The financial anxiety that never goes away no matter how much money you earn is not a mindset problem it's your nervous system still living in the economy you grew up in - Silicon Canals

"Your relationship with money was encoded in your body before you ever earned a paycheck. It was written in the tension at the dinner table when bills arrived. In the silence after your parent checked the mail. In the particular way your family's mood shifted at the end of the month."

"Your autonomic nervous system learned to detect financial threat the same way it learned to detect physical danger: through environmental cues absorbed long before you had language for them. The smell of a particular kind of stress. The sound of a hushed argument about money behind a closed door. These became wired into your threat-detection system."

"When you sit down to pay your mortgage today, with plenty in your account, your vagus nerve might still fire as if the electricity is about to be shut off. Because at some point, in some version of your life, it was."

Financial anxiety persists despite adequate income and savings because money-related stress is encoded somatically in the nervous system during childhood. Through environmental cues—tension during bill payments, parental stress, family mood shifts—the autonomic nervous system learns to detect financial threat similarly to physical danger. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory explains how these early experiences become wired into threat-detection systems. Consequently, individuals may experience physiological stress responses when managing finances today, even with sufficient funds, because their nervous systems retain threat patterns from earlier economic conditions. The childhood economic environment continues operating as the foundation of adult financial psychology, independent of current rational circumstances.

Read at Silicon Canals