Healing Space | Your debt and your wealth begin in your mind

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

Let’s say every time you did something good as a child, completed a chore or got really good marks, your parents got you a present or handed you a token of money, Rs 101 or Rs 1,001. The better your result, the higher the reward. As this practice repeats over years, you develop an association between the money and reward for hard work, but also success. So, you come to believe that all hard work deserves a reward, and all reward for hard work is monetary. This can affect you in two ways, when you work hard and don’t get a reward, you fail to see the value of the hard work. Or let’s say you don’t get a reward that is monetary, maybe you just get praise from your boss, you can feel cheated of your reward. This also influences whether you see yourself as successful or not. Maybe no matter how good you are at your work, how much you like your workplace and colleagues, i.e., no matter how satisfied you are with your life, you just don’t see yourself as ‘successful’ because your monetary reward is not high enough.

We all have various ways in which our relationship to money has been shaped in these subtle terms.

For others, it could be the opposite. That is, if you grew up with parents who told you ‘it’s the job profile and your commitment that matter, never the money’, maybe you feel awkward to negotiate a pay raise or a better salary for yourself. Your work has become about ‘honour’ and money feels like it degrades that sense of dignity. Working hard, more than you are compensated for can be a culturally-accepted practice, such as with the Japanese concept of ganbaru, which is complete commitment to the task until its end. However, this also leads to karoshi, which is overworked to death or suicide by overwork. We may have grown up around a beloved family member, let’s say a grandparent, who made a lot of money but was basically cheated, swindled and used for his wealth, embroiled in property disputes and the like, making him miserable. We may thus conclude that money is what makes people unhappy, and create a subconscious bias in ourselves against it. We may know someone who lost a lot of money in equities and so will never invest in it.