It’s 2 a.m., and you can’t stop thinking about the car repair bill that came out of nowhere. Or you’re at work, unable to focus because of money anxiety.

If you’ve ever been in this spot, take a deep breath. You are not alone. Three out of four people lose sleep over financial anxiety, and 42% of people report that it causes them to struggle with concentration at work.

While these money problems are real, the worry itself often becomes the bigger problem. I’ll show you how to work through that worry, but first, we need to understand more about anxiety itself. 

What is anxiety?

Anxiety is our body and mind’s attempt to prepare us for a potential problem that hasn’t yet happened.

When this emotion pops up, you’re usually in a situation—or have a thought—that causes you to realize there’s a potential problem. Anxiety then leads us to respond in one of two ways: think about the problem (worry) or ignore it (avoidance).

Our body and mind are simply trying to keep us safe from looming danger. That’s why anxiety isn’t inherently bad. It’s just that this ancient survival technique doesn’t always work well in our modern world. Which leads to…

How do I stop worrying about money?

You want to follow a three-step process:

1. Identify whether you’re feeling financial anxiety, fear, or stress.
2. Decide whether you should work through the problem or the anxiety.
3. If the anxiety, try some short-term strategies and then put a long-term plan in place.

Step 1: Am I feeling anxious?

To answer this question, you want to look for clues based on the three parts of an emotion.

1) Physical Reaction

Do you notice nausea, chest pain or tightness, rapid heartbeat, restlessness, shortness of breath, or tense muscles? That’s proof of an emotional reaction, though it doesn’t alone indicate financial anxiety.

2) Internal feeling

Anxiety often feels buzzy, like a shot of espresso, and starts small but can grow more intense.

3) Behavior

Notice if your thinking’s abnormal. With anxiety, you often have racing thoughts, catastrophic thinking, or avoidance.

Anxiety vs. Fear vs. Stress 

The above symptoms can help you differentiate anxiety from fear and stress:

• Anxiety is often about a specific future problem, and you can feel wired in a way that intensifies as you think more about the issue, until you’re unable to concentrate on anything or fall asleep.
• Fear is often about a specific near-term problem, so it often feels more extreme but lasts for a short period of time.
• Stress is often about being unable to handle the various short- and long-term problems on our plate.

Step 2: Is the anxiety useful?

Say I have a wedding in a few weeks, and I haven’t tailored my suit. I probably feel anxious about wearing a crinkly suit, so my mind and body are trying to get me to solve that problem.

I don’t need to work through my anxiety. I need to… hit up the dry cleaners, which will probably make the anxiety go away.

But you may not have a clear solution. That’s especially true if you have a massive bill or are living paycheck to paycheck. In these situations, the looming problem can cause you to fall down anxiety’s infinite worry spiral, which often does more harm than the money problem itself.

That’s when you want to work through the anxiety itself.

Step 3: How do I work through the anxiety?

Try to pull yourself out of the racing thoughts by naming the anxiety. Start thinking or write “I am feeling worried about XYZ” and keep going. I know it sounds cheesy. It helps more than you’d think.

However, anxiety is tricky. If you get trapped in a deep worry loop, it’s hard to do this effectively, and you instead want to yank yourself out by doing something that brings you back to the present:

• Calm your body, in hopes it also calms the mind. For instance, slow your heart rate with deep breaths where you exhale longer than you inhale.
• Focus on what’s around you with grounding techniques. (My favorite is 5-4-3-2-1.)
• Schedule 15 or 30 minutes to worry. I know this might sound silly, but research shows this boundary creates a sense of control when you otherwise feel like you have none.

That point on control is a great transition to long-term reduction.

How to deal with long-term financial anxiety

The above tips can help with a specific moment, but you also want to stop financial anxiety. To do this, we need to start by understanding how anxiety and control connect.

Anxiety, in some ways, is our attempt to control the future. We see a future problem, and we want to solve it.

When it’s unsolvable, we can get stuck in a loop trying to fix the unfixable. Money is a perfect example, as there’s no clear solution when it’s just permanently tight. That’s when your best bet is to get comfortable with ambiguity.

Specifically, you want to work through your Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU), or how much you struggle with the unknown. The three tips below can help:

Expose yourself to it

Think of uncertainty as a phobia that you need to treat with exposure therapy. The more you live with uncertainty, the more you teach your mind and body that ambiguity is uncomfortable but not dangerous.

Start with mild levels of uncertainty:

• Choose a restaurant without checking reviews
• Send an email that you’ve only re-read once
• Make a small purchase (e.g., a coffee) without immediately calculating how it impacts your budget

Over time, you can expose yourself to more uncertainty. Meanwhile, you also want to avoid situations where you try to gather perfect information to avoid uncertainty:

• Over-research a purchase until you have 100% of the information
• Double- or triple-check a concept
• Procrastinate because you want more details before deciding

Now, let me caveat. This is wayyy easier said than done. But the more you trust yourself in small ways, the more you may in big ways. Even if money’s tight, you’ve always figured it out, so you have good reason to believe that you will this time as well.

Read books about it

If you’re struggling to make progress yourself, learn from experts who offer advice on how to overcome uncertainty:

• The Worry Workbook by Melisa Robichaud and Kristin Buhr is a self-help book specifically built to tackle the fear of uncertainty.
• Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss by Joel Minden offers a gentle three-step approach to reduce anxiety.
• How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff is a more modern and narrative-driven approach to the topic.

Attend therapy

Finally, I feel obligated to say that a licensed professional is always the best support.

Look for one who specializes in CBT-IU and ACT—the most evidence-based forms of talk therapy to reduce Intolerance of Uncertainty. You may also consider EMDR, somatic work, and IFS to work through anxiety triggers from a trauma-informed approach.

With that said, I understand that therapy’s too expensive for many people, so give yourself grace if you cannot afford it.

Living with financial anxiety

Throughout this article, I hope you’ve learned that financial anxiety isn’t all bad. It serves a purpose, like all emotions, and the goal is to listen and decide when to apply its message or when to work through it.

Be patient. If you can calm a worry spiral from an eight to a four, that’s great. The same goes for a spiral that starts at a seven rather than an eight. Remember that your mind and body built this habit of money worry over many years, so it will take time to reduce it.

And be kind to yourself. You deserve it, for one. And that self-compassion itself can help ease the worry.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that few people would have to tackle financial anxiety if we lived in a world where money wasn’t so tight. It’s unfair.

When we cannot change our finances, all we can do is take the edge off by working on our relationship with money.

That’s why I’ll continue to tackle how to work through emotions in future pieces. Subscribe below so you never miss a post.

The Q&A Takeaway: