your body knows your finances are a mess before you do
cortisol is quite literally costing you money. | fhg #89
Happy Sunday, financial hotties.
A few years ago, I noticed that in certain situations, my stomach twisted into a knot so tight that I woke up not being able to breathe properly. This twisting happened so subconsciously that I didn’t even realise I was doing it, and for years, assumed that in these certain situations, I must have been eating or drinking something to cause breathing issues.
It was only after reading The Body Keeps The Score that I learned how our bodies protect us from perceived trauma, even if we don’t even realise what that trauma is. Avoidance, procrastination, the inability to just open an app or make a decision. A lot of that is our nervous system doing its job, which is shielding us from something it decided was dangerous.
The question is: what happens when the thing it’s shielding you from is your own finances?
𝜗ৎ In this issue:
the gym story I don’t talk about enough (i think)
the hormone that’s sabotaging your financial decisions
3 solutions for 3 specific physical reactions
the gym story I don’t talk about enough (i think)
So how did I actually get my finances under control? The gym. Stay with me.
When I got consistent in the gym, something permanently changed in how I related to myself. I started to become someone who did the thing she said she was going to do, i.e., I built self-trust.
Self-trust is the foundation of financial behaviour. Even though I talk a lot about skills and knowledge, at the bottom of the Financial-Hot-Girl pyramid sits self-trust.
Because when you don’t trust yourself to follow through, you avoid setting up the direct debit because part of you doesn’t believe you’ll leave the money there. You avoid looking at your spending because you don’t trust yourself to do anything useful with what you see. You push the pension off again because “future you” feels like a stranger you don’t owe much to yet.
And a lack of self-trust makes you financially anxious. Which, as it turns out, is a hormone problem as much as a money problem.
The gym gave me evidence that I could be consistent. That when I said I was going to do something, I did it. And that evidence (and resulting discipline) transferred. Physical discipline didn’t create the financial discipline, it created the self-trust that made financial discipline actually possible.
What self-trust actually does is give you the belief that even if you open your banking app and it’s a mess, you can get yourself out of it. And when you have that, your finances stop being a museum of failures. They’re just situations you’re capable of handling.
the hormone that’s sabotaging your financial decisions
Now, when you’re financially anxious (i.e. not just stressed about a specific bill, but living in low-grade, background dread about money) your body is producing cortisol. The stress hormone designed to help our ancestors outrun life-endangering threats, which is now running on a loop because your overdraft is £200 and payday is nine days away.
Cortisol is useful in short bursts, but when it’s elevated consistently (because maybe you’ve been avoiding a bank letter for three weeks) it starts doing things you’d never connect directly to your money.
It disrupts sleep, narrows your ability to concentrate, and makes your brain default to short-term thinking over long-term planning. It suppresses the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for rational decision-making, planning ahead, and impulse control.
When you’re financially stressed, your brain is physically less capable of calm, future-oriented thinking that good financial decisions actually require.
And all of this is to say that your nervous system is likely in survival mode. And survival mode does not care about your savings or investments, it’s just trying to get you to tomorrow.
So this becomes the loop that too many of us are familiar with:
Money feels tight → cortisol rises → sleep suffers → energy drops → you avoid the financial admin → nothing improves → money still feels tight → cortisol stays elevated
And studies show that when people are in a state of financial stress, their cognitive bandwidth narrows a lot1. They get better at managing immediate crises and worse at planning anything beyond the next few days, because their brain is rationing its resources.
So if you’re chronically financially anxious, advice like “just start a budget” or “just start investing” is a bit like asking someone to write a thoughtful email while someone is shouting in their ear.
But it’s also why things that feel less like a threat produce less cortisol. And less cortisol means your brain can actually make the decisions it needs to make.
Your nervous system decided that your finances were dangerous, for a seemingly legitimate reason in your past. The way through this ‘danger’ is rebuilding the physical self-trust that makes facing your finances feel survivable.
3 solutions for 3 specific physical reactions
While a physical habit changes your baseline over time through self-trust, here are solutions to manage how cortisol shows up for you right now.
The heart-in-mouth feeling. When you think about everything you haven’t done yet. That feeling is likely shame, and your nervous system has flagged it as a threat.
What to do:
Don’t open five tabs and try to fix everything at once! Your cortisol is high and your decision-making is impaired
Write down one specific thing, (NOT a to-do list, just one thing please). “Log into my pension this Sunday at 11am.” That’s it
The act of writing it externalises the threat, your brain can stop holding it (yay, science)
Set a calendar reminder for this task before you close this email
Heat in your face. Like when a card declines or when a friend texts about a trip and you have to do the maths while looking relaxed. Your threat response is activating in a social context, which makes it ten times worse because there’s usually an audience.
What to do:
Two sharp inhales through your nose, one long slow exhale through your mouth; this activates your parasympathetic nervous system and physically slows your heart rate within seconds
Repeat twice, then respond
What to do about the pattern:
The heat keeps coming back because the underlying situation hasn’t been addressed
Identify the one financial conversation or task producing the most dread
Give it a date in your calendar (not today if you’re still reacting in this way, but a real, specific date)
Your racing heart. Especially if you have any self-employed, freelance, or side income, taxes or deadlines can do this. The dread that you’ve underpaid, haven’t tracked properly, or that a letter is coming you won’t know how to handle. This is almost entirely driven by uncertainty.
What to do today:
Open a new note on your phone
Write down your best estimate of what you earned
Multiply it by 0.2 (a rough 20% liability estimate to start)
Write that number down
That number is less terrifying than the blank space your brain is currently filling with catastrophe. A plan requires a number, and you cannot make a plan for a feeling.
Financial literacy is built on a nervous system that's regulated enough to use information2. But financial literacy is also built on a version of yourself that you actually trust. Those two things are very connected.
Start with your body, whether that's the breathing technique above or a physical habit that gives you evidence you show up for yourself. Everything else gets easier from there.
Until next week,
— Dev xo
5 years ago I thought this was a woo-woo excuse for not knowing ‘enough’ about money, so please believe me for writing about it on the internet now