Posted on

The staggering costs of personal financial stress at work

Using mindfulness

The staggering costs of personal financial stress at work.

For a while we’ve known that financial stress has an impact on our productivity at work. But how much worse financially sick staff fare compared to their financially healthy colleagues will come as a shock.

It’s clear absenteeism and presenteeism is rife amongst employees feeling financially stressed.

American employees under financial stress were nearly five times as likely to be distracted at work as those without money worries (48% v 10%) according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) 2017 Employee Financial Wellness Survey of 1,600 fulltime employees.

Spending hours dealing with personal financial issues during work hours was a very common occurrence, with nearly one in three employees affected in this way. Just under half (49%) of millennials (aged 21 to 35) spent 3 hours or more in work time each week sorting out their money own problems, while the figure was 46% for Generation Xers (36 to 56 years old).

The problem was bigger for staff self-reporting financial stress: they were nearly twice as likely to spend three hours a week sorting out their money issues at work as those not under financial stress.

This group was also more than four times as likely to have trouble keeping up with credit card payments and twice as likely to take a day off work to sort out a personal financial crisis.

Twelve per cent of all employees self-reported “missing work occasionally” because of their personal money woes. The major issues affected by financial stress was health (cited by 28% of respondents) although it wasn’t defined as mental or physical; relationships (23%) and productivity (22%).

Overall, “more than half (53%) of employees report that they are stressed dealing with their financial situation and nearly half (47%) say that their stress level related to financial issues has increased over the last 12 months,” the report found.

These issues are also clearly getting worse for the two generations who dominate the workforce – Generation X and Millennials – and quickly. The report showed all the above issues had gotten worse in 2017 compared with 2016, for example, in 2017 there was a 9% rise on 2016 numbers in Gen Xers self-reporting their productivity was affected at work (23%).

The survey also asked respondents across the three main generational groups at work to define the meaning of “financial wellness”. To do this they were given several options and asked to pick the phrase that most closely matched their idea of “financial wellness.”

The option “not being stressed about my finances” was one of the most-cited definitions, especially by millennials who nominated lack of money stress ahead of “being debt free”.

This arguably means millennials especially saw worrying less as a defining characteristic of wellness, suggesting interventions including mindfulness – moment-by-moment awareness – could have use in improving employee financial wellness.

Each generation rated “not being stressed about my finances” as a bigger contributor to financial wellness than being able to meet day-to-day (or month) living expenses and being able to retire when they were ready.

It’s no wonder millennials felt so much stress financial worries; the report showed a big jump in the percentage of 21-to-35 year olds who carry balances (stay in debt) on their credit cards (a huge 70%, up from 53% in 2016).

Comparative data showed that is nearly a 100% rise from 2013 in Millennials locked into debt on their cards.

The proportion of millennials struggling to meet minimum monthly repayments has also skyrocketed in recent years, up to 39% in 2017 from 23% in 2013.

Sixty-three per cent of Generation Xers carried a credit card balance.

Posted on

Employees want help with their financial stress

financialmindfulness blue Background color

Employees want help with their financial stress.

Does it strike you as strange that the biggest stressor we face isn’t talked about in plans offered to help with our stress?

In recent years employers have recognised the personal stresses experienced by staff can affect productivity and the bottom line, due partly to the sheer amount of our lives we spend at work and no doubt partly due to increased workloads.

In response, workplace ‘wellness’ programs are everywhere these days, especially in large companies – acknowledging the impact of unhappy staff on the bottom line.

Now there’s evidence from the United States that workplace wellness programs might be missing the mark but not addressing one of the biggest causes of issues in the personal lives of workers – their personal finances.

A new online survey of 511 American employees, done in mid-April by Four Seasons Financial Education, found people wanted financial stress addressed in their corporate wellness plan but 70 per cent of those whose company did offer something said assistance on personal finances was not included.
It’s not just in the US that this mismatch is happening.

Financial wellness is not commonly an element in corporate wellness programs in Australian workplaces either.

Corporate wellness programs have longed focused largely on physical wellbeing, so they offer health checks, fitness classes, nutrition, massage and team bonding. Few look at mental health, although mental health problems are experienced by a huge number of people.

According to the Australian Psychological Society, 26 per cent of Australians report having “moderate to extremely severe depression symptoms”.

