How financial anxiety hinders ability to pursue our potential

Working with a life coach recently helped me understand how my childhood anxieties about limited financial means continue to restrict my ability to make optimal life choices. In our next session, I’m going to have a conversation with my inner child — reassuring him that I’m safe and it’s going to be okay. It’s fascinating to me that irrational fears based on what happened 25 years ago still continue to imprison me and my potential.

Anxiety has been a constant sub-thread weaved into the contours of my life. I wake up anxious every day even though everything is fine. It’s a travesty really because it holds me back from enjoying life, doing my most productive work and living my best life. What do I really fear? Worst case scenarios of all sorts. Losing a job, a loved one or just being a failure in general. Not being good enough or enough.

The part that’s particularly bothering me these days is the tax anxiety places on my productivity. If I wasn’t anxious, I’d get so much more done and actually enjoy the process versus feel so much pain. I’m good at what I do. You wouldn’t be reading these words if I wasn’t. But I can’t help but feel like it’s all a farce. And that one wrong step will mean everything falling apart like a house of cards. I’ve been on planet earth for 36 years and that should count for something. I’ve been through a divorce, depression and still come out alive. Then why do I still feel like everything can go wrong at any moment?

Part of it could be a call from God to submit to Him and realise that I can do everything in my control and still feel helpless when it comes to outcomes. Part of it is that I’m afraid I’ll be seen as a failure in front of the world if I can’t hold it together. And part of it is that I’d feel a deep sense of unfairness or injustice in life if something does go wrong (why did this happen to me?).

In terms of being seen as a failure to the world, who cares? I don’t spend more than a minute thinking about how other people are not doing well. I think about what I can do to help them. Other folks will feel the same way about me if I struggle. Besides, I don’t live for others. I live for myself. Why be anxious about worst case scenarios in the context of other people who don’t even care?

In terms of a sense of unfairness or injustice, if something goes wrong in my life, what about all the things that have gone right? What about having a healthy body, the ability to see, hear and walk or the love of my life and daughter that make my world go round? Food on the table and all the things that I’m grateful for. So what if something goes wrong when so much has gone right? Is the anxiety of worst case scenarios worth taking when you’re living through a best case scenario?

Anxiety is not a productive emotion when one is trying to be productive. And productivity is the only way you can actually avoid worst case scenarios. So I have to find a way to restore the confidence and joy in doing the thing I want to and should do so that I can actually resolve my anxiety structurally. How does one do that? By saying the same to yourself when anxiety rears its ugly head. Not indulging the anxiety in letting you down a rabbit hole of worse case scenarios but pushing back and talking about what could go right and everything you’re grateful for.

There’s also an element of submitting to God here by saying all we can do is try our best and then leave the rest to Him. But how do we know that we are trying our best, the anxiety asks? What if you’re just being lazy and easy on yourself, while telling yourself you’re doing your best?

That’s what the modern day life treadmill tells us. That we aren’t running hard enough or fast enough. And that’s what we have to reprogram ourselves on. The anxiety that drives us insane isn’t just personal but socialised.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12^th, 2023.

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