This post is by associate Triage Practitioner, and guest blogger, Anna Fialkowska
How to cope in the cost-of-living crisis
In recent years, many individuals and families have been grappling with the challenges of a cost-of-living crisis. Rising expenses for housing, healthcare, education, and basic necessities have put significant strain on people's finances, causing stress and anxiety. However, it is essential to recognise that coping with this crisis involves not only financial strategies but also addressing the psychological impact it can have on our well-being. This article explores practical ways to cope with the psychological toll of the cost-of-living crisis.
Practice self-care
One of the first things we can do is start to recognise our own mental state and how financial stress may be impacting this. We must take care of our own wellbeing so we can support others in similar situations so recognising mood states is important. Looking at triggers for low mood, frustration or anger are important to consider and then looking at coping strategies you may be using to help. Are these coping strategies positive or negative? For example, positive coping strategies could be regular exercise, getting outside in nature, seeing friends, meditation or ensuring you are getting enough sleep. Negative coping strategies may be drinking alcohol in excess, binge eating or avoiding certain things that might lead to a stress reaction. This can help us reduce the impact and help us cope when stress levels are high.
Building resilience in the face of challenges
Positive coping strategies are one part of building resilience to outside influences. Resilience is defined as the ability to withstand or to recover from the adversities of life, accepting and solving problems and moving on from them successfully, as strong or if not stronger than before the event. Developing a positive attitude and an optimistic outlook is important is the first place to start and this can be achieved through setting goals, chunking them into smaller parts and celebrating them when you complete each part. Developing positive mantras (positive phrases you can repeat during times of stress) or ‘self-talk’ can help you to develop more optimism and remind yourself that the position you are in may only be temporary. Considering thought patterns, such as catastrophic thinking, can be achieved through therapy such as CBT or writing gratitude diaries is important to consider the “upside” of life each day.
Dealing with uncertainty
Seeing the upside of the situation you are in may sound difficult when we feel so many outside influences are out of our control. But skills such as organisation or planning can be extremely helpful to overcome some of the challenges the cost-of-living crisis causes. Budgeting and reducing expenses may be helpful to give a sense of certainty, which can reduce anxiety. Can you switch the supermarket you are buying from to save? Do you have a skill or useful contacts who could help you to produce additional income? Gaining financial education is also important, considering the trajectory of the economy, investment strategies and things such as interest rates can allow for greater understanding of the situation, again allowing us to feel more certainty.
If you have done everything you could have done to solve your current problems, you may still struggle with your hypothetical worries, the ones that relate to your future and are unsolvable. For instance, worries about the future economic situation or your future salary. If there is nothing you can do about those worries, try Worry Time. It’s a very simple technique, which allows you to postpone your worries and therefore minimise their impact on your everyday life. Simply, plan when you can spend 10-15 minutes thinking about your worries. Ideally every day at the same time. Then write down all of your worries as they happen and shift your attention to something that you were doing or focus on new activity. When your worry time comes read the list of your worries. You may want to consider how you felt when you wrote the worry and how you feel about it now. Has it happened? How did you deal with it if it has? Were some of them no longer a problem? Finally, destroy the list of your worries, stop worrying and plan a task to help re-focus on the present afterward. Remember, it is the worry that distracts you from everyday tasks, so do not ignore it but acknowledge it and learn to control your behaviour of worrying more effectively. This will allow you to be more in control and accept some level of uncertainty that is always going to be there. We cannot control everything, so let’s face challenges that we are able to solve and learn to live in peace with unknown.
Normalise your emotions and seek shared understanding
When times are hard, it can be easy to feel like you are alone in the struggle. This can lead to feelings of sadness, anxiety, feeling overwhelmed or helpless. However, first validating your emotions and understanding that many people are highly likely to experience them too is very important in accepting them and overcoming the negative emotions. Speaking to family, friends or support groups where you can share your thoughts with others is shown to be very helpful in reducing feelings of distress. A sense of shared understanding can be vital in helping overcome these feelings and, as the saying goes, “a problem shared is a problem halved”.
Conclusion
Although we may not be able to change the financial climate we are living in, these simple steps can be really important in helping us navigate the cost-of-living crisis. Ensuring we have a strong self-care regime, incorporating positive strategies in our lives, accepting our emotions without judgement and sharing our experience with others are all positive ways to build resilience and maintain a positive mindset in the face of adversity.
About Anna Fialkowska
Anna Fialkowska is a Trainee Doctor - Health Psychologist and is completing her doctoral training at the University of the West of England, currently working as a Heath Improvement Practitioner. She has worked within the field