229 | Why Financial Anxiety Impacts Recovery and How to Find Relief and Resilience One Step at a Time

Show Notes:

Is financial stress weighing on your recovery—and leaving you feeling like you’re falling behind in both health and life?

In this episode of Whole Again, Michael opens up about his own experience with medical debt, healthcare anxiety, and how money stress quietly drains our energy while healing from injury or trauma. If you’re overwhelmed by bills, uncertain income, or the fear of not “providing enough,” you’re not alone—and this conversation offers both comfort and action.

Takeaways:

• Learn why financial stress isn’t just about numbers—it’s deeply emotional and impacts your healing
• Discover small, powerful steps to bring clarity to your finances without shame or self-judgment
• Get practical mindset shifts that support both emotional and financial recovery—starting today

Take a deep breathe and discover now to release financial guilt, gain clarity, and take your first step toward greater peace and healing.

Transcript:

 In this episode, you’ll discover ways you can ease your financial stress as you try to heal and recover.

Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors of physical injury and trauma reclaim their strength and resilience through the wisdom. Of Kintsugi. Today we’re gonna talk about something that keeps many of us up at night, especially as we try to recover. I’m talking about finances, and we’ll also talk about ways to ease our financial worry.

But before we do, I wanna take a moment to thank you for being here, and thank you for being a fellow survivor.

So if you’re ready, let’s get into it. Let’s talk about money and finances and healthcare. If I’ve said it once, I probably have said it a million times. My family and I are beyond grateful that we had really good healthcare insurance when I went through my accident that I called my last bad day, my employer at the time.

Gave us really good coverage, gave all the employees really good coverage. Without it, we would be bankrupt. No doubt about it. But we still had a bunch of copays to worry about and out of network cost. I’m sure you understand. So I come at this topic, this worry about finances from a very personal perspective.

Current day, I worry about affording healthcare as an entrepreneur because now I’m not part of a company and as a coach and a speaker and a meditation teacher. We need to buy our healthcare on the open market. And let me tell you, if you don’t know, it’s super pricey. And with all the things that are happening, at least in my country, here in the US with threats to Medicaid and healthcare in general and Medicare, there’s a lot of worry out there.

So when we talk about finances and money, it’s not about simply. The numbers in your bank account. Money is a story, and it’s a story about safety. It’s about dignity. It’s about that feeling in your chest when the bills keep coming and coming and your body is already stretched and you’re trying to figure out how you’re gonna pay for everything.

And all you wanna do is look up at the ceiling and pray, hoping. Hoping beyond hope that something will save you from the overwhelm that you feel. The debt that’s so heavy to balance or to carry, and the expenses that keep coming and coming. You are not alone. There are many of us who go through physical injury, illness, trauma, and this is just another thing that complicates our recovery, so you’re not alone.

I want to share some thoughts with you that might be able to help ease some of this worry. So let’s start here. Financial stress isn’t about being bad with numbers or bad with money. It’s about the anxiety that creeps in to your thoughts. It’s the tension you feel in your shoulders. It’s the. Strain that is placed on your relationships.

The lack of sleep you get when you’re worried about money. It’s the inability to focus in on your healing. Maybe it’s the medical debt, maybe it’s the worry about your employment. As we go through economic uncertainty, it might be wondering how to make your paycheck last as you go week to. Another big expense could be detrimental to you or your family.

So I wanna make sure that you know that your stress around money is valid. It’s something that many of us deal with. You’re not weak for feeling overwhelmed. You are not less than for not having the money that you need to have to heal in the way that you want to heal. And there’s some good news, you can start to shift your mindset around money, stress, not all at once.

Rarely do we change that way, but through small, steady steps, every step you take can start to ease some of that financial worry that you’re holding onto. If this is step one, then step two is doing a deep dive on your numbers and getting really honest, but without any judgment, and this can be the hardest step.

I will simply speak for myself. This was a very hard step, especially when I felt the financial stress. I did not want to look at what we were spending our money on. I also didn’t wanna look at my bank account. I rather not know. What do they say? Ignorance is bliss. That might be the case, but not when you’re trying to balance the household finances, especially when you’re trying to heal and recover.

However you might do it, you might go onto your computer. It could be a notebook, it could be on your phone, write down every expense, everything that leaves your bank account. Big or small, daily or weekly streaming subscriptions to big purchases. Write it all down. Again, this is the most difficult step because we have emotion around money, and this is bringing full awareness to the situation at hand when we wanna change anything.

From personal growth to personal finances, awareness is always the first step and it’s always the hardest one. Now that you have all the numbers out front and center, here’s the next step. We’re gonna take one or two small steps towards greater financial health. We can do so by taking one or two steps.

They don’t have to be huge steps. It can be small steps. Small steps lead to momentum, and as momentum builds, you can take bigger steps. So you might start off with canceling a subscription or two, maybe changing your phone plan, perhaps pausing your coffee habit or changing it in a certain way. This isn’t about restricting yourself, this is more about relief.

We had a situation as a family where we cut back on going out to save money for my bills. Now I did miss going out ’cause who doesn’t like to go out for a meal every now and again? What was more important for us as a family, for me as a provider to the family was that relief. Less stress was more important to me than say a dinner out over burritos and margaritas.

So it’s a choice, and the more you align your spending with what truly matters, aligning your spending with your first principles or your values, you start to feel lighter because life becomes more in alignment if your expenses are more than your income. That is not a personal failure. It is a sign. It’s a sign to shift and look for small ways to adjust because you’re not your budget, you’re not your debt.

You are simply a human being trying to recover in doing the best you can with whatever you have. So it’s also important to remember to ask for help. You don’t have to do this alone. I asked for help myself, although it was tough before my accident. I did not like to ask for help, but then I started to see asking for help without any shame as a way to say, I’m still in it.

I’m still in this game. I’m not quitting. So asking for help allows you to connect with others. So again, you don’t have to carry your financial burden alone. There are options out there depending on where you live, what country you happen to be in, or if you’re in the states, what state you happen to be living in.

That. Offer up, offer free or low cost financial counselors. There are support groups. There are resources within your community. Of course, you’ve seen many people do crowdfunding or crowdsourcing campaigns to cover medical expenses. You are not a burden if you ask for support, if you ask for help. In fact, asking for help may be the most courageous thing.

Courageous step you’ll take. For me, it was definitely one of them. Learning how to ask for help and dealing with the financial stress was a big monumental step, and once I took it, there was a big sense of relief. That help was on its way. It allowed me to really pay attention to how I was going about my recovery and my healing and my rehab and all of it.

So from someone who has gone through something, like you’re going through someone who’s been there. Sometimes just saying I’m not okay, is what opens the door to real change. And if you happen to be carrying financial guilt, you are not alone. This was one of the things I was dealing with. I felt guilty for not being smarter with our money or not being a better provider to the family, or guilt for getting into the accident to begin with, or getting sick.

There was a whole bunch of overwhelm I just shoved into my backpack and I didn’t really wanna talk about it openly. And here’s the thing. We all make choices outta survival and sometimes we don’t. We don’t know what we don’t know. I know growing up, my parents never talked about money. I didn’t think I was, well, in hindsight, I wasn’t all that financially savvy, even though I went through college.

When I started my professional life, I got into debt pretty quickly. I just didn’t have the tools or support or expertise I needed to be really financially sound at that age. And with my accident, there was a whole bunch of different expenses and they were coming at us, left, right, and center. I’m sure you know that feeling.

So I had periods where I felt not only guilty, but I felt shame. Guilt is when we. Have done something bad or we think we’ve done something bad. Shame is all about thinking that we’re a bad person. So I had guilt, also thought I was a bad person. I was a bad dad, a bad husband. I didn’t think I was all that smart.

Again, I felt horrible that we were in this situation to begin with. So you can reframe things. Part of my grace model that. I keep on saying I’m gonna do episodes on and I will probably this summer, but Grace stands for gratitude. R is reframe or reflect. A is awareness, the C is community or who’s in your Peloton.

And the E is all about energy. So this particular topic. Does lend itself to reframe or reflect. So instead of shame or guilt, we can reframe the situation or reframe our perspective. You can ask yourself, what have you learned about yourself in this season? You can ask yourself, what steps can you take, or what could you do differently?

And you can also, and this is a question I just love asking. I ask this of myself all the time. I was actually just talking to my wife about this question, but if you had a friend in a similar situation that you’re in, what would you say to your dear friend? How would you talk to them? How could you offer them support?

And this is one you can say. All of these questions are ones that you can say to yourself in helping you reframe the situation in hopes that it can help you take a step forward. They say that the most stressful situation anyone can be in is giving a talk, presenting in front of people, and there’s no doubt being up in front of people can be highly stressful to a great number of folks.

But I think one of the biggest stressors in life is stress about money, about finances, especially when we’re trying to recover. Because it taps into so much of our identity as being smart, as being a good provider. It also taps into the basic core need that we have for safety, for shelter, for food, all of it.

So having financial stress as you go through your recovery and trying to navigate healthcare and how they play with us, it’s so frustrating. It’s so tiring, and it does take away from our energy that we could devote to our healing.

And in this episode, you discovered that this feeling, the stress that you have is real. And we also talked about the importance of finding awareness first, looking at all the expenses and then taking one step forward. So what’s one step you can take today? Could be canceling a subscription. It could be starting a budget.

It could be trying to figure out if there’s a financial counselor who is free in your area. It might be simply asking for help without any judgment, without any shame. Take that one first step. We start small. We build momentum. And then we take bigger steps as we develop more confidence, and these first steps can be your first step towards greater financial ease, more peace if you will.

Not just financial peace, but really emotional peace. Here’s what I know. Going through what I’ve gone through, you are not broken, you are not behind. You are not dumb. To balance the budget because you’ve gone through something significant, and healthcare is pricey, but you can step by step, you can find greater financial ease and take another step towards becoming who you’re becoming and feel whole again.

As always, thanks for being here, and thank you for being a fellow survivor.

And if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, Michael O’Brien schiff.com. And sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect, and join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this. And we’ve got you.