Something You Should Know
How to Optimize Your Brain Chemistry & What Would You Do With More Money?
Mon, 27 Jan 2025
Traffic accidents are an inevitable part of life. However, there are a few simple things you can do to improve your chances of NOT getting in an accident. Listen as I offer several proven strategies that will keep you and your car safer in traffic. https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/top-10/top-10-editors-tips-to-prevent-a-car-accident.html Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins are 4 brain chemicals that can make you happy or make you miserable. And there are ways to regulate these brain chemicals by making changes in the way you live your life. That is according to neuroscientist TJ Power who is co-founder of Neurify, an organization providing scientifically backed teachings to enhance mental health. TJ is also author of the book, The Dose Effect (https://amzn.to/3E42cDr). You will be fascinated to hear how these chemicals work in your brain and control your thoughts and feelings. We all have our own thoughts about money and what it represents. As a result, some people are cautious with their money while others are less so. Some people think of money as evil others think money will bring happiness. You individual attitudes about money come from somewhere and they can have a big impact on your financial success. Here to help you understand more about your relationship with money is Vicky Reynal. She is a financial psychotherapist in private practice who has been featured in the Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, and Women’s Health. She is also author of the book Money on Your Mind: The Unconscious Beliefs That Sabotage Your Financial Well-Being—and How to Break Free (https://amzn.to/4gbitDX). It is very hard to keep track of more than 3 things at once. It just is. It is a limitation of the human brain. Listen as I reveal why this is important and the interesting ways we cope with it. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/571010 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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today on something you should know how to dramatically improve your chances of not getting into a car accident then brain hormones brain chemicals there are four of them that really impact your quality of life ask yourself
Do you feel like your attention span is really strong? Do you feel very consistently motivated? Do you have great relationships? If any of the answers are you're not thriving, the brain chemistry is your answer. And pursuing a life where you intentionally boost these is going to lead you towards a life where you feel exceptionally good a lot of the time.
Also, why it's almost impossible to keep track of more than three things at a time and a different way to look at your financial life and well-being.
I always invite people to be curious about what they imagine more money will get them. The other way in which I ask the question is when they say I don't have enough. I ask, well, enough for what?
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome and thank you for making something you should know part of your day today. I want to start by talking about a subject that people don't really like talking about, and that is car accidents. Because it seems that if you drive long enough, sooner or later, you will find yourself in a car accident. Hopefully not a serious one.
But there are some things you can do to stack the odds in your favor that you will not get in a car accident. These suggestions come from the editors of Edmunds.com. First of all, avoid the fast lane because that's where most crashes occur. If you're in the middle lane or the right lane, you have more escape routes to get out of the way of trouble. Scan ahead.
Don't just watch the car in front of you. Watch the car in front of it. If you're looking further ahead, you'll have more time to react if something goes wrong. Watch for blind spots. Don't trust your mirrors exclusively. Actually look to the left or right before changing lanes. Drive with your hands at 9 and 3 o'clock, not 10 and 2.
This gives you the best chance to maneuver quickly to get out of the way. Judge a driver by his car. If a car has a lot of body damage or dirty windows, assume you have a lousy driver driving it and steer clear. And if you can, don't drive at night. In addition to you being tired and fatigued, so are other drivers. And it is at nighttime when drunk drivers are out in force.
And that is something you should know. Let's talk about hormones, brain chemicals. Specifically, four of them. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins. There's a lot worth knowing and understanding about these things because your behavior can impact the levels of these hormones in your body. And the levels of these hormones can impact so much of your life.
Here to help us understand how this all works is TJ Power. He is a neuroscientist and speaker and author of a book called The Dose Effect. Hey TJ, welcome to Something You Should Know. Mike, thanks for having me. So first of all, I guess what we should do is explain, have you explain what these four chemicals, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins are and what they do.
These chemicals evolve within the human brain over our hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. And each of them has a specific function. Dopamine basically drives all our motivation. Oxytocin connects us together. Serotonin lifts our mood and our energy levels. And then endorphins can de-stress our brain.
Well, those sound like good things to have.
