How Does Money Effect Mental Health?

Since the pandemic mental health has been top of mind for most leaders in the workplace and has extended beyond the usual fruit baskets, gym memberships and relaxation offers.

Financial wellbeing and supporting employees to improve their financial health has been one of the key risk factors affecting stress and mental health during the pandemic.

We’ve seen a lot of people and organisations who weren’t resilient during the pandemic to whether financial storms.

The risk of redundancy is increasing and the looming economic crisis is sending many who already have piling debts into financial anxiety or feelings of helplessness.

Employees are three times more likely to suffer with stress, anxiety and depression if having financial problems.

Financial wellbeing is a basic human requirement and key to reducing anxiety. Yet, rarely considered to improve mental health.

What Is Financial Wellbeing?

Most of the narrative on financial wellbeing surrounds how money negatively affects people’s mental health.

Borrowing to excess, piling bills and looming debts and very rarely on financial health – how to create a budget or savings habits.

Imagine if you are trying to find ways to become healthier physically and you googled how to get fit.

And all of the results that came back were about broken bones and sprained ankles. You wouldn’t have any proactive ways to improve your physical health.

Everyone has financial health, it can be bad and it can be good, but ideally we’d like to focus on prevention rather than on curing poor financial health.

Whatever, the circumstance you find yourself in when it comes to financial wellbeing, whether poor financial health and anxiety or financial freedom, you can find tailored solutions from some really great financial educators out there.

And advice or debt counselling which may not necessarily be able to get from your colleagues at work or from your workplace EAP provider.

5 Ways To Cope With Financial Anxiety

We recently ran a masterclass on financial wellbeing to promote financial health in partnership with Timi Merriman Johnson at the MoneyJar and Maji Catherine Miller

Here were the top 5 coping strategies;

1. Increasing Your Financial Literacy. How much do you know about the world of finance and how to navigate it? Knowledge and understanding is important but also your experience. Understand your feelings on money. To build financial resilience you will need to increase your financial capability or mindset which encompasses both behaviours and attitudes.
2. Save For Emergencies. An emergency fund is super important. The money advice, service recommends 3 months of living expenses. However, £1000 is a good start and something you can begin to save within the space of a year. Saving just £3 pounds a day will get you an emergency fund in a year.
3. Have A Monthly Money Routine. If you are too scared to look at your bank statements you won’t know what is going out or coming in. At the same time each month, set some time aside to look at your budget. How much money has come in and how much has gone out and record it. You can make adjustments based on your previous month’s spend, then make proactive choices about what you will keep and what you will spend.
4. Financial Health. The emphasis seems to be on saving or withholding, but actually you can use money to benefit yourself or benefit others. Make sure to use your money on things that you enjoy and that are important to you. This could be to promote good physical or mental health and even giving to causes you care about.
5. Whole life & Long Term Financial Security. Pension auto-enrollment is something that everybody’s in but a lot of people don’t understand. One easy way for organisations to address the long-term financial health of employees is pensions, because it is something that both employers and employees are contributing to financially. Make space to talk about this, whether that’s within a team meeting, a staff noticeboard or Slack.  The Maji platform is helping companies and employees to make the most of workplace pensions.

If you would like to support your employees to increase awareness of mental health and improve emotional wellbeing join us each month for our FREE Monthly Mental Health Awareness Masterclass.

We take the hot topics in mental health and provide advice, information and tips to support HR Managers and leaders taking care of individuals and teams explore key topics to build a healthy and sustainable hybrid workplace. Join HERE