How Financial Stress Can Affect Your Life & Your Health

How Financial Stress Can Affect Your Life & Your Health

When your finances are in trouble, it’s natural to feel stressed, whether your financial issues are caused by job loss, debts, increased living costs, expensive emergency costs or something else. It’s a common problem and it’s happening to people all around the world. The pandemic caused lots of financial problems for many families and now we’re living through the cost of living crisis.

If you don’t have some savings available, it’s very easy to get into serious financial problems easily and quickly. It could be something like a big winter energy bill costing more that you had expected or something breaking that results in a big bill – something breaking on your car or boiler issues for example. It’s important to ensure that you have insurance and cover in place, if possible, and that you try to maintain a rainy day fund to avoid surprise costs becoming too much of a problem.

Just like any other kind of stressful situation, having financial issues can affect your life and your health negatively. You will struggle with feelings of low self-esteem, low energy levels, mood swings, and you’ll probably struggle to sleep. If you’re feeling stressed about money, it can also damage your relationships too, especially if it causes disagreements and you and your partner have different opinions on how to deal with the problems.

These things can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression that can then leave you with an urge to use unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to suppress your negative emotions. Drinking too much alcohol, overeating, gambling and drug use are common things that people who are feeling stressed about money turn to to help them feel better for just a little bit. Some people are so worried and stressed about their financial situation that they are even considering hurting themselves. If you are feeling like this, it’s important that you get professional help quickly.

We all know that there are many other things in our lives that are more important than money but, in modern life, money is still an important part of our daily lives and not having enough to keep your family safe and warm or not being able to keep up with your bills will cause stress, fear and overwhelm.

As you can see above, financial problems can result in lots of health problems, both physical and mental, and ruin your relationships and cause big problems in your life as your money concerns will make you feel hopeless and unable to make good decisions.

What you need to do is to take control over your financial situation to ensure that what’s happened doesn’t happen again. Find out what financial support is available to you and make a greater effort to put yourself and your family in a better financial situation by looking at your outgoings, reducing what you can and building some savings for future expenses instead.