Yeah, I mean, they're good things to have. And these chemicals were once thriving when we were living in a more ancestor type lifestyle of waking up, living outdoors, loads of light, hunting, hard physical work, natural food. They were really designed for that experience of life. And a lot of us are experiencing low levels of these chemicals in the modern world.
And that's causing a lot of the mental difficulties we struggle with.
So what determines those levels of chemicals in my brain of those four things? Is it hereditary? Is it set? Or is it lifestyle and how I live can affect them up or down or what?
Yeah, so there is a genetic component to how much your brain will produce of each of these chemicals. Each chemical has what we call a baseline. So you'd have, for example, your dopamine baseline, which is in any given moment, how much dopamine can your brain generate? However, in our modern world, behavior itself can have a massive impact on each of these chemicals.
Say, for example, with dopamine, if you were sitting doing nothing, your dopamine would stay at a pretty stagnant level. If you pulled out your phone and opened a social media feed and started watching videos, your dopamine would rise very, very rapidly. That, for example, is an example of quick dopamine. Then we'd also have other examples of things like slow dopamine, which you would get from,
cleaning your home for 30 minutes, that would be slow dopamine. So there's different behaviors that will impact these chemicals.
And when you do those behaviors, whether it's video games or you're cleaning your house, you impact the levels of dopamine in your system. How much do you impact them and how long does that impact last?
So we're in direct control of where these chemicals are at with each of the behaviors. we have if you take oxytocin for example that second chemical whenever you come in physical contact with a human so if you hug your kids or your partner for example immediately in that moment oxytocin begins to increase creates feelings of love and connection and safety in your body
serotonin something like when you eat natural foods fruits meats veg these kind of foods serotonin increases and there's a good lasting impact of that benefit you'll have an hour or so a few hours where the chemical will rise if you then went through a prolonged period where you weren't stimulating the chemical it'd begin to fall back to baseline but is the idea that you would want to deliberately impact these levels or is the idea to just lead a healthy life and these things take care of themselves
If I was chatting with a hunter-gatherer, they would have to not even think at all about whether these chemicals were high. It's really important to consider this hunter-gatherer idea because for 99.9% of human history, that's what our brain did. It's a very small percentage of time that we've all sat inside and played on computers and phones.
and if you looked at their lifestyle the chemicals were always thriving so they'd never have to intentionally make sure they boosted them the modern lifestyle where we wake up we spend all of our time inside pretty much we spend a lot of time isolated our diets can be quite poor we've had it very sedentary that lifestyle is leading us to now have to become much more conscious of how are we intentionally boosting these chemicals
As you said, like if you live a healthy lifestyle, you are going to be doing a lot of actions that can boost them, but you still may be missing some key components. Someone might be really good with their exercise and food and sleep, but they might also be spending five hours a day scrolling social media. So they, for example, could also take some action towards boosting them.
So what are the benefits? I mean, this seems a little obvious, but what are the benefits of doing this or even worrying about this rather than just trying to lead a healthy life? I mean, what's the benefit of really focusing in on this and saying, let's raise these levels?
I would ask yourself the question, do you feel like you're really thriving as a human being right now? Like, do you feel like your attention span is really strong? Do you feel very consistently motivated throughout the day? Do you have great relationships? Do you have great sleep? Do you have good energy levels or really positive mood? And if any of those questions are,
Now, sometimes I feel really low motivation and my concentration isn't as good as it used to be. And I do have trouble in my relationships where I do feel tired quite often. If any of the answers are you're not thriving, the brain chemistry is your answer to that question.
And pursuing a life where you intentionally boost these is going to lead you towards a life where you feel exceptionally good a lot of the time.
And so how much can you stimulate them and how do you know if you're doing it? I mean, do you do these things and all of a sudden you go, wow, my serotonin must be just raging?
Yeah, that's a good question. It's becoming really familiar with what each chemical would feel like. So if I ask you the question, what is an activity or task that you've done in the last week that's made you feel really satisfied? Is there any activity that comes to mind that created the emotion of satisfaction for you? Well, exercise does that for me. Yeah.
So you got like a good feeling of satisfaction. So that if you felt satisfaction, that means dopamine increase. And that's a good win. Some people might get satisfaction from arts. They might get it from cleaning. They might get it from sport. They might get it from whatever it may be. So dopamine would be you feel satisfied.
