
Getting goal-ready: how mindfulness can help you tackle anything
Tackling goals—whether at work, at home, or in fitness—can be challenging. But if you take care of the mind, it can help you take care of everything else.
by Headspace
In this month’s Headspace featured collection, Money on the Mind, we’re highlighting recommended meditations and exercises to help you better cope with financial stress and have a healthier relationship with money.
At one time or another, most of us will have felt stressed about money, whether it’s struggling to make ends meet, feeling burdened by debt, fretting about family expenses, or worrying whether there’ll be enough left in the pot to retire. The stress could also be from making a certain financial decision, worrying about losing hard-earned savings, or simply being money-phobic, due to some conditioned beliefs handed down over generations.
Whatever the reason, the pressure that accompanies financial stress can sometimes feel overwhelming and hard to escape — affecting our relationships, our sleep, and our health. It seems to trickle down into every area of life, making it hard to think, focus, and function.
The easiest thing to do, of course, is project our current situation into the future and imagine it’s never-ending, making us feel even worse. It’s why many of us go into avoidance: avoiding calls from utility companies, avoiding opening bank statements, and avoiding tough conversations.
The hardest thing to do is to look our financial stress in the eye, stay present, and deal with it. We can make this easier on ourselves by looking at our situation through the lens of mindfulness.
Meditation cannot make us wealthy or dissolve our debts, but it can bring an awareness that helps us reframe our approach to finances, and therefore, ease the strain. When we cannot change the reality of a situation, we instead change our perspective; in changing our perspective, we change our relationship with something, and that’s a powerful shift when it comes to money.
Money on the Mind: recommended meditations to help manage financial stress
Check your balance
Checking in with ourselves before checking our bank account balance can put us in the right frame of mind, rather than sending us into a tailspin. Breathe, step back, reassess, and restore some much-needed balance to your life.
Emotionally overdrawn
Our emotions can get the better of us when we’re financially stressed. There is a lot going on and every day can feel overwhelming or burdensome. The following exercises are designed to ease the strain and help you keep moving forward with calm and clarity.
Treat yourself
When stressed about money, one of the hardest things to do is look after ourselves, or at least do something that feels positive. But in looking after ourselves, we look after our minds … and that’s a stress-buster in and of itself.
Tackling goals—whether at work, at home, or in fitness—can be challenging. But if you take care of the mind, it can help you take care of everything else.
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Tackling goals—whether at work, at home, or in fitness—can be challenging. But if you take care of the mind, it can help you take care of everything else.