התמלול המלא של The Connection Between Financial Health and Mental Health

Matt Pierce: Guess what's back. Business and Brews, where real business talk meets real people, and always fuel by good brew. This time we're going podcast first, bite-sized, insightful, and built for conversations you'll want to share. I'm your host, Matt Pierce, founder and CEO of Immediate, and I'll be sitting down with leaders, entrepreneurs, and friends to talk about leadership, growth, and the stories that make business worth talking about. So grab your favorite brew, pull up a chair, and let's talk business the way it's meant to be talked about. Business and Brews, back, bolder. Matt: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Business and Brews. I'm your host, Matt Pierce And given that it's a short week due to Memorial Day, we're gonna do something a little bit different. No guests this week, just a conversation that I think is incredibly important, especially right now. going to talk about the connection between financial health and mental health. Because whether we wanna admit it or not, money stress impacts almost every part of our lives. It impacts relationships, it impacts sleep. Matt Pierce: better than ever. Matt: It impacts confidence, health, and for a lot of people, it creates this ⁓ anxiety that just follows them around every single day. And reality is ⁓ you have to be quote unquote bad with money to feel financial pressure. A lot of people are doing their absolute best and still feeling squeezed. So today I want to talk through a few things. One, the financial landscape, which I think we all have a decent understanding of, so we'll keep that part short. Two, how financial stress impacts both mental and physical wellbeing. And then three, we'll finish with a few practical things you can do to regain a little bit of control and reduce some of that pressure. So grab your favorite brew and let's jump in. And we'll start with the obvious. feel really expensive right now, right? Gas prices, ⁓ insurance, housing, ⁓ out to a nice dinner somehow costs the same as a week's worth of groceries right now. And even though inflation has slowed from where it was a couple years ago, people are still feeling the effects of the cumulative price increases across almost every category of life. A that stands out to me, and if you follow along on Business and Brews, you've probably heard this a few times, but roughly 65 % of Americans say they're living paycheck to paycheck. And what's interesting about this is that it isn't limited to lower income households. You see this stress across every single income bracket. Why? it's because financial pressure is often less about income and it's more about margin, right? ⁓ it's the gap between what comes in and what goes out. And when the margin gets tight, life gets stressful very quickly. One unexpected a car repair, a medical bill, appliance replacement, that suddenly feels overwhelming. So at over the last six years, we've had a front row seat to this reality. one of the biggest things we've learned is this. Most people are not irresponsible. They're simply reactive, right? Most employees accessing their pay early, they're not doing it for extravagant purchases. They're buying groceries. They're paying utility bills, right? Bill due date doesn't match up with pay date. putting gas in the car so they can get to work. Or they're simply handling any of ⁓ a of other unexpected life moments. ⁓ And when you zoom out, what you realize is that financial stress isn't really about money alone. It's about stability and it's about feeling safe. It's about feeling like you can breathe, So when people don't feel that, it starts to impact everything else, which us to the second section of this episode, which mental health. As you would ⁓ financial stress, of course, one of the most common forms of stress in America. Unfortunately, doesn't just stay in the money category of life. ⁓ bleeds into everything. There's a growing amount of research showing strong connections between financial stress and anxiety, depression, sleep disruption, relationship strain, and even physical health decline. The American Psychological Association for ⁓ one point it was like 13 straight years and then COVID hit. And COVID was number one for that year. But then for the next four years, This became it again. Money is the top stressor for Americans year after year after year. And honestly, it makes sense uncertainty is exhausting. When someone's constantly thinking, how am gonna pay this bill? What if something else goes wrong? Am I falling behind? Your brain just never really gets to rest. And over time, that chronic stress kind of seeps into the physical body and you start to have these negative physical consequences of elevated cortisol levels, poor sleep, right? Waking up at 2 a.m., watching the ceiling fan spin around and around trying to figure out how you're gonna pay that bill, right? It's higher blood pressure, it's fatigue. It could be weight fluctuation, lower immune response, ⁓ all things that the mental aspect of it start to flow in and you see it and feel it physically. Financial stress literally changes how your body functions. So mentally it creates what I would call survival mode thinking. And when people are under this intense financial pressure, long-term planning just becomes incredibly difficult. You stop thinking about personal growth, you stop thinking about retirement at some point, decades in the future. There's no real thought of, I enough margin to start investing? what are my future goals? ⁓ these things that just kind of start getting pushed back further and further. Because ⁓ all you're thinking about is, can I make it to Friday? Or can I make it to next Friday? And that's one reason that financial literacy matters so much is because ⁓ literacy isn't just about spreadsheets and budgets. It's about reducing stress ⁓ order to create clarity. It's about helping people feel like they have options again. And I think this is an important distinction