Financially Stressed? If Yes, Do This Now

Stressful thoughts and feelings about money are often not accurate or true. But when you're caught in contagious financial stress, they will present themselves to you as if they were absolute fact. Don't start running with the panicking heard of people who fear the worst and who are burning out on a vicious cycle of financial stress.

Avoid Stress Hormones

The herd is in a group survival reaction known as the Fight or Flight Response, a response that releases stress hormones into your blood to prepare you for a life or death struggle.

Yes you may have money problems, even severe ones-but that doesn't mean that all hope is lost. It doesn't necessarily mean that you won't survive.

Please don't think I underestimate the hardship of serious financial trouble, I don't. But even if you're bearing a heavy burden, you'll be a lot better off if stress hormones aren't running around in your system.

If you've been foreclosed or close to it or if you've watched your life savings shrink along with the value of your home. All the more reason you need to safeguard your well-being so you can get on the other side of this hardship.

If you learn how to stand free from stressful financial worry, you won't get poisoned by toxic stress hormones. Learning how to do this is a form of mindfulness and what we call "Inner Fitness".

Inner fitness will strengthen your ability to avoid identifying with your worries. If you do identify with your worries, you'll mistake them for facts and you will go into chronic Fight or Flight. Not good. If your worry, anxiety and depression "possess" you and define your reality, then you'll pay a steep price.

Do This: MESICS Free Release Breathing

Here's a technique you can use to help lower your stress hormone level and calm your mind and body. Take 3 deep "Free Release Breaths". This strategy is drawn from a MESICS Training routine. Use it to create a gap in your financial worry when it's driving you into the herd, a gap that allows you to exit from exaggerated fear and worry.

First, breathe deeply into your diaphragm. Your Diaphragm is just under your breastbone and above your upper abdomen. Pause for a slight moment. Then breathe out from your diaphragm. But don't walk your breath out, just freely release it. Sounds like HHHAAAAA. Then pause for a count of seven and then repeat two more times.

Notice that at the end of the out breath there's a calm, relaxed state. Tune yourself to that during between breaths during your 7 second pause and let your stressful thoughts go. Don't go after them or spin them or feed them. Just let them be. They will go away. Yes, they will return. When they do, just do the same thing. As you practice you'll develop your capacity to pull the plug on financial worry.

The 3 Free Release Breaths are a preliminary technique to help shut down your Fight or Flight response. If you can learn to let your thoughts go, it will stay shut down more often.

And learn how how to develop the presence of mind to not jump on every train of thought that pulls into your station with financial worry.

Develop a Prejudice Toward Action: Act NOW

STOP listening to, watching or reading sensational news stories about financial doom. If you're facing chronic financial stress, learn how to develop an action plan that will empower you to feel in control. Seek help doing that-from reliable sources.

Expect financial worries in the form of negative thoughts and feelings. Expect to feel fear, anxiety, depression, self-doubt and self-blame. These are natural. But learn how to stand free from them and not buy into them at levels that cause you hopeless despair and panic.

The more action you take, the more control you'll feel and the more control you feel, the more action you'll take. If you pray, don't pray for money to drop out of the sky-pray for the patience, confidence and strength to get through this and to make the money you need.

Think positively, but positive thinking alone is not enough. You must marry it to decisive action. Or else you'll be waiting for a bus that doesn't come.

Get angry if you have too. But make it a healthy anger. Let your anger become fuel for you to take charge and act. Healthy anger can free you up and push you into a new way and a new day.

Consider working with a capable stress expert and a financial advisor you can trust.

Take the Long View

See your financial woes as a temporary challenge not as a final defeat. Don't just think short term, think up ahead. And take things one day at a time. Again, get expert help, don't move off in an unknown direction on your own.

And beware of people who don't know enough to really help you. Or people who'll want take advantage of your situation. Make sure you can trust someone before you give them any money and don't pay anyone a large sum in advance.

If you have a lot of debt, or are at risk for foreclosure, then consider contacting The National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

This Too Shall Pass

Keep in mind that this situation will pass. Be thankful for the little things and for any support you can count on from people who care about you. The philosopher Nietzsche said it well when he noted: "Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger".

While that's not always the case, it most often is. Necessity can be the mother of invention. By meeting the challenge of financial stress, you'll have the chance to master new learning and open up new possibilities in your life.

Your thoughts and feelings define your reality, so avoid news media that sensationalize the financial crisis by blasting you with it from every doom and gloom angle possible.

Again, studies show that we're very susceptible to the opinions those around us. So take a holiday from opinions that breed more and more fear and worry in your life. Just focus on today and tomorrow. And believe in yourself, you deserve it.