after ourselves, it is often extremely challenging to ensure that we are looking after every aspect of our lives as equally as possible. This is something that can really take a long time to get right, and if you are not careful it could mean that you end up prioritising one thing too much over another. In this post, we are going to look at the thorny issue of money and health: how they interact, how they combine, and how you can make sure that you are not sacrificing one at the benefit of the other.

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Does Money Make You Happy?

One of the central issues in this is the question of whether or not money actually makes you happy. It’s not an easy one to get to the bottom of, but it is worth exploring if we want to better understand the whole concept of wellness as it relates to finances. In fact, studies have been carried out on this specific question, and the apparent answer they have found is a very interesting and enlightening one. So what did they seem to discover with this research?

As it happens, it looks as though money does indeed make you happier - up to a point. Essentially, it makes you happy as long as it is removing other major stresses in your life. So if you are struggling to afford rent and food, earning more and being able to afford those things is obviously going to bring with it some kind of psychological relief. That’s as far as it goes, however. Beyond removing those kinds of difficulties, any money you make past that point does not make you any happier. In a certain sense, you are always going to have the temperament you have, and you will always more or less be as happy as you are, regardless of how much money you have.

What this means for us is simply this: if you are chasing money because you genuinely think that more and more of it will make you happy, you are quite wrong. If anything, the eternal chase is only going to bring about more worry and despair in the long run. Chase money by all means, but don’t expect to be happier as a result of doing so. It’s more likely to be the exact opposite, and then you will wonder why you did it.

Dealing With Financial Stress

As we have seen, money helps you psychologically to the point that it removes stress. You should focus on this as best as you can if you want to improve the relationship between money and wellness in your life. Basically, you might want to think about how you are approaching the issue of financial stress, as that is something that can have a really negative effect on your life if you are not careful. We all have financial stress at different times, and it is something that can really upset things quite profoundly in general.

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In order to try and deal with financial stress, most of what you need to do comes down to planning. The more you plan ahead, the more likely it is that you are going to be able to deal with stress as it arises, as you will have thought about the potential pitfalls and laid traps for them, essentially. This is the essence of good budgeting: ensuring that you have considered what might go wrong, and working around it before it even happens. If you can learn to do that, the vast majority of your financial stress will simply never appear.

For the remainder of it that does appear, you might need to ask yourself whether you are approaching it in the right way psychologically, or whether you need to change around the way you think about money. There is plenty of talk of money mindsets in the world today, but the most important thing is to have a mindset that allows for flexibility, and which doesn’t believe in money as the be-all and end-all of human happiness and woerth. If you can get to that point, you will find your relationship to money is a lot healthier and much easier to manage.

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Preparation & Patience

Often, when you are dealing with money, you need to make sure that you are as fully prepared for the future as possible. If you are about to go into a new venture of some kind, you are going to have to think about whether you are prepared, and that means looking into every aspect of it you can. For instance, let’s say you are about to move home. This is one of the most stressful experiences you can have, but you can make it less so by preparing for the financial elements far in advance.

That means you need to learn more about mortgages, how they work, and what you can expect from them. It also means that you are going to have to develop some patience, which is something that many of us find difficult, especially when it comes to financial issues. We all want things to happen as fast as possible, but sometimes you simply have to wait for it to alter. If you can have preparation in one hand and patience in the other, you are going to find that financial wisdom is yours for the taking - and your health will prosper.

The Poor Mental Health Cycle

It might be worth bearing the following in mind as you try to improve how you approach money. When you are bad with money, it likely leads to poor mental health. That then means that you are less likely to deal with money well, and so on. This unfortunate vicious cycle is one you should aim to avoid, but that is easier said than done. However, if you can keep it in mind you should be able to learn how to manage it a little better - so your money, and more importantly, your mental and physical wellbeing, is in a much better shape.

*Collaborative Post