How to manage holiday spending as an ADHD'er
Mindful money tips for the holidays. Learn how to navigate spending with intention when stress and impulsivity run high.
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Mindful money tips for the holidays. Learn how to navigate spending with intention when stress and impulsivity run high.
The end of the year is a stressful time for everyone. On top of the weight of our daily lives, we’re also wrapping up projects, thinking about the year ahead, and planning for the incoming holidays. Our daily routines are having to change according to government guidelines which may leave holiday plans in limbo. For people with neuroatypical functions, navigating uncertainty, making decisions, and controlling impulses may be especially difficult. There’s a lot extra to navigate this season.
Wading through tinsel and the intoxicating smell of roasting chestnuts, our behaviour around money is especially at risk of deteriorating. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research and guidance around managing money across neurodiversity during normal times. Because the holidays seem to speed up the pace of life, it’s especially possible to be vulnerable to the behaviours and tendencies that make money management harder in the first place. People tend to be more stressed, harder worked, and lest we forget that all of life’s routines have gone out the window. However hard, there are things we can do to take some of the pressures off of the holidays, especially when it comes to managing our buys, our spending goals and our intentions.
We’ve come up with a set of steps that can help with the pressures of navigating the world with our cash in hand and our intentions at heart. With some earnest awareness of how your mind affects your money, a little extra planning and organization, we hope you’ll come out of the season feeling grounded, and perhaps even empowered by your money habits moving into a new year!
Take these steps when you’re feeling overwhelmed with the to do’s of the holiday season. These steps are great to instill prior to being in the throes of holiday shopping or spending on sales, but there is never a wrong time to begin forming a better mind-money relationship in general.
When we’re stressed out or feeling rushed, chemicals in our brain trigger quick reactions for immediate solutions. Today’s stresses might originate in social anxieties or unfamiliar streetscapes, but historically quick reactions were needed to escape pouncing predators. According to Dual-Systems Theory, our brains react first and foremost quickly and emotionally, then reflective and analytical thinking comes, but from a different system altogether. To boot, when we’re agitated, this secondary system of reflection and analysis is less effective.
Services like “buy now, pay later” and “tap to buy” take advantage of this, and acting now and thinking later can wreak havoc on our intentions, especially our budget goals. But our tendency to think first with our emotions and for the short term means that slowing down the actual process of buying can greatly help us to make decisions.
Our external environment is always changing and changing unpredictably. This means we’re constantly presented with new information that must be interpreted to make decisions and to adapt routines. This is a significant task for your brain, and in some conditions your brain is simply better at making decisions than in others.
Our capabilities with executive functioning are impaired when we’re tired or stressed. In these states, we’re also less resistant to stress and impulse, increasing our likelihood of heeding to impulses and ill-considered buying. We likely can’t bend the outside world to suit us, but we can be strategic to limit our spending to places and times we feel best.
To keep to our intentions, whether that’s saving a paycheck or fulfilling a shopping list, we’ve first got to be clear about what those intentions are and how we might set practices in place to keep them. Creating and sticking to goals means always having them mentally within reach, which can be a challenge because there are of course limits on how much information we can keep in our minds at once. It’s suggested we can hold around 7 ‘bits’ at any one time, and this number decreases when we’re under pressure or stressed. This means that when we have a lot on the go, things can slip through the cracks, like the items on our shopping list or the savings we want to keep.
Whether we like it or not, spending and buying is part of our emotional ecosystem. We are emotional creatures, and our intentions and decisions are in place to serve some goal, whether we know what that goal is or not. Successfully sticking to a budget can help us be confident with our money and save for the future. But it’s also worth working towards a balance between militant budgeting restrictions and a buying free for all. Even the most useless-seeming purchases, like an exciting new game or a candy bar, bring us some kind of value.
Being mindful of our tendencies around money can be scary, but it also provides important insights about our general wellbeing. The above steps aim to help with buying habits, but notice that the more you practice being mindful about spending, the easier it will be to acknowledge when you’re in a state that isn’t conducive to making the best decisions. Then return to step number one to pause the payment. Eventually you’ll have greater awareness of other under-considered behaviours too!