Metlife Australia’s 2016 Employee Benefits Trends study showed the top three concerns employees had were related to mental health: work-life balance, depression and anxiety, and stress.

“Only a small proportion of employers recognise work-life balance, depression and stress as important health issues for staff,” the report found.

According to AMP’s Financial Wellness Report, based on interviews with 2000 employees in 2016, 24 per cent of employees feel financial stress. While there is no suggestion personal finance issues create mental health issues for everyone, there is undoubtedly a correlation.

While some new generation wellness programs branch into stress testing, yoga and meditation as a way of combating stress, few acknowledge the importance of improving mental health or drill down to examine the leading causes of stress for workers.

The Australian Psychological Society’s 2015 Stress and wellbeing report, which came from online interviews with 1731 Australians, found : “[Personal] financial issues are rated as the top cause of stress over the five years, while also of concern is the increase in the number of people turning to gambling to manage stress (now one in five).”

Furthermore, the report concluded: “31% of employees say they have taken unexpected time off to deal with a financial issue and 41% admit being distracted at work because of financial worries.” The study surveyed 300 managers and 500 fulltime employees.

One of the report’s four calls to action was “Win minds and hearts by encouraging emotional and financial wellness.”

Posted on

Mindfulness could complement CBT interventions for depression

Retirement Orange

Mindfulness could complement CBT interventions for depression.

Anyone who has been truly depressed understands how vast the difference is between knowing it’s helpful to talk to people and regularly being able to connect with others.

Depression, and its nagging stablemate, anxiety, often render a person so exhausted and full of self-doubt that it feels impossible to escape the prison cell of their own thoughts.

Anhedonia is a common symptom of depression, which is the loss of the ability to experience pleasure – emotional flatlining. A mindfulness practice could hold a key of sorts to that prison and even help sufferers to begin experiencing more fulfilling relationships in their lives.

But such a healthy change might not come about by doing a mindfulness alone, although multiple studies confirm its effectiveness in alleviating the symptoms of depression. The idea here is that mindfulness could complement and even enhance the effectiveness of specific Cognitive Behavioural Therapy interventions for depression.

The positive effect of ‘daily uplifts’

New research done in New York, by Lisa Starr, of the University of Rochester and Rachel Hershenberg, of Stony Brook University and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that positive events in real-life conditions had a greater positive impact on sufferers of depression than in laboratory conditions.

They wrote: “experiencing or even just anticipating uplifting events in daily life was related to feeling less depressed that same day”. The researchers called these “interpersonal uplifts”, such as participating in fun activities with friends or family.

“It’s the social activities—positive, everyday experiences that involve other people—that may be most likely to brighten the mood of those struggling with depression,” Starr wrote on the University’s of Rochester’s website. “The same is true for the expectation of good things to come,” although Starr noted people with depression are actually less likely to anticipate positive experiences. The study included 157 young adults, a third of whom had depression ranging from mild to severe. Sandra Knispel, writing on the University website concluded: “In other words: If you’re feeling seriously blue—make a concerted effort to do something fun with friends.”

Overcome negative thinking with mindfulness

Of course the advice ‘just do something fun with friends’ is easy to say but might feel impossible to do if you are bound by negative thinking, especially about yourself.

This is where mindfulness could help enormously, says Marc Richardson, psychologist for Financial Mindfulness who also works private practice in Sydney.

“Self-recrimination does lead to greater levels of worthlessness which compounds our unwillingness to engage in those interpersonal events which have really clear effects on brightening the mood. It’s hard to access those events when the overwhelming sense is ‘I’m worthless’.

“Mindfulness is about lifting our level of awareness and that improved awareness would give us the ability to notice the negative thoughts which are such a big part of depressive symptomology.

“Mindfulness has the capacity to act as a circuit breaker to rumination on negative thoughts, allowing us to catch those negative generalisations and challenge them, and make us more willing to engage in those activities we know are beneficial.

Richardson explained how that process could also help anxiety sufferers too.
“Depression is closely aligned with anxiety and in both people tend towards living in a future-oriented state rather than a present state. They will typically worry a lot about what might happen next, almost with an impending sense of doom.

“Mindfulness brings us back to the present moment and allows us to connect with the here and now rather than identify with our negative projections.”
Richardson believes a mindfulness practice could allow us to make decisions to follow through with, or perhaps even plan, those ‘daily uplifts’, such as meeting with family and friends for healthy fun activities.

