The Future, Mental Health and Your Money
Trigger warning for suicidal thoughts.
The future is difficult to envisage for people who don’t have mental ill health - it’s a big part of the reason that pensions are so often avoided. The future is so far away and the here and now is so pressing. It’s difficult to know what might happen and therefore how you should be planning. There’s also the horror stories of people who did everything right and it still messed up. If this is you then there’s information for you here.
But I am also talking to the people who can’t bear to think about the future, who think about it too much, who don’t believe there will be one or who don’t want there to be one.
The future is not something that I always thought I would have. It’s really difficult to put into words for people that haven’t experienced this - I’m going to try here but I also hope it reaches people who understand this innately. I’m not quite talking about suicidality, although that would certainly fit within here, I’m talking about a lack of belief that there would be a future. It’s too much to contemplate. When things get so bad, so low and so constrained that there is no hope for the future or even that there would be one. Existence is a day to day thing, and the bare minimum is probably slightly more than you can achieve.
I’m not suggesting that I have a solution to this. I can tell you that I am on the other side of it - I believe in a future, have hope for it and work towards that - so it’s possible. I have two trains of thought that I’d like to root around in a little.
Future You Deserves Stability and Comfort
Even if you don’t believe that. At all or just in the moment.
Similar to my suggestion yesterday that you could pretend you are worth the trouble, if you’re struggling with that. Or imagine yourself as looking after something your loved ones value. It doesn’t matter how you get there but it does matter that you head in that direction. This applies to all sorts of good self care stuff - taking medication, moving your body, eating well, getting out of the house but it absolutely applies to money.
Money is fundamentally about the future - saving, investing, pensions, insurance, job progression - all of these require you to imagine a future self. What might that future self be doing? Where might they be living? What resources will they require and have access to?
Just before I went away, I read a really sweet little book about serving the future you.
The book was How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davies (that’s an affiliate link so I’d get some money if you choose to buy through there) and the core point - as I understood it - is to take the shame and morality away from housekeeping.
If the reason that we ‘keep house’ is because we are following rules set by somebody else/society, then firstly that is absolutely a weighty obligation, it’s also easy to lose a routine when we feel the rules don’t apply (for whatever reason) and the dissonance between the obligations and what you haven’t done is a shame incubator. She suggests instead, concentrating on caring for the future you.
Doing your dishes every single night is a rule I’m sure we’ve all heard suggested, or making the bed every day, or clearing up as you go with dinner - but none of these are absolutely necessary for a good life. It might make a difference to future you tomorrow morning, to walk into a clear kitchen in the morning. It might make a difference if you’ve already set out the coffee and cereal. It might make sleeping that much easier if your bed is all comfy, cosy and fluffed up - and we all know how important sleeping is.
None of this is groundbreaking stuff, although working out that I was somebody who was genuinely worthy of that softness felt pretty groundbreaking to me, and still is every time I have to rediscover it after a bad period. The problem, perhaps, is remembering it in the moment so that you can put it into action. This is where nervous system regulation comes in - which isn’t really in the remit of today - but does, I think, lead into the next piece that I wanted to speak to.
There Are Things You Can Do Which Create A Future
And I suggest that you do them, even if it feels stupid or pointless. Do it joylessly, do it because you have to, like we all took our silly mental health walks during the pandemic.
The best example I have of this is a garden. Planting seeds, being on the earth, watching life bloom is an absolute tonic.
During the pandemic I remember watching Caroline Quentin on some social media talking us through how to plant a seed - I had no idea she was a gardener! It was one of those really sweet videos where the presenter assumes no knowledge, but not in a shitty way, just in a sort of brisk-we’re-starting-from-scratch way. She talked about how people get their knickers in a twist about different types of compost and different growing conditions and exact months of the year - but she said, things want to grow. So stop overthinking it, plonk it in the soil, give it water, sun, know that not everything will come up perfectly and hope for the best.
I think of that video and that message quite often and in a lot of different contexts.
(In writing this post I found quite a few articles about Caroline Quentin’s gardening and her mental health - that’s a nice one and it’s free but it’s full of ads - sorry!)
Creating a garden is an act of hope for the future. Nothing will happen today, or tomorrow probably, but maybe next week, probably next month and by the end of the season goodness knows what might have happened! The garden also needs you, a little pruning here, some weeding, some watering, some chatting to the plants (just call me King Charles).
I don’t have a garden any more, I have a balcony, and getting to know how to ‘garden’ like this has been an experience. But I learned from last year that I needed to start earlier and that I also needed to cover my seedlings because Attractive Cat has a taste for greens.
Gardening is not the only thing that will do this for you - exercising, learning a skill, starting an art or craft project, investing. All of these create a future for you, almost without you thinking. A sense that there is something to come back to, something happening without you being able to see it, something which requires time, won’t work without time.
The links between this and say, investing are obvious. The beginning requires a bit of effort - working out where you want to put your money, opening accounts, transferring bits. After this you probably want to tend it a bit, check in every now and again, keep watering the investment with regular payments, see if you want to redistribute into different assets or convert to a different fund or something, but mostly, you’re going to let it grow. You’re not going to dig it up and root around in the soil. You’ve created the conditions and now you’re going to let time - the future - do what it does.
And if you let that sink in, sooner or later, you realise that a future does exist - with you in it - in a way that you can shape and that inevitably leads to more great future-you behaviours.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about exercise in the context of shame but I really wanted to just mention Yoga With Adriene. I don’t know how I discovered her, well over a decade ago, but her 30 days of yoga series were my first inkling of this - there’s a goal and a future included in the concept but it was as a direct consequence of doing those with her that I started Couch to 5K, which led to weightlifting, which led to giving up smoking, which led to learning about nutrition, which led to investing, which led to minimalism, to moving to Sweden, to reading - to so many of the great things in my life.
That doesn’t have to be your path, but whatever you can do to cultivate a spark of a future - do it.
Financial Coaching and the Spark of a Future
In the last few weeks of meeting with my financial coaching clients I’ve been realising that the spark for them is often reaching out to me. Which is very exciting!
I hope that way that I write shows that this is not all about the money - so much of it is about our nervous systems and our behaviour patterns which we might not even be aware of. There’s space for the practical, important space, but if you’re getting the feeling that you’re ready to cultivate your garden then I’d love to help you with that.
Book your call here.
Love Eleanor. xxx