And if you just look at the other side of dopamine, what we call quick dopamine, when you scroll your phone or you drink alcohol or you eat sugar, it doesn't actually create a feeling of satisfaction. It creates a feeling of I really want more, which is the part of the difficulty with dopamine.
With oxytocin, if you had a moment where you felt loads of love in your body, like a real peace, content, loving feeling as a result of like a relationship moment with a kid or a family member, that would mean oxytocin was up. If your mood just felt quite like happy and light and positive, that would be serotonin.
And then the endorphins is a very powerful euphoric feeling which can come from real feelings.
hardcore exercise so if you for example might have heard of runner's high where someone runs for a prolonged period of time and gets a very euphoric almost drug-like experience from it that would be endorphins you've got satisfaction love positive mood or proper euphoria well can we run through the four and just like an example of what you could do to increase them given that you identify as having maybe low levels of any one of them
Yeah, so with the dopamine, I would say if I could pick two things that would be really powerful for your dopamine levels, one would be what we call phone fasting. Fasting being the term of taking a prolonged break from something. We would really recommend phone fasting for the first 30 minutes of your day when you wake up.
I run a research lab called Dose Lab, and we see in our research that that's insanely beneficial for the brain. So you phone fast for 30 minutes in the morning. and 60 minutes in the evening. And that means physical separation from your phone where you don't see it once for those periods.
The other thing for dopamine that's amazing is what we call flow state, which is where you get into a really deep state of concentration on a task. If I was to ask you the question, like, have you done a task recently, maybe a working task, maybe a task in your home that's really deeply focused your brain,
Yeah, well, my work deeply focuses my brain. So, yeah.
And is there any one aspect of the work that you find the most enjoyment in, you get the most into focus?
Well, I like this part. I like talking to people.
Yeah, the focus. Yeah. Yeah, so this, for example, may be your flow state, which is podcasting. And that would make sense if that's your career. That would make sense that podcasts would be your flow state. And everyone has something that is their flow state, something they intrinsically are good at and their brain really likes to focus on.
When we focus for longer than 15 to 20 minutes on just one thing. So that would mean like, just like right now, you and I aren't also going on our iMessage or our email or something that would take us out of flow state.
oxytocin physical touch is a really good one whether that's romantic physical touch or friendly friends and family increasing the quantity of interaction with humans and also pets so that's hugging humans interacting and cuddling pets is really good for oxytocin The other one for oxytocin is really thinking about how often you make a contribution to somebody else's life.
We've all had that experience of doing something kind for someone and then thinking, oh, I feel quite good now that I've helped that person out with whatever it may be or made someone dinner or pick someone up from somewhere or whatever it might be. Oxytocin is driving you to contribute. So you've got touch and contribution. Serotonin, natural environments, absolutely unreal.
There's this incredible researcher called King Lee in Japan who's done this whole research into forest bathing and what we call serum serotonin levels. And when humans are in forests, you build tons and tons of serotonin. So if you can ever get into a forest, that would be awesome. The other one for serotonin is your food.
If you can eat single ingredient foods, meaning steak, chicken, fish, eggs, yogurt, fruits, nuts, anything that just came from the jungle, basically, and has been here for hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to ultra processed foods, that'd be great in nature and gut health. And then the final one, endorphins, either exercising hard, like you mentioned earlier, or singing music out loud.
Those are two methods that are really good. Oh, not my singing. It doesn't matter whether it's good or bad quality. I'm sure there's been a time in your life, maybe you're at like a bar or something and you were drinking and you had a good sing and you probably felt quite good when you were doing it.
We're talking about four brain chemicals that make a huge difference in your life. And my guest is TJ Power. He's author of a book called The Dose Effect. Thank you so much for having me. It's a bit similar to Something You Should Know, which is why I think you'll like it, but it takes a different spin.
Listen to Curiosity Weekly and you'll discover things like how neuroscientists are studying TikTok and social media habits to see which chemicals are being released in your brain that make you so obsessed. Or how it is that you can fly from Florida to England on a plane using recycled plastic jet fuel. And how AI can now read hieroglyphics from Egyptian pyramids.