“The more people engage in mindfulness, the more self aware they will be. That greater capacity to be present will surely improve our capacity to be in relationships.”

What ‘fun’ activities?

If you are depressed or anxious you might well ask ‘what sort of activities?’ In the end that will come down to you: who do you feel happy around, what do you like doing that lifts your mood naturally? You are best advised to talk to a therapist or loved one, or journal, to work this out. But here are some suggestions:

  • Arranging and having a coffee/tea and a chat with a trusted friend once a week
  • Phoning a family member you have a good relationship with once a week
  • Volunteering somewhere in your local community for 4 hours a week where the work involves helping someone who is likely to be grateful for the company / help
  • Taking the opportunity to chat in a friendly way to someone on public transport, if that opportunity presents itself)
Posted on

Send yourself a valuable gift: get mindful

financialmindfulness blue Background color

Send yourself a valuable gift: get mindful.

Why do we spend money to feel good now, even if it’s clearly going to have negative consequences later? And why do we seem to make better decisions if they are planned and not impulsive?

The answers are complex, but just so you really get the idea, first imagine yourself under a lot of stress. Maybe you are working and studying, so you’re always flat-out busy, and there’s no end in sight. Or perhaps one of your parents is gravely ill and it’s hard to communicate about this with siblings you don’t get on with.

So you should feel really stressed.

Then without thinking, say which of these following suggestions sounds like a great idea a/ now, or b / in five years time: buying two pairs of the same fancy shoes you like because they are on sale, or selling your car today for $500 less than you could probably get because a buyer is ready with the cash and you want a weekend away.

You probably favour option a/ in most cases, meaning you want the ‘reward’ now.

Why? Because, according to behavioural scientists, “present rewards are weighted more heavily than future ones. Once rewards are very distant in time, they cease to be valuable,” so says behaivoraleconomics.com.

This was the finding of landmark research done in 2002 by Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein and Ted O’Donohue, and published in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Interestingly, when the reward is delayed, we are more prepared to wait to receive a greater reward. Research shows if given the choice between $100 in a year or $120 in 13 months, we will probably wait.

All this suggests if we plan for the future we are likely to make better decisions about money.  But it depends what that future event is, and how far off it is.
If it’s a skiing holiday in the Canadian Rockies, we will probably swing into action. If it’s retirement at age 70 (as the Australian Federal Government proposes from 2035), that feels somewhat less urgent, even though few would argue it’s more important.

In a 2014 report on savings, the Reserve Bank of Australia showed “younger households place more weight on saving for large purchases and emergencies to smooth near-term consumption rather than saving for longer-term (retirement) consumption.”

“Keys to managing decisions like these are to make those far-off outcomes feel closer,” Peter Sokol-Hessner, assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of Denver, told The Huffington Post.

He suggested “to imagine how you’ll feel when you can use those retirement funds, how grateful you’ll be that your younger self sent this gift into the future.”

If that sounds like a fairy story, there is research to back up the idea that we are more careful as ‘our future selves’. A study run by UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2011 found when people visualised themselves as 70 and were asked to imagine what they’d do with a $1000 windfall, they put more than twice as much money towards their retirement as those who were asked to visualise themselves now. They were more likely to choose short-term options like planning an extravagant outing or buying someone a gift.
So where does mindfulness come in?

Let’s be clear: a mindfulness practice, even one focused on money, isn’t going to directly impact your Canadian Rockies ski fund, let alone your retirement savings.

But if undertaken consistently, a mindfulness practice could help change the decisions you currently unconsciously make about spending.
For instance, you may decide to do extra research before selling your car or home, looking more carefully at trends and brainstorming other ways to find ready cash.

It does that by increasing time between your thoughts: that well-worn but accurate metaphor of busy thoughts as clouds against a blue sky that represents an untroubled mind.

“Thoughts are like clouds,” says Financial Mindfulness’s Chief Mindfulness Officer Tomas Jajesnica.

“When you can see more sky and less clouds you start to move out of an immediate, involuntary response state and towards the type of thought where you could think about your ‘future self’.”

A big benefit of a regular practice is a buffer against the power of marketing, he says. Think about the hype involved around the release of the next stage of a sought-after apartment development: it’s in the interests of a real estate agent to get you into a feeding frenzy state with other potential buyers, so the stage sells put, the project can go up and the next stage goes into marketing overdrive.

