When Anxiety Isn't a Distortion

What happens when anxiety isn't a distortion at all? What if it is an accurate read of genuinely unstable circumstances.

When you don't know if you will be able to pay next month's rent, have food, or you're one unexpected expense away from a fiscial crisis, that isn't a distortion. That's anxiety doing exactly what it's built to do: to let us know when we are in danger. That's not just physical danger.

What scarcity does to the mind

When someone is preoccupied with not having enough, whether that's money, time, or other resources, the mind keeps returning to it, almost automatically. This can look like trouble concentrating, irritability, or racing thoughts. That’s how the mind works under real, ongoing scarcity, in anyone.

It can make small decisions feel exhausting, what to buy, what to skip, when to check the account again, because the mind is already working overtime on the bigger question underneath. This often gets mistaken for a focus problem, or even a motivation problem, when it's really a bandwidth problem. There's only so much attention available, and scarcity claims a large share of it.

Two different kinds of anxiety

With so much attention already spoken for, it helps to know what anxiety you are actually dealing with. Anxiety exists to alert us when something is wrong. That's its job, and it can be genuinely helpful. But somewhere along the way, anxiety can flip, and what was once useful starts working against you instead.

Some anxiety is tracking a real, ongoing threat. If you're behind on rent, that anxiety is doing its job. It's keeping your attention on something that actually needs attention.

Other anxiety has outlasted its usefulness. This is what it looks like when someone has stabilized financially but still can't stop checking their bank balance, or when the body stays braced long after the danger has passed.

Both are real. Both matter. But they call for different things. The first often needs concrete stabilization, resources, planning, support, more than it needs a coping skill. The second may respond well to the more familiar tools: regulation, grounding, gradual exposure to safety.

Shame in Financial Anxiety

When a culture equates financial stability with self-worth, financial anxiety may occur. Financial anxiety on its own can look like checking your account balance repeatedly, avoiding opening bills, or running the same worst-case numbers repeatedly at night. However, even after you move back into financial stability, anxiety may still linger. And with this anxiety, shame may follow.

Shame comes from a belief system, one you've come to believe yourself, or one that others have imposed on you. This kind of shame is intensely painful and doesn't serve you. It keeps you stuck in a story about what your financial struggle says about you rather than recognizing it's outside of your control.

Not all anxiety is a puzzle to be solved by looking inward. Sometimes the most honest thing to do is recognize that your anxiety is responding appropriately to something that is actually unstable, and to find footing within it, rather than trying to think your way to a calm your circumstances don't yet support.

Next in the series: bringing the attachment, family, and financial threads together, and what it means for how we understand anxiety as a whole.

If you are struggling with this kind of role that you had in childhood and now as an adult know you're not alone. There is support for you