Why You’re Bad with Money

iStock

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca

By Kelley Keehn

Michael used to sleep with his phone under his pillow—not because he was waiting for an important call, but because the vibration from his banking app alerts would jolt him awake. Another overdraft. Another minimum payment. Another “you’re out of money” moment that felt like failure.

By day, he was a charismatic twenty-nine‑year-old marketing manager with a magnetic LinkedIn profile and a talent for storytelling. By night, he was dodging collection calls, ghosting his student loan portal, and panic-refreshing his credit card balance before trying to buy groceries. He didn’t always live like this; it happened slowly. First came the student loans—he told himself everyone had them. Then the credit cards—just for textbooks, at first. Then Uber Eats, because he was too tired to cook after ten‑hour workdays. The car lease “to look professional.” The drinks to network. The vacations to “reward himself” for surviving burnout. The shame crept in quietly, disguised as lifestyle. As performance. As “normal.” But here’s the thing about shame: it loves secrecy. And the more Michael tried to fix it alone, the worse it got.

Research from the American Psychological Association shows that financial stress is one of the top contributors to anxiety and depression, especially among millennials and Gen Z. And when stress becomes chronic, it hijacks the brain’s executive functioning, which makes it harder to plan, act, or solve problems. In other words: stress about money exacerbates financial problems. And avoiding dealing with debt doesn’t mean you’re lazy—it means your nervous system is overwhelmed.

Michael kept telling himself, “I’ll open the bills tomorrow.” “I’ll fix this when I get a raise.” “Once I pay off one card, the rest will be easy.” But avoidance breeds more avoidance. And eventually, even opening his mailbox felt like a threat.

It wasn’t until he missed his sister’s birthday dinner—too embarrassed to say he couldn’t afford the meal—that the dam broke. He collapsed. Told a friend everything. And something surprising happened: instead of judgment, he got a story. The friend had been there too—once sobbing on the bathroom floor over an $18 overdraft fee. The pain Michael felt wasn’t his alone. Countless others had lived it; he just hadn’t known where to find help.

According to the National Endowment for Financial Education, seven in ten Americans say they’ve struggled with debt at some point—and a third