What's so great about Curiosity Weekly is there's so much to learn about science and tech, and these guys seem to have their finger on the pulse of the most interesting stuff. Food science, the science behind social media, the science of algorithms, computer science, and it's all explained in a fascinating way every week on Curiosity Weekly.
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Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash SYSK, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash SYSK to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash SYSK. So TJ, I like what you said a moment ago. I like hearing about those four brain chemicals. What I'm wondering is, is there a flip side to this?
Are there things we're doing that are actually suppressing those hormones that we need to stop doing as opposed to just finding things that will increase them?
For sure. And this is where, this is the most important factor. So it's good we've come to this idea. Four... All of humanity's evolution, dopamine was the primary chemical we were in the pursuit of because we would get dopamine hits off the main things that were keeping us alive.
So if we successfully stumbled across some fruit or if we caught an animal or if we built shelter or if we started a fire, these things that were essential for our survival that were a lot of effort to attain would create dopamine in our brain, they create satisfaction and they would help humanity survive. Without dopamine in the human brain, there would be no humans.
It drove us to do all these actions. In the modern world, Maybe about 500 to 1,000 years ago, we figured out how to hack dopamine for the first time with things like alcohol and tobacco. Those are the first sort of things that could create a very rapid stimulation of dopamine in an unnatural way. These were concepts that weren't from the natural world.
They were modern creations, especially as we began to harness them and chemically them more and more. And then we began inventing more stuff, pornography. We also invented social media, which is huge. And these kind of things overstimulate dopamine. They create this rapid increase in the chemical. And because of that rapid increase, we effectively burn out the dopamine engine.
Like if you got in a manual car and you didn't put it into gear and then you just rev the engine every day, eventually you would burn that engine out and it would break. That's exactly what we're doing with the overstimulation of dopamine through things like social media or alcohol or sugar or pornography. And that's then causing what we call low dopamine levels.
And if ever in your life you're in a state where you feel kind of apathetic, you can't be bothered to do anything, that you might be sitting on the sofa scrolling your phone for a while, and then even the thought of getting up and going and making your dinner feels like effort, that's because your dopamine level is low.
And likely because of one of the things you just described.
Yeah, often nowadays, the phone is like the primary factor. And as we've seen the phone grow in popularity and how much humans spend their time on it, how every generation, whether it's young teenagers that people worry about or when I was in the coffee shop earlier, I saw a couple that must be in their 70s that didn't say a word to each other for 20 minutes whilst they both rolled their phones.
The phone is disrupting all generations in humanity because of the way in which it stimulates our dopamine. We're so hooked. on interacting with it.
Well, this is, this is so interesting. And, you know, we've all heard those stories or, you know, you know, laughter is good for you and raises hormone levels or, you know, listening to music or what about those things?
Yeah, laughter is magic. Laughter actually really is great for our endorphin system, especially if you really laugh. Like if you're really finding something funny and it almost is like hurting your stomach level funny, that's magic for endorphins, which provides an amazing de-stressing effect on our brain. It calms our brain a lot. Music as well. Music is really powerful.
As long as you're not changing song very regularly. In the modern world, people are like clicking next song every like 20 seconds. So it's not as calming for the brain, but especially back in the day of cassette players and putting the, I don't even know what it was called when you put like a disc on there and it's like a nice proper old method of listening to music.
That sort of stuff would have been great for the brain.
So all of that stuff helps if you, but is there a formula to it or it's just the more you do, the better it is? Or, I mean, can you ever do too much of this or what?
It's very rare to do too much of it.
I mean, you could choose to only do one of the, if you fell in love with someone and you decided you're just going to lie in bed and sleep together for 10 hours a day, every single day, you'd certainly get a lot of oxytocin, but the other chemicals would begin to reduce because you'd stop working and getting dopamine from hard work and stop going outside and getting serotonin and so on. So
You technically could, but it's unlikely in the modern world that you're going to overdo one of these chemicals. The vast majority of the challenge we're facing is that we're completely hooked on dopamine. So we're spending a lot of our time centering our life around when am I going to be on my phone? When am I going to watch Netflix? When am I going to have my next drink of alcohol?
When am I going to have my next sugary meal? Not only is that overstimulating dopamine, it's creating a life where the prioritization of really close, intimate relationships and hiking outside in nature and listening to music and singing songs and these key actions humans need, they're going lower on the prioritization list.
than the dopamine that we're seeking for so that's kind of the main challenge occurring but that seems almost like an addiction to that's going to be really hard to stop if you're craving netflix and getting on your phone and eating a sugary meal i mean those things those are those are things that are hard to resist if you've developed a habit and or a liking towards them
100%. It is hard to break these addictions. And this whole framework, I've not built this as just like a neuroscientist. I think, oh, everyone should be healthy. I was in an extremely unhealthy lifestyle with alcohol and partying and pornography and social media. I just grew up as a teenager. That's what everyone around me was doing. And I thought, well, that's the life you live.
Then I went to really study this and got deep into the research behind it. And I was like, wow, I'm completely breaking my brain chemistry. And that's no wonder that I'm there for overthinking things and struggling with my mood and sometimes feeling depressed and so on. And I thought it was just because of the life events I was going through this grief that I was going through.
I came to discover that these addictions like needed to be broken and they can be broken. But it's just like, how much do you want to feel good? You have to start asking yourself that question. I made that decision in my life that I was like, I actually really want to feel good. I want to energetically feel good. I want to be able to exercise regularly. I want to feel confident.
I want to be able to really nail my career and build an awesome career. And some of the addictions have to be sacrificed in order to attain a life that you really love.
Seems like most of them would have to be sacrificed.
Depending on the intensity of the addiction. For me, with alcohol, for example, I loved drinking alcohol too much for alcohol to remain a key part of my life. So I had to let go of alcohol. If you are someone that... worked all week and had a great week and then on a Friday night had a glass of red wine, then that's fine. That's not going to do any damage to your experience of life.
It might enhance your experience of life whilst you have that glass of red wine. If you're someone that really over consumes different things, it would be important to step away from them.
So obviously there's a lot to consider in what you've said, but If you had to boil it down, what is the biggest challenge that people face as it relates to these four brain chemicals and improving them as best we can?
I hold the perspective that the phone is the most significant challenge facing our world today. And that varies across generations how much people believe that is the case. The only real evidence I would suggest it really is the case is that mental health has rapidly, rapidly changed since phones became massive, specifically smartphones and social media.
We always had the alcohol and the cigarettes and the pornography, but we didn't have the phone. And I think every single human in the world could benefit so much from waking up
and not having their phone in their bedroom, not having a charging in their bedroom, waking up, going to the bathroom, splashing cold water on their face, brushing their teeth, maybe having their shower if you have a shower in the morning and getting your day going, creating momentum for your day before you see a single notification from the phone.
We've done this process, as I say, with over 50,000 people, and it's ridiculous what happens to things like depression and their anxiety, how motivated someone becomes. just by simply not going on to that device when you wake up.
This certainly sounds like, if addressed, could really solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. I appreciate you explaining all this. TJ Power has been my guest. He's a neuroscientist, international speaker, and the name of his book is The Dose Effect. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. TJ, this was very informative, and I appreciate you spending the time with us.
I like those questions, mate. I do lots of podcasts, and they were really cool. They were fun.
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Do you have an attitude towards money? In your eyes, is money good? Do you handle it well? Do you tend to spend more than you should? Do you really understand how much money you make and how you spend it? Well, let's take a look at your approach to money and your attitudes towards it with Vicki Raynall. She is a financial psychotherapist in private practice.
She's been featured in The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, The Telegraph, and Women's Health. And she's author of a book called Money on Your Mind, The Unconscious Beliefs That Sabotage Your Financial Well-Being and How to Break Free. Hi, Vicki. Welcome. Good to have you on Something You Should Know.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
So where do we get our attitudes towards money? And everybody seems to have a certain relationship with money. Where does it come from? And why does it seem so problematic much of the time?
Well, in my experience, our attitude towards money is shaped throughout our life, sometimes starting quite early. And what I found working as a financial psychotherapist is that when people get stuck in behaviors that are unhelpful financially, and they kind of know what they should be doing differently, but they can't change it.
it's because there's unconscious feelings that are getting in the way.
And those feelings could be related to early experiences, some that are not even money related, that have nothing to do with the money lessons they learned growing up, but actually have more to do with other experiences of attaching to others or past trauma and all sorts of different experiences that I'm happy to give you examples of.
Yeah, I think examples would help here.
Yeah, so for example, I've seen overspending being linked to a desire to fit in. Maybe a desire to fit in that was rooted in experiences feeling like the odd one out in school or maybe experiences of being bullied. There's
other spending behaviors like um well a difficulty with spending money that could be linked to not feeling worthy worthy of the good things that money can buy and that low sense of worth could be rooted in experiences with our early caregivers. So how, whether we felt good enough in our family growing up.
And even more extreme financial behaviors like stealing, for example, could be rooted in an early abandonment where we felt kind of deprived of something growing up. And as adults, we're trying to claim it back. And that manifests itself through money.
So do people generally have a money personality? We hear about some people are spenders, some people are savers, some people are, are there some general buckets that people fall into?
I think there might be areas of financial life that people might struggle with more or less. But sometimes, even if somebody, let's say, tends to be quite reasonable when it comes to money and spending and saving, there could be pockets of their behavior that is unusual or different.
And that's where I would draw their attention to, you know, why is it that even though you're generally, I don't know, a generous person, why is it that you sometimes become really withholding with money with that particular friend or with that particular group of friends.
And I think sometimes even spotting the inconsistencies in our money behavior can give us a lot of information about what could be going on emotionally for us in that particular situation or in that particular relationship.
Do you find, and maybe you're People come to you because they're having a problem, so your answer might be a little skewed, but do you think people know when there's a problem, or do they think it's the result of outside forces and that's why things aren't going their way with money, but that it's not their fault?
Well, more often than not, people tend to blame themselves when it comes to money. I find even though I know that the group of people that I see come to me because they think they are the problem, I think the issue of shame around money is quite universal. Most people I meet even outside the consulting room, feel they should be better with money than they are.
Even people who might work in the financial services industry, you know, might confess to me that actually, when it comes to my personal finances, you know, it's a bit of a mess, and I wish I could be better at this or better at that. And there's generally this kind of this sense that
it's almost an innate skill that we should all be good at for some reason, even though the reality is that most of us weren't really taught much about money growing up from our parents and it wasn't taught in most schools. And so why should we be better with money? And I think that fuels a certain sense of shame about it.
And the fact that it's a taboo and people don't talk about it, I think fuels that sense of embarrassment and shame.
When people say, I wish I was better with money, what does that mean? My sense is it means that they wish they had saved more, they invested more, saved for retirement, that kind of thing, as opposed to spend. But is that your experience?
I think that's a fantastic question. And actually, I always turn it back to the client. I always say, well, what does that mean? And even when people set resolutions for the new year and they say, well, next year, I want to be better with money. Well, that's too broad. We need to understand what is it that you feel you're struggling with.
And it could be, as you pointed out, a whole set of reasons that why they feel that way. Some people are very bad with their spending with their budgeting, they might be very impulsive. And that's probably the most common money problem you'll see out there. But you know, it can be a difficulty enjoying money, and a difficulty
saving or investing, I think there's a lot of not knowing when it comes to investing, you know, people are not very educated about investing. And so they avoid it, and they don't do enough of it, they put it away, they procrastinate it and, and it never gets done. And it kind of lurks and in the back of their minds as something they should be doing more of.
But it's kind of the fear of not knowing enough making mistakes that stops them from engaging with it.
So they just tend to ignore it. They just kind of put their head in the sand and just let money do whatever it does.
Well, you know, avoidance and vagueness, I find are two very common defenses, psychological defenses that people use when it comes to money. So either they don't look at it, you know, there's plenty of people who will not open bills and really not attend to financial matters until it's absolutely necessary. And vagueness, you know, this, oh, I need to be better, you know, I should save more.
Well, as long as we keep it vague, then we're setting ourselves up for more. vagueness and failure and self sabotage. But the moment we set a goal that is very kind of measurable and concrete, that's when our sense of agency becomes more engaged and awakens. And it's very different to say, you know, I want to save 50 pounds every week next year, than to say I want to be better with money.
It seems that maybe it's just my experience, but from what I can tell from other people as well, that money becomes a problem when you think you don't have enough of it. Nobody comes to you and says, Vicki, I've got so much money, I don't know what to do. It's usually a lack of money that causes problems.
Well, you'll be surprised. I have had people with a too much money problem as well, and I'm happy to go into that. But the most common, you're right, is the lack of. And I always invite people to be curious about what they imagine more money will get them. The other way in which I ask the question is when they say, you know, I don't have enough. I ask, well, enough for what?
And I think the point here is that money can be a very powerful symbol and it represents different things to different people. And so for some people, more money will buy them more credibility in their family. They will finally be taken more seriously by others. For other people, it's about acceptance and fitting in.
If they have enough money, they can spend on the right things, and then they'll fit in with their group of friends. And yet for others, it's about worth. They've equated.
um financial worth to self-worth in their minds and so they'll feel better about themselves if their net value is higher and so i think sometimes it's unearthing those um sometimes unconscious uh symbolic equations that people can then question them and say well is it true that people will find me more lovable if i'm richer or you know am i attaching something unrealistic to money.
A common one, Mike is, especially in families, you know, somebody who grew up in a family where there was scarcity, you know, the belief that money will fix all the problems, it will resolve the conflict in the family, it will make everybody get along, you know, everything will be fine if there's more money.
And actually, you know, I've seen the other end of it, you know, I've seen people come to me having become very wealthy and saying, well, You know, it didn't fix everything. Why am I still unhappy? Why are we still all arguing?
So I want to hear about the people who come to you because they have too much money because they're welcome to send me some if that's the problem. But what is it? What's the problem of having too much money?
I've seen it manifest in different ways. One example comes to mind. It was a man, let's call him Robert, who came to see me because he had a $2 million problem. It turns out that because he owned shares in a company that got bought at a very good price, suddenly he became a millionaire. this man looked so upset. And I started asking him, well, what is so distressing about this?
And there were all these fears attached to being wealthy. First of all, he had grown up in a modest family. And the way in which wealthy people were talked about attached certain judgment on them. So wealthy people can be corrupt, can be greedy, can this and that. Secondly, there was a fear that money would spoil the children.
He had two children, and he was concerned that if they found out that the family was now wealthy, they would lose drive and motivation and drop out of school and whatnot. There was also a fear that money would bring conflict in his relationship. How would he and his wife navigate all these problems and financial decisions that they both felt a bit, you know, out of their depth with.
And finally, the fear of envy, you know, would his friends stop talking to him, you know, if he starts telling them about his luxurious holidays and, you know, things that he could now afford and they couldn't. And so you can see how there's
a whole range of fears that got attached to to wealth and and that's not uncommon actually to attach kind of a shame to wealth particularly if we grew up in an environment that condemned the pursuit of wealth in some way so given that everybody has their own money deal their own money issues their own money concerns it's hard to have a blanket advice but but
How do you, well, is there blanket advice? I mean, how do you approach this?
My blanket advice is always to be curious. Be curious about what it is that is driving your financial choices. If, for example, you find yourself regularly overspending, Be curious about when do you do that? Is it, for example, on a Sunday that you tend to go online and do all this spontaneous shopping? Well, what is it that you're feeling on Sundays? Is it loneliness? Is it boredom?
Is it sadness? And are there other ways in which you could be addressing those feelings rather than overspending? or maybe you overspend on your children and that's where you really go overboard and then you're filled with regret and um and guilt afterwards we'll be curious about that what is it about wanting to give to your children, where is that coming from?
Is it coming from an experience maybe of having parents who weren't very generous with you or maybe couldn't be generous because they didn't have the means to? And so now you're trying to kind of vicariously live through them and give them all the experiences you didn't have, but is that what's best for them? And so I think curiosity is the key to all of this.
But because a lot of the money behaviors that I see trace back to quite painful emotional experiences, it's important to do that self-exploration without judgment. So saying things like, I'm bad with money, I'm terrible with money, that's not going to get you very far. a better approach is to investigate what that means, you know, that sense that you're bad with it.
Well, what is it that you wish you could be better at? Let's say it's investing. Well, why do you think you're not good with investing? Well, I don't understand enough about it. Well, could you learn more about it? Where could you find the information?
And you see that the moment you become, you have a kinder inner dialogue with yourself and a curious one, you can begin to find the answers to those questions.
One very common problem it seems people have, because you hear it talked about frequently, is people's inability to live within their means. That they overspend, they put things on credit cards, they don't really have a good sense of what they can and cannot afford, and that lands them in trouble. Is that a fair assessment?
Yes, I would say so.
And so what's the advice to that? If people are doing that, do you think most people know that's what's going on or are they just scratching their head going, I don't know where all the money's going?
Sometimes they don't know where it's going and that's kind of a... Again, that vagueness defense, they don't want to know where it's going. They don't want to open their statements and look at it because it would be uncomfortable to face the reality of what they're doing and the consequences of what they're doing.
But the reason why people might end up being a bit messy with their spending are very broad. In some cases, it's a practical reason. They haven't gone through their numbers to see what they can afford to spend every month. They haven't done kind of a basic budget that tells them that you have X amount of dollars every month that you can spend on discretionary items and on going out and so on.
So they actually don't haven't done the maths to know what is within their means. But most often, there is something that is driving that that choice of spending. And it could be that there, maybe it's a personality thing, there might be an impulsive person who struggles to sit with their feelings, sit with any discomfort, and anytime they feel anything negative, they act on it.
And some people choose substances, other people choose shopping, the famous retail therapy, right? You do it because it makes you feel better, And there is a neurological process that makes you want to go back for more. And you can become quite hooked on that habit of, you know, addressing feelings through spending. In other cases, there's more deep seated reasons.
I mean, I had a client who shopped and in particular bought luxury handbags. And when we started to explore what is it about these luxury items that, you know, It was actually a sense that because there were quality products that lasted long, they would stay. And this particular woman had a history of being abandoned by her father when she was little.
And she said to me, you know, things stay, people leave you. And so it was actually a very painful place within her that was driving the spending. And it had nothing to do with, you know, doing a budget or not being impulsive. So the key there was to try and find a healthier way to relate with her father that didn't involve this whole financial self-sabotage.
So you've already answered this question as we've discussed throughout this conversation, but let me ask it directly. I already think I know the answer, but if someone comes to you, even before you know what the problem is, What's the advice? My sense is your advice is going to be, well, first start being curious, but is that it or is there more to it or is that not it or what?
Before they even come to me, I would say educate yourself about money because a lot of money problems have to do with financial literacy or illiteracy in this case. So people feel anxious about money, and about 50% of the population in most countries, in the US it is above 50, feel anxious about money. And the more we know about money, studies have shown, the less anxious we are about it.
So the first step is, know more about finances, because that's going to avoid a lot of money mistakes. One of the statistics that has shocked me is that in the US one in three teens doesn't know the difference between a credit card and a debit card. And that's really important to know if you're going to start your financial life on a good footing trying to avoid credit card debt, right.
Yeah, absolutely. That's a pretty alarming statistic that that many people don't know the difference between a debit card and a credit card. Well, all of what you've talked about is really enlightening. I've been speaking with Vicki Raynall.
She is a financial psychotherapist and author of the book, Money on Your Mind, The Unconscious Beliefs That Sabotage Your Financial Well-Being and How to Break Free. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes and I appreciate you coming on and talking about all this. This was great. Thanks, Vicki.
Thank you very much.
Did you know that it is basically impossible to keep track of more than three items at the same time unless all those items are the same color? So, for example, when you watch a football game, the common color of the uniforms allows you to overcome that limitation because everybody's wearing the same color, so you see the team as a single set.
Team sports would be incredibly difficult to watch if everybody on the team didn't wear the same color. According to a study at Johns Hopkins University, the ability to only keep track of three items at a time is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. Almost everyone has it, and the only way to override that limitation is with color coding. This principle will work in other areas of life.
For example, if you wanted to take seven kids to the zoo by yourself, it would be tough to keep track of all of them. But if they all wore the same color shirt, it would be a lot easier. In general, if you want to keep track of multiple things or people, Make them all the same color. And that is something you should know.
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Dancing was a no-no. No women dancing. That would be something that, yes, the cops would grab you for. There were no Black-owned female gay bars. We needed a place of our own. In those days, we went to the bars to socialize because there was no other way. When you went to Brady's Bar, you knew you were safe.
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