The more we enact mindful money handling, the more we become aware of our reactive, and highly malleable emotional states. Even for those of us who are mind and money masters, the end of the year presents us with extra challenges, from stress, to uncertainty, to external pressures that can affect how we feel and our requisite behaviours. Keeping grounded means taking stock of all components of our lives: personal, social, and financial. Each is an important part of our emotional ecosystem. For a happy ecosystem, the personal, the social, and the financial all need tending to. The good news is that tending to one is tending to all.
Ariel, Elan. Memory and Decision Processes: The Impact of Cognitive Loads on Decision Regret. 2014. Wharton Research Scholars, no. 108, http://repository.upenn.edu/whartonresearchscholars/108.
Edwards, Susan. “Holiday Stress and the Brain.” On the Brain, Winter 2016, https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-institute/brain-newsletter/and-brain/holiday-stress-and-brain.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan, 2011.
Lerner, Jennifer S., et al. “Emotion and Decision Making.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 66, Jan. 2015, pp. 799–823, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043.
McClelland, David C., et al. “How Do Self-Attributed and Implicit Motives Differ?” Psychological Review, vol. 96, no. 4, 1989, pp. 690–702, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.4.690.
Samson, Alain, and Benjamin G. Voyer. “Two Minds, Three Ways: Dual System and Dual Process Models in Consumer Psychology.” AMS Review, vol. 2, no. 2–4, 2012, pp. 48–71, https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/amsrev/v2y2012i2d10.1007_s13162-012-0030-9.html.
Shields, Grant S., et al. “The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis and Comparison with Cortisol.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 68, 2016, pp. 651–68, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.06.038.
Mindful money tips for the holidays. Learn how to navigate spending with intention when stress and impulsivity run high.
The end of the year is a stressful time for everyone. On top of the weight of our daily lives, we’re also wrapping up projects, thinking about the year ahead, and planning for the incoming holidays. Our daily routines are having to change according to government guidelines which may leave holiday plans in limbo. For people with neuroatypical functions, navigating uncertainty, making decisions, and controlling impulses may be especially difficult. There’s a lot extra to navigate this season.
Wading through tinsel and the intoxicating smell of roasting chestnuts, our behaviour around money is especially at risk of deteriorating. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research and guidance around managing money across neurodiversity during normal times. Because the holidays seem to speed up the pace of life, it’s especially possible to be vulnerable to the behaviours and tendencies that make money management harder in the first place. People tend to be more stressed, harder worked, and lest we forget that all of life’s routines have gone out the window. However hard, there are things we can do to take some of the pressures off of the holidays, especially when it comes to managing our buys, our spending goals and our intentions.
We’ve come up with a set of steps that can help with the pressures of navigating the world with our cash in hand and our intentions at heart. With some earnest awareness of how your mind affects your money, a little extra planning and organization, we hope you’ll come out of the season feeling grounded, and perhaps even empowered by your money habits moving into a new year!
Take these steps when you’re feeling overwhelmed with the to do’s of the holiday season. These steps are great to instill prior to being in the throes of holiday shopping or spending on sales, but there is never a wrong time to begin forming a better mind-money relationship in general.
When we’re stressed out or feeling rushed, chemicals in our brain trigger quick reactions for immediate solutions. Today’s stresses might originate in social anxieties or unfamiliar streetscapes, but historically quick reactions were needed to escape pouncing predators. According to Dual-Systems Theory, our brains react first and foremost quickly and emotionally, then reflective and analytical thinking comes, but from a different system altogether. To boot, when we’re agitated, this secondary system of reflection and analysis is less effective.
Services like “buy now, pay later” and “tap to buy” take advantage of this, and acting now and thinking later can wreak havoc on our intentions, especially our budget goals. But our tendency to think first with our emotions and for the short term means that slowing down the actual process of buying can greatly help us to make decisions.
Our external environment is always changing and changing unpredictably. This means we’re constantly presented with new information that must be interpreted to make decisions and to adapt routines. This is a significant task for your brain, and in some conditions your brain is simply better at making decisions than in others.
Our capabilities with executive functioning are impaired when we’re tired or stressed. In these states, we’re also less resistant to stress and impulse, increasing our likelihood of heeding to impulses and ill-considered buying. We likely can’t bend the outside world to suit us, but we can be strategic to limit our spending to places and times we feel best.
To keep to our intentions, whether that’s saving a paycheck or fulfilling a shopping list, we’ve first got to be clear about what those intentions are and how we might set practices in place to keep them. Creating and sticking to goals means always having them mentally within reach, which can be a challenge because there are of course limits on how much information we can keep in our minds at once. It’s suggested we can hold around 7 ‘bits’ at any one time, and this number decreases when we’re under pressure or stressed. This means that when we have a lot on the go, things can slip through the cracks, like the items on our shopping list or the savings we want to keep.
Whether we like it or not, spending and buying is part of our emotional ecosystem. We are emotional creatures, and our intentions and decisions are in place to serve some goal, whether we know what that goal is or not. Successfully sticking to a budget can help us be confident with our money and save for the future. But it’s also worth working towards a balance between militant budgeting restrictions and a buying free for all. Even the most useless-seeming purchases, like an exciting new game or a candy bar, bring us some kind of value.
Being mindful of our tendencies around money can be scary, but it also provides important insights about our general wellbeing. The above steps aim to help with buying habits, but notice that the more you practice being mindful about spending, the easier it will be to acknowledge when you’re in a state that isn’t conducive to making the best decisions. Then return to step number one to pause the payment. Eventually you’ll have greater awareness of other under-considered behaviours too!
The more we enact mindful money handling, the more we become aware of our reactive, and highly malleable emotional states. Even for those of us who are mind and money masters, the end of the year presents us with extra challenges, from stress, to uncertainty, to external pressures that can affect how we feel and our requisite behaviours. Keeping grounded means taking stock of all components of our lives: personal, social, and financial. Each is an important part of our emotional ecosystem. For a happy ecosystem, the personal, the social, and the financial all need tending to. The good news is that tending to one is tending to all.
Ariel, Elan. Memory and Decision Processes: The Impact of Cognitive Loads on Decision Regret. 2014. Wharton Research Scholars, no. 108, http://repository.upenn.edu/whartonresearchscholars/108.
Edwards, Susan. “Holiday Stress and the Brain.” On the Brain, Winter 2016, https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-institute/brain-newsletter/and-brain/holiday-stress-and-brain.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan, 2011.
Lerner, Jennifer S., et al. “Emotion and Decision Making.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 66, Jan. 2015, pp. 799–823, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043.
McClelland, David C., et al. “How Do Self-Attributed and Implicit Motives Differ?” Psychological Review, vol. 96, no. 4, 1989, pp. 690–702, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.4.690.
Samson, Alain, and Benjamin G. Voyer. “Two Minds, Three Ways: Dual System and Dual Process Models in Consumer Psychology.” AMS Review, vol. 2, no. 2–4, 2012, pp. 48–71, https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/amsrev/v2y2012i2d10.1007_s13162-012-0030-9.html.
Shields, Grant S., et al. “The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis and Comparison with Cortisol.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 68, 2016, pp. 651–68, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.06.038.
Mindful money tips for the holidays. Learn how to navigate spending with intention when stress and impulsivity run high.
The end of the year is a stressful time for everyone. On top of the weight of our daily lives, we’re also wrapping up projects, thinking about the year ahead, and planning for the incoming holidays. Our daily routines are having to change according to government guidelines which may leave holiday plans in limbo. For people with neuroatypical functions, navigating uncertainty, making decisions, and controlling impulses may be especially difficult. There’s a lot extra to navigate this season.
Wading through tinsel and the intoxicating smell of roasting chestnuts, our behaviour around money is especially at risk of deteriorating. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research and guidance around managing money across neurodiversity during normal times. Because the holidays seem to speed up the pace of life, it’s especially possible to be vulnerable to the behaviours and tendencies that make money management harder in the first place. People tend to be more stressed, harder worked, and lest we forget that all of life’s routines have gone out the window. However hard, there are things we can do to take some of the pressures off of the holidays, especially when it comes to managing our buys, our spending goals and our intentions.
We’ve come up with a set of steps that can help with the pressures of navigating the world with our cash in hand and our intentions at heart. With some earnest awareness of how your mind affects your money, a little extra planning and organization, we hope you’ll come out of the season feeling grounded, and perhaps even empowered by your money habits moving into a new year!
Take these steps when you’re feeling overwhelmed with the to do’s of the holiday season. These steps are great to instill prior to being in the throes of holiday shopping or spending on sales, but there is never a wrong time to begin forming a better mind-money relationship in general.
