Why Your Body Freezes When You Budget

Krystle McGilvery
Aug 10, 2025
4 min read

Money management can lead to mental shutdown

If money stuff feels hard, it's not because you're lazy or disorganised.

It's because your body has been doing its job.

Before you blame yourself for not saving more or for feeling overwhelmed by bills, let's pause and understand what's really going on.

Your body has been tracking things long before your brain had a chance to explain them.

If you've ever opened your banking app and felt a tight chest, avoided a conversation about debt or kept telling yourself "I'll sort it soon." while doing nothing at all, that's not just procrastination. That’s your nervous system interpreting money as a threat.

And for good reason.

Your body remembers things - even when your mind forgets.

Our financial behaviours aren't just driven by numbers or logic. They're shaped by experiences, expectations and emotional residue - Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014).

If you've lived through financial uncertainty, been judged or shamed around money, watched your caregivers struggle or grown up without a financial safety net, your body may associate money with:

Instability ("It's never enough.")
Judgement ("I should know this by now.")
Fear ("What if I lose everything?")
Overwhelm ("I don't even know where to start.")

These aren't character flaws. They’re protective responses.

The body's job is to keep you safe, and sometimes that means avoiding things that feel risky or shameful. Even if those things, like checking your statements or setting up a savings account, could help you long term.

This is where behaviour meets biology.

In behavioural economics, we talk a lot about biases and heuristics - mental shortcuts we use to make decisions quickly. They're part of what makes us human. But when mixed with money, stress or past trauma, they can pull us into spirals:

Present Bias: We prioritise immediate comfort over long-term goals. So we delay cancelling that subscription, or buy now and deal with it later.
Loss Aversion: We feel the pain of losing money more strongly than the joy of gaining it. So we avoid risk, even when investing could help us grow wealth.
Confirmation Bias: We look for evidence that supports our existing beliefs. If you believe you're "bad with money", you’ll likely notice every slip-up and ignore your wins.
Status Quo Bias: We stick with what feels familiar, even if it's not serving us, like using a credit card instead of shifting to a budget.

Confirmation bias is a big one, as this is the bias that keeps us stuck in the cycle. Your brain is trying to simplify complex financial decisions. But when those shortcuts are layered on top of emotional wounds or structural inequalities, they can trap us in loops.

And then the spiral starts.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice, because I've seen it countless times, and you're not alone if you recognise yourself in this.

You want to save. You try.

But an unexpected cost hits, or your income fluctuates, or you just feel too overwhelmed to budget, so you lean on your credit card.

You feel ashamed. You tell yourself you'll do better next month.

But that shame makes it harder to even look at your bank account, let alone plan ahead.

So the next month, you're even less prepared. And the cycle continues.

This is not a lack of intelligence, discipline or desire.

This is a lack of safety - emotional, structural, and sometimes physical.

And then there's the system.

It would be easy to stop at "Just manage your mindset.", but that ignores the bigger picture.

The cost-of-living crisis has eaten into even the most careful budgets.
Pay hasn't kept up with inflation.
Financial education is missing in most schools, or taught with judgement, not compassion.
Predatory lending, systemic discrimination and wage gaps disproportionately affect certain communities.

So if you've ever felt like you're doing everything right and still not getting ahead, you're not imagining it. It's not just you.

But there are tools and truths that can help.

Your power is not lost. It's just been hidden under survival mode.

And yet, even in the thick of it, you are not broken. You are adaptive.

What we often call "avoidance" is really protection.

What we call "bad with money" is often unprocessed experience and unmet support needs.

You've been trying to navigate a system that rarely meets people where they are, and often punishes them for not already being somewhere else. But here's the thing: change doesn't begin with shame.

It begins with safety.

Safety to look. Safety to learn. Safety to try.

And when that safety is in place - emotionally, relationally, structurally - we start to see real, sustainable change. The science backs this up.

Studies show that people are more likely to take proactive financial steps when they feel supported and resourced, not when they're criticised or scared into action. When we approach money with self-compassion, our stress levels decrease, executive functioning improves, and long-term planning becomes more possible.

It needs systems thinking and emotional insight.

So if you've been stuck in a money spiral, here's your permission to stop blaming yourself. To pause. To soften. You can't heal your money story by muscling through it, but you can rewrite it with the right support, pacing and perspective. And that starts not with a perfect plan, but with a single shift:

The belief that you are not the problem, but you can be part of the solution.

One small, self-honouring step at a time.