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Stress Goes Up When Money Goes Down
Jim’s mom had passed away after a long fight with congestive heart failure. While on bereavement leave he got a call from his boss.
“Don’t come back to work next week. We’ve eliminated your position.” Jim was stunned. Rather than fight back he found himself saying,
“You do know my Mom just died, right?”
“There’s no work for you here, Jim. Don’t come back.” Within the span of a phone call, Jim had lost his primary source of income. Jim put down the phone. His way of life had been threatened: this time the saber-tooth tiger took the form of an economic enemy. His ancient limbic brain kicked in generating a stress response to the news: his heart rate began to increase, his breathing changed, he got a cold sweat. Unknown to him, his blood pressure increased and a slow insidious process began leading to the potential of heart disease, diabetes, strokes, and other stress-related health problems.
As our money goes down our stress goes up. From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense. Money has become a critical resource, vital to our stability and survival. The advent of money is wonderfully explored in The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright . His premise is that our use of money depends on our ability to trust each other.
Last night my wife and I went to a restaurant. We ate our food, handed a credit card to our waitress, in essence a complete stranger, who left the room out of sight. She returned a short while later with the card and our bill. I signed a promise to pay for my food sometime in the future, and added a few dollars to acknowledge the service of our waitress, which I trusted she would receive from her boss at the end of the night in cash: A whole lot of trust going on in just that small transaction.
Trust was an enormous evolutionary leap for humanity. Never the strongest animal, the fastest animal, the biggest animal, we were always at risk of being lunch for some other animal. On your own you were very often prey. Human beings that formed social groups significantly increased their chance of survival.
But to rely on each other you had to trust that a sacrifice you made today would be repaid when you needed it. Most of our economic system is based on this very human relationship.
When you don’t have money you can’t fulfill the promise of paying someone later for resources today. (Dating myself, it reminds me of Wimpy in Popeye the Sailorman, imploring,
“I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”) When Jim was caught in the down-sizing of his workplace, his stress was a product of the ability to anticipate a future in which he had less money coming in to keep his promises he began to get stressed out… or stressed in.
His thoughts became influenced by his primal need to survive:
“What if I don’t have a job? What if I don’t have enough money? How do I pay my bills? How do I feed my family? How do I keep our house?”
Faced with a problem, Jim’s pre-frontal cortex began to assess the world around it for solutions, and anticipated the consequence of those solutions, or the consequence of a continued money shortage.
Stress is a natural survival tool. We all experience it. In fact, it is not always my stress that gets in the way of my success. Very often it is someone else’s stress that gets in the way of my success. When Jim lost his job, and his income decreased, his loss of cash flow was about to increase the stress of people all around him. That one product he now could not afford would influence the vendor of that product. Perhaps Jim would not be able to make the next mortgage payment, impacting the value of his home and then the home of others in his neighborhood.
Perhaps he would not be able to afford college tuition for his kids, impacting their future earning potential.
So what can we do now and today? How can we help each other with our stress? There are small ways to help someone else all the time: Opening a door, letting someone go first, becoming a valuable resource, treating each other with respect. Respect leads to value. Value leads to trust. And trust leads to the potential sharing of resources so we can all be more successful.
Over the next few weeks we will explore some simple ways to help at home and at work. Interspersed, please tune in for some in-the-moment examples. And please keep reading and writing comments!
Reference: The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life, Paul Seabright. Princeton University Press, 2004
