Does the thought of balancing your checkbook or building a budget leave you filled with anxiety? Do you lose sleep thinking about your bills? If so, you’re in good company with the other 60% of American adults who find money a major stressor in their lives.
It’s even understandable. The 2008 financial crisis and the Covid Pandemic upended a lot of people’s trust in their financial futures as jobs and saving accounts vanished. Like other kinds of chronic stress, financial stress is bad for you on a lot of levels.
Fortunately, meditation and financial mindfulness can go a long way to easing that stress in your life.
Why Meditation?
However New Age it might seem, study after study has shown the benefits of meditation for emotional, mental, and even physical health. For example, meditation can reduce your blood pressure. Of course, there are many different kinds of meditation.
Mindfulness meditation places its focus on staying present in the moment. You literally mind what is happening right now.
This lets you acknowledge the things that trouble you and let them go, at least temporarily. The knock-on effect is that your mind grows calmer, which lets you deal with things more thoughtfully and less reactively.
Financial Mindfulness
Financial mindfulness meditation uses this same approach but zeroes in on elements of your financial life. For example, it might focus on your spending or saving. The mindfulness approach lets you step past your knee-jerk reactions to spending and consider it more calmly.
So, for example, let’s say you spend as a way to boost your well-being, however temporary that might prove. Mindfulness will let you look at that behavior as the short-term fix that it is and work on a healthier spending approach.
On the other hand, you may take up abundance meditation as a way of seeing what you have as sufficient or more than sufficient, instead of never being enough.
Methods
There are numerous methods for taking up financial mindfulness that range from the highly traditional to the tech-savvy. You can take a mindfulness meditation class somewhere and simply make finances your personal focus. There are also guided meditation sessions at places like yoga-therapy.la.
You can use mindfulness apps that feature financial mindfulness options. If you look for them, you can even find financial mediation music and guided meditation for financial abundance. The short version is that you can find resources to help you with financial mindfulness.
Mindfulness and Financial Stress
Avoiding financial stress in this day and age isn’t an easy option for most people. Many people carry substantial consumer debt before they realize the full stress impact of those youthful financial choices. fortunately, financial mindfulness and meditation provide you with a means of managing that stress in a healthy way.
As a side effect, you’ll often find yourself making more reasoned and responsible choices about your financial life as you put aside your reflexive reactions to financial stress.
Looking for more finance or health tips? Check out the posts in our Finance and Health sections.
