The Happiness Balancing Act – And How It Can Affect Your Personal Finances
Posted on July 20th, 2010 in Debt Assistance | No Comments »
Most people will understandably seek out happiness wherever they can. They’d rather have fun, rather be loved, rather do something exciting, than be unpopular, miserable and bored.
One observation that I have made again and again however is that it seems that many of us have some form of mental “scales” in which we try to balance out the bad and the good in life so that overall there is more of the positive than the negative.
Imagine you crash your car and write it off. That’s bad. To try and even up the scales therefore we may try to find some positive in the situation – such as the way we decide we didn’t like our old car anyway – or add something positive onto the scales such as treating ourself to a night out to “make up for it”.
Every time something negative happens, we try to balance it up with something positive.
And I believe this same “balancing act” can have quite extensive effects on our personal finances in all sorts of ways.
Firstly, one of the quickest and most obvious ways to create a positive situation is to buy yourself something nice. Something that brings you comfort. How many times do you hear of someone splitting up with their partner, and then immediately going out and spending money on getting a hair hair cut, new clothes or joining the gym? They’re trying to balance up those scales.
But the problem with using the act of spending money to balance up your scales is that this can quickly start to get very expensive. Worse, debt itself can cause us distress and become a negative. And if your gut reaction to deal with that anguish is to go and spend more money on yourself then you’re risking getting into ever decreasing circles.
Far better is to find something else – something that doesn’t cost money – that will cheer you up. Whether that’s simply spending time with a friend having a good chat, going for a walk in the countryside or taking up a low-cost hobby like painting; the results will likely be far longer term than just buying yourself something new (by default it won’t be “new” for very long) and you will also find it easier to dig yourself out of debt.
However another common area where I see this happiness balancing act is in terms of people with stressful but highly-paid jobs. The long hours and the stress of their jobs can be a real negative. They feel tired. On edge. Struggle to spend enough time with their friends and family. So they try to even up the scales; often by buying nice things.
How many times have you heard the phrases “but I deserve it” or “but I’ve earned it”?
I know one person who has an insanely busy job which really gets them down. So on their days off, they go shopping. They treat themselves to unnecessary purchases because they believe they deserve them after all their hard work.
However of course there is another perspective on the situation here. And that is that if the person I know got a less-stressful job, they’d have less negatives on the scale and so would probably feel far less need to splurge on unnecessary luxuries. They’d probably work shorter hours, enjoy themselves more and, because they don’t need to keep on buying things to make themself feel better, they’d probably be no worse off even if their new job paid less.
So the thinking point for today is this. Try to be more conscious of the money you spend over the next few weeks, paying particular attention to the things you buy that you feel you “deserve”. To many people these purchases don’t feel like luxuries but more essentials so be aware of this.
Try to pay attention to how much money you really spend unnecessarily to balance up issues in other areas of your life and try to either reduce those negatives directly, or find new ways to make yourself feel good without spending money.
By doing so you’ll likely not only be happier, but will also have more money at the end of each month.
