Do You Have Avoidance Anxiety When It Comes to Your Money?

Anxiety, sadness, guilt, shame, frustration. If money causes these feelings, perhaps you have been avoiding it.

Avoidance is one of those pesky survival skills that stuck around through our evolution into the modern world. According to Anxiety Canada, avoidance was designed to keep us safe from danger but now it will keep us from more than predators and spoiled food. It may just be keeping you from progressing in your life. 

In her 2023 Washington post article titled, “Avoidance, not anxiety, may be sabotaging your life” Dr. Luana Marques, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, describes her client who’s avoidance of public speaking caused her to seek a job where she wouldn’t have to do any. In doing so she accepted a 25% reduction to her potential income. Public speaking did not pose a real danger, but her avoidance of it had a significant negative impact. 

While avoidance may give us that initial reduction of anxiety, it makes the issue feel larger and therefore harder to tackle. We allow it to build up in our minds and when we do have to eventually deal with the issue it can make the anxiety feel much worse than if we had faced it initially. According to Anxiety Canada, avoidance can also, “generate a host of other unwanted emotions such as sadness, guilt, shame, frustration, and more. 

This may explain the stress I see so many clients have around tax time. Many of us avoid thinking or talking about money the best we can but the government forces us to face it, at least a little bit, once per year. 

It’s easy to intellectually understand this concept and it’s altogether a different thing to implement it in one’s own life. Let’s consider how you can move from knowing it, to doing it. 

It can be helpful to break down the avoidance anxiety in tiny pieces. One of the strategies that Dr. Marques suggests is called “Approaching”, as you may have expected, that’s the opposite of avoiding. This doesn’t mean you have to face everything that is scary in one sitting. For some people just having a call to talk to me about money is a momentous step forward. People don’t talk to other people about money and so having a free 15 minute chat with me, deciding coaching is what they need, that’s a great first step. 

When I was doing my Masters degree I would tell myself, time passes anyway. Completing a Masters degree while working full time, raising two young children, and dealing with some health issues felt like a lot. If I thought about the magnitude of the work ahead of me I would have quit before I began, but instead I told myself I’m not in a rush, time passes anyway. If I do what I can, course by course I will pick away at this thing and eventually finish it. And guess what, I did. When I started the degree at 28 years old, I initially thought, at this rate I won’t be done until I’m 34! (I know, I know, but nine years ago, 34 felt pretty old) That could have held me back from doing it at all. Instead, I shifted my thinking to, I could be 34 with a Masters degree, or 34 without a masters degree, I chose the former. 

The point is, you can take little steps toward improving your finances and eventually you will get to the other side of your financial anxiety. 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, those years will pass whether you face your finances or not. You might as well take your first small manageable steps now, break down the avoidance anxiety bit by bit and avoid the increasing impact of long term avoidance on your head and your bank account. 

What will be your one small step to face your finances today?