“Money can’t buy happiness”, this is true in the context of navigating some of the deeper existential and relationship fears we hold. However, when it comes to our baseline needs of safety and security, our financial wellness is deeply intertwined with our health and happiness. Our relationship with our finances has real consequences; financial stress negatively impacts our health, and chronic stress negatively impacts financial decision making.
What is financial wellness? It’s the third pillar of wellness, alongside physical and mental wellness. It’s the ability to feel financially prepared for unexpected emergencies, to be able to feel confident and values aligned in your purchases, and to have plans for your financial future.
But here’s the catch. Finances are the number one stress of adults in the United States. Financial wellness is not within reach for over three-quarters of Americans. You can find listicles all over the internet advising on how to achieve financial wellness, but what’s missing is the fact that feeling stress about finances pushes us to make rash, short-term financial decisions, which further destabilizes our financial wellness. This is happening all over America.
Women in particular are at higher risk for experiencing financial stress due to the gender pay gap, the gender wealth gap, less access to investing, our longer life expectancy, and financial planning models that are biased toward men’s salaries, family roles, and preferences. We have been left out of the conversation and the system. And in the current economic climate and “she-cession”, many of us aren’t in a financial position to even take steps toward financial wellness.
Not having a handle on our financial future can harm us. While having the safety net of an emergency fund or a 401k can help to prevent hardship or medical debt, what we want to highlight is the interplay between physiology and our financial situation.
Financial decisions require cognition and emotion to be in lockstep. This pairing allows us to be attentive, focus on what matters, ask questions, and assess risk appropriately. Hormones like cortisol (our main chronic stress hormone), when elevated, can knock this pairing out, and our attention to detail and risk assessment become impaired, leading us to financial decisions that we may regret. This is what we call the finance-stress cycle. Chronic financial stress exacerbates our short-term decision-making, worsening our financial position and extends chronic stress. Our bodies don’t always make the finance-stress cycle obvious, and instead, manifest our cortisol dysregulation as anxiety, depression, or other illnesses.
There are nutrients, herbs and lifestyle practices that help us regulate our cortisol levels and in times of financial stress become critical tools for our financial wellness and our wellness in general.
We want you to know the seemingly insurmountable to-do list for financial health is not the first stop on the train. We understand that there is so much on your plate, so many people you are holding up, and so many tables you deserved a seat at but didn’t get. The first step to getting well, is having the support to get up off the ground. It might be our quiz, our test, our supplements, or our membership - whichever mode serves you is what we’ve got.
You make thousands of decisions every day. We know that thriving and planning your future starts with getting the cognition-emotion pair to work well together. We do this by giving you the option to measure and test your cortisol levels and use evidence-based supplements to help regulate them. This, in turn, helps you make decisions with clarity, allows you to ask for help without shame, and have the energy to get up and go for gold.
