Holiday stress & finances: Money cannot buy happiness

Since the financial component of the holidays is often unavoidable, it is important to remember that spending does not equate happiness and a healthy mental state.

Transcript

00:00

Coming into the holidays, this is a time where many of us tend to spend maybe more than we do at any other point of the year. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:14

In years when we don't have a pandemic, finances can be tough and can be a sort of-- a touchy subject

00:21

and a little bit of a sticky issue. I think it's important to talk about how it relates to our mental health because we're

00:27

talking about this because it affects our health and can affect our well-being. So maybe I'll start with you, Dr. Betsy, since you know,

00:35

you are a mental health professional. Any opening thoughts about this? Yeah. I think that the pandemic, again, it's

00:43

forced us to be very creative. Unfortunately, a lot of people lost jobs, and finances became a really big stressor.

00:50

But what I also saw is people just learning how to make it work. A huge shift that I've seen is that people

00:58

were able to see that maybe spending money wasn't really the source of happiness after all. I think just having a different perspective on money,

01:08

making sure that we learned how to budget in a healthy way. What are things that we need? Being able to let go of things that we don't necessarily need.

01:17

What I've been able to see is that people were able to adjust to these difficult changes.

01:23

Betsy, your comment about spending not equating happiness is something that I think became very apparent to me

01:31

during the pandemic. You know, I think when you're really busy, it's really easy to just spend and forget

01:38

that you have an item already or forget that you have food at home, and you don't need to stop and get

01:44

fast food or take-out. The pandemic was really a fantastic pause, in some ways,

01:50

to take a look at our habits and our patterns of activity. And so I think that it has become

01:58

a real place of introspection. Yeah, I agree with everything you both said. And you know, you're right.

02:05

Last winter, families, you know, really learned that the most important thing was spending time together, right? And we got out the board games again

02:13

because we couldn't go anywhere. And you know, realizing that it's not about how many things you have. It's more about the quality of time that you spend together.

02:21

And I hope they'll just, you know, continue with that this winter as well, although I know some of the kids do have little shopping lists also.

02:27

But with the bar just keeping all those toys away, you know, we might again have to relearn to work with everything that we have in our own home,