“But it’s not just effective in dealing with real estate,” Jajesnica says.
“A lot of marketing works on the idea of scarcity and urgency; some saying ‘quick, there’s only 100 in stock’ , or ‘hurry, it’s a brand new order’, or whatever. Marketing works on you by getting you to make a decision right now.

“A mindfulness process will help you to buy things rather than just be sold to.
“It’ll allow you to come from your own space, consider the consequences of your actions and respond by making decisions, rather than be manipulated by marketing.”

Posted on

Why isn’t mindfulness working for me

Retirement Orange

Why isn’t mindfulness working for me.

Mindfulness, in theory, sounds great. The deal seems to be roughly this: if I sit still and listen to my breathing for 10 minutes each day I will be calmer, certainly cooler, possibly richer and definitely an all-round better person.

So how come it’s not working, you might ask, because you probably feel like none of those things after a few days doing mindfulness meditations.

However, that starting point of using mindfulness meditation to find self-improvement is, apparently, backwards.

“Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better, it’s about befriending who we are,” the world famous American meditation teacher and author Pema Chodron said.

Chodron was a stressed-out schoolteacher called Deirdre Blomfield-Brown until she was crippled by depression following the end of her second marriage in the 1970s. So how does she, one of the world’s foremost experts do it?

“You just sit down with yourself,” Chodron told Oprah in a 2008 interview.
“It’s a way of being completely open to whatever is happening in your mind, and you realize your mind is wild and crazy and all over the place. The instruction is so simple: Just keep coming back to your breath. Then you say,

“This is almost impossible!”

“It isn’t, but I know how hard it is.”

Initially it will be hard, so like anything, practice makes perfect.
In general terms, if we feel like quitting after a few days we are expecting too much too soon.

“You might call it beginner’s uncomfortability,” says Marc Richardson, psychologist with Financial Mindfulness.

“I tried to learn the guitar literally every time I picked it up I would sweat because I was so uncomfortable. Trying anything new is uncomfortable and to experience full benefits one would need to engage for quite a while.”

Are there strategies, though, for dealing with the specific problems if they persist? Some of the most common include: I’m thinking too much, I can’t do this, I can’t sit still, I don’t have time, it hurts.

Here’s what British mindfulness expert Shamash Alidina wrote about some of these problems in Meditation for Dummies.

I can’t do this:

“When people say this, they normally mean they can’t focus … mindfulness meditation is one of the best ways to develop that focus! It’s completely normal for your mind to wander off when you’re meditating.

However, as soon as you’ve noticed, bring your focus back to the object of attention specified in the meditation (often your breath).

Each time you’re training your mind to be more focused in the future. Remember, you can’t fail at meditation. As long as you try, you’ve succeeded.”

I can’t sit still:

“Some meditations require you to be … still for half an hour, but many don’t require this. You [can do a] body scan meditation lying down. And mindful yoga, walking or tai chi is meditation in movement. [A] three-minute mindfulness exercise is a great practice to do daily.”

I don’t have the time:

“If some of the busiest people in the world can find time to stop and meditate, even if it’s only five minutes, you probably can too. You can do mindfulness meditation at any time. You can wash the dishes mindfully, you can walk your dog mindfully or you can even have a mindful shower.

So that takes no time at all out of your busy day.”

What about ‘It hurts’?

Tara Healey and Jonathan Roberts, writing for mindful.org are clear on this:

“Being in a lot of pain is not a mark of doing it right. It can take some work, though, to find a position (or a few positions) that don’t lead to intense pain … try out different postures and supports … a hugely important lesson of meditation is that even comfort is, well, bound to eventually become uncomfortable.

“For this reason, once you find a suitable posture and support, it’s a good idea to avoid making too many adjustments.”

Getting fully into the meditation itself can help: “People have found that as they relax that inner tension, it often results in less bodily tension.”

As for I’m thinking too much, well that one is addressed by realising practice makes perfect. You accept the thoughts you have without judgement, and gently set them aside. Thoughts are normal and they will come and go, hence the widely-used analogy of allowing thoughts to pass like clouds against a blue sky.

The more you meditate, Chodron told Oprah, “the more you have a lightness about what’s occurring in your life … it’s not about becoming indifferent to life’s experiences; it actually allows you to be much more present with whatever arises.

“You’re fully engaged, but you see it from a different perspective.”
In other words, you will be able to cope much better with what life throws at you.