When we’re stressed out or feeling rushed, chemicals in our brain trigger quick reactions for immediate solutions. Today’s stresses might originate in social anxieties or unfamiliar streetscapes, but historically quick reactions were needed to escape pouncing predators. According to Dual-Systems Theory, our brains react first and foremost quickly and emotionally, then reflective and analytical thinking comes, but from a different system altogether. To boot, when we’re agitated, this secondary system of reflection and analysis is less effective.
Services like “buy now, pay later” and “tap to buy” take advantage of this, and acting now and thinking later can wreak havoc on our intentions, especially our budget goals. But our tendency to think first with our emotions and for the short term means that slowing down the actual process of buying can greatly help us to make decisions.
Our external environment is always changing and changing unpredictably. This means we’re constantly presented with new information that must be interpreted to make decisions and to adapt routines. This is a significant task for your brain, and in some conditions your brain is simply better at making decisions than in others.
Our capabilities with executive functioning are impaired when we’re tired or stressed. In these states, we’re also less resistant to stress and impulse, increasing our likelihood of heeding to impulses and ill-considered buying. We likely can’t bend the outside world to suit us, but we can be strategic to limit our spending to places and times we feel best.
To keep to our intentions, whether that’s saving a paycheck or fulfilling a shopping list, we’ve first got to be clear about what those intentions are and how we might set practices in place to keep them. Creating and sticking to goals means always having them mentally within reach, which can be a challenge because there are of course limits on how much information we can keep in our minds at once. It’s suggested we can hold around 7 ‘bits’ at any one time, and this number decreases when we’re under pressure or stressed. This means that when we have a lot on the go, things can slip through the cracks, like the items on our shopping list or the savings we want to keep.
Whether we like it or not, spending and buying is part of our emotional ecosystem. We are emotional creatures, and our intentions and decisions are in place to serve some goal, whether we know what that goal is or not. Successfully sticking to a budget can help us be confident with our money and save for the future. But it’s also worth working towards a balance between militant budgeting restrictions and a buying free for all. Even the most useless-seeming purchases, like an exciting new game or a candy bar, bring us some kind of value.
Being mindful of our tendencies around money can be scary, but it also provides important insights about our general wellbeing. The above steps aim to help with buying habits, but notice that the more you practice being mindful about spending, the easier it will be to acknowledge when you’re in a state that isn’t conducive to making the best decisions. Then return to step number one to pause the payment. Eventually you’ll have greater awareness of other under-considered behaviours too!
The more we enact mindful money handling, the more we become aware of our reactive, and highly malleable emotional states. Even for those of us who are mind and money masters, the end of the year presents us with extra challenges, from stress, to uncertainty, to external pressures that can affect how we feel and our requisite behaviours. Keeping grounded means taking stock of all components of our lives: personal, social, and financial. Each is an important part of our emotional ecosystem. For a happy ecosystem, the personal, the social, and the financial all need tending to. The good news is that tending to one is tending to all.
Ariel, Elan. Memory and Decision Processes: The Impact of Cognitive Loads on Decision Regret. 2014. Wharton Research Scholars, no. 108, http://repository.upenn.edu/whartonresearchscholars/108.
Edwards, Susan. “Holiday Stress and the Brain.” On the Brain, Winter 2016, https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-institute/brain-newsletter/and-brain/holiday-stress-and-brain.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan, 2011.
Lerner, Jennifer S., et al. “Emotion and Decision Making.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 66, Jan. 2015, pp. 799–823, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043.
McClelland, David C., et al. “How Do Self-Attributed and Implicit Motives Differ?” Psychological Review, vol. 96, no. 4, 1989, pp. 690–702, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.4.690.
Samson, Alain, and Benjamin G. Voyer. “Two Minds, Three Ways: Dual System and Dual Process Models in Consumer Psychology.” AMS Review, vol. 2, no. 2–4, 2012, pp. 48–71, https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/amsrev/v2y2012i2d10.1007_s13162-012-0030-9.html.
Shields, Grant S., et al. “The Effects of Acute Stress on Core Executive Functions: A Meta-Analysis and Comparison with Cortisol.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 68, 2016, pp. 651–68, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.06.038.
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