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
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]
In years when we don't have a pandemic, finances can be tough and can be a sort of-- a touchy subject
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
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,
you are a mental health professional. Any opening thoughts about this? Yeah. I think that the pandemic, again, it's
forced us to be very creative. Unfortunately, a lot of people lost jobs, and finances became a really big stressor.
But what I also saw is people just learning how to make it work. A huge shift that I've seen is that people
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,
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.
What I've been able to see is that people were able to adjust to these difficult changes.
Betsy, your comment about spending not equating happiness is something that I think became very apparent to me
during the pandemic. You know, I think when you're really busy, it's really easy to just spend and forget
that you have an item already or forget that you have food at home, and you don't need to stop and get
fast food or take-out. The pandemic was really a fantastic pause, in some ways,
to take a look at our habits and our patterns of activity. And so I think that it has become
a real place of introspection. Yeah, I agree with everything you both said. And you know, you're right.
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
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.
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.
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,
happiness
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