Financial stress can eat you alive. You can’t escape your own bad finances, not in the short term.

https://i.imgur.com/VCHDgNV.jpg

Every minute of the day suffers when your finances are weak.

**Buying groceries?** You have to balance health vs. convenience vs. money, and when you’re poor, that usually means buying unhealthy and/or super inconvenient food.

**Putting gas in the car?** Poor people know the feeling of being near empty but needing to wait another day before filling up. Scary, not fun.

**Navigating social invitations** to go out and have fun (and spend money)? Your friends might not understand why you won’t come out to the bar tonight. They think you don’t appreciate the invite, but the truth is that your card would get declined.

It’s awkward over and over. The stress and depression pile up. Hopeless, helplessness, these feels stack up and make a land grab for your entire brain.

<h3>The Antidote Could Be So Simple</h3>

What if all you have to do is talk about it?

There’s a pressure for us to keep our financial troubles to ourselves, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s just the honest truth that a lot of us (a lot!) are in financial hardship.

When we talk about our finances in an open, non-whiny way, we accomplish a few things:

**(1) Honesty** - It’s just honest. When we pretend we aren’t poor, we lie by omission. This makes it easier to explain why you won’t go downtown for that concert tonight. Your friends know it isn’t personal.

**(2) Strategy** - If some of your friends are wealthy, they are exactly the people to admit your own struggles to. Don’t drop financial stress stories on well-to-do acquaintances, that’s not what I mean… I’m saying, if you have **close friends** that are good with money, they probably have all kinds of useful advice.

**(3) Clarity** It’s near impossible to look at our own finances clearly when we are poor. Guilt and shame cloud the equation. “I’m terrible, I always fuck this up” is one side of the coin. The other side is huge blind spots - we feel poor, are poor, but then we do stupid shit like spend $100 on alcohol in a weekend. When you speak honestly and clearly about your situation, it helps you to notice your own self-destructive habits.

<h3>Sometimes You Just Gotta Vent</h3>

My last post about the financial freedom quest was pretty angsty. Nothing crazy, just needed to vent. This is great! I felt better immediately after writing it.

Sometimes we want to pretend that we “grow up” and stop having those feelings. It’s like, this isn’t high school anymore, why would I complain about shit? But the truth is that every now and then we just gotta vent.

If you are struggling with money, you might want to try blogging about it. You might feel better. 

**What do you do to deal with financial stress?**

<center>https://i.imgur.com/hgkeIwR.jpg?3</center>