Tweak Your Perspective and Financial Behaviors to Stress Less |
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
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Impulse shopping that relieves momentary pressure slowly drains your future finances.
Apply CBT to your money management to create discipline, not to mention savings.
The more solid your plan and modest your lifestyle, the less you’ll struggle and panic.
Two universal truths: Humans have automatic thoughts that we can prove to be a little (or a lot) irrational. Second, people stress over money no matter their balances. Using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the former can mitigate the latter.
Events don’t influence our behavior as much as perception does. Take losing your job, landing you hurt, shocked, and scared. How is it that one person facing this may close the shades and swing open the liquor cabinet to douse feelings, while another sits at a computer, turning contacts into a network with a sharpened resumé?
Perception or self-talk makes a huge difference. How much evidence truly exists to support your beliefs?
Focus on what you can control. Ruminate less on what you cannot. This constitutes a cognitive reframe—unhelpful thoughts turned into positives.
“Money touches every part of our lives, yet most of us were never taught how to think about it with clarity or confidence,” says Ryan Coulter, CFP, in Stop Following the Rules: The Real-World Guide to Building Financial Security.1
CBT helps you connect your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to interrupt the process that leads to impulsive, emotional spending, reports Deborah Beck Busis, LCSW, Director of the Beck Institute Cognitive Behavioral Wellness Coaching Program.2
Twisted Financial Thinking
Pick up any CBT-based book to learn about distorted thinking. Here’s a primer presented through finance:
All or nothing thinking: You think you’re either rich or broke, you must save hundreds of dollars, or it makes no difference, or be debt-free first. Such distortions propel procrastination.
Personalizing: Your portfolio dips, and you feel ashamed. If you give no regard to the bad day on Wall Street, you’re taking things too personally.
Labeling: “I’m a financial loser.” You’re not your credit score nor your latest bounced check. Labels limit your work toward goals.
Should/must/ought thinking: “I should have started saving sooner” or “I ought to have listened to…” Money compounds over time, but awareness is key to meaningful change. Who hasn’t had a regret? Life centers us; stuff happens.
Overgeneralizing: People may think enlisting a financial planner is only for the wealthy. Words like always and never show us we may be generalizing.
Emotional reasoning: “I feel I deserve a big home. All my friends have them.” Mixing strongly believed feelings into pseudo-facts hastens troubling realities.
Fortune telling: You predict the future, or the stock market, or tell yourself a gently used car could break down. This rationalizes borrowing, the opposite of compounding invested money, says Warren Buffett.3
Mind reading: It’s time for a raise. You assume your boss will refuse, so you forestall negotiations. If you’re self-employed, not increasing your fees, even occasionally believing you’ll lose clients, epitomizes this.
Catastrophizing: A Middle East conflict arises. Oil prices increase, costing you at the pump. Your commute, your job, and the world equals one big catastrophe. It’s sometimes called magnifying a problem or the opposite, minimizing it, which stems from overconfidence or taking unnecessary risks.
Untwisting Faulty Thoughts
“Unless you’ve been told no by life a few times, you’ll struggle to find the drive it takes to build a lasting financial foundation,” says Coulter. He also advises not to chase dopamine (the latest product, trend, or stock analyst).
Indeed, shopping creates a predictable neurological rush of the feel-good hormone dopamine released in the brain before and during a purchase. Compulsive shopping can lead to oniomania, uncontrollable urges to purchase despite negative consequences.
“Too many people fall into the trap of thinking they deserve the dream home, the new car when they land a high paying job,” Coulter adds. Quick moves aren’t progress. They’re traps. Emotional reasoning leads to bad investments.
Other faulty thoughts are often fear-based. Investors bail when the market dips or people-pleasing personalities paralyze their voices or stall initiative.
“There’s no rate of return that outpaces a twenty-one percent credit card interest rate. That’s quicksand,” says Coulter. Debt doesn’t have to break you, but it demands planning because life doesn’t stop happening while you pay down balances.
“If your whole plan is to pay everything off first, then start investing ‘someday,’ that’s not a plan, it’s wishful thinking,” says Coulter, noting one’s earning capacity is the most valuable asset that causes disaster if it's unprotected. Think disability and insurance protection.
“Real financial planners don’t just run your numbers. They talk you off the ledge. They keep you from buying depreciating assets with delusional confidence. They remind you that intelligent people still make dumb choices when emotion gets in the driver’s seat.”
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Take our Your Mental Health Today Test
Find a therapist who practices CBT
Dealing With Behavioral Challenges
Organization: One wise albeit non-sexy expenditure is a locked file cabinet, hanging folders, and notebooks to track expenses and file important documents.
Side hustles: Some side gigs can bring personal growth, but if finances are tight, Coulter warns an energy lag might render your earning power more vulnerable. Instead, advance day job skills.
Well-meaning parents: College grads face a grim economy. Yet parents who continually make life easy for struggling adult kids, removing real-world consequences, enable and create dependence. Co-signing loans makes you vulnerable as a signatory.
Impulse traps: Cigarettes, alcohol, edibles, lotto tickets, plus payday loans, while letting routine dental care and exercise slide, complicate your finances for a shortened life.3
Coulter advises that it’s better to have a modest income and a solid plan than to earn six figures and have just as many panic attacks. More funds don’t make up for a lack of strategy.
Ride out unnecessary spending urges, label your feelings, and rate their intensity from 1 to 10. In 15 minutes, you’ll likely see a peak that recedes if you do not make purchases.
Mindful money management begins at home. Coulter writes, one generation hustled with sacrifice. The next got comfortable from the fruits of that labor. The third often became entitled, never having had to skimp, save, or stretch. Talk about money. Do a financial genogram to uncover inherited dynamics and patterns.4 And, keep learning.5
© 2026 by Loriann Oberlin, MS, LCPC
1. Coulter, R.M., CFP. Stop Following the Rules: The Real-World Guide to Building Financial Security (Warrenton, VA: InnoGage Publishing, 2025)
2. Beck Institute, April 20, 2026. How to Stop Impulse Buying: CBT Strategies to Help You Control Your Spending; https://cares.beckinstitute.org/blog/cbt-for-impulse-buying/
3. Seven Things Keep You Poor, Legend Investor Framework with Warren Buffett; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy90iLAM77M
4. https://creately.com/guides/financial-genogram/
5. Cagan, M., CPA and Lariviere, E. The Infographic Guide to Personal Finance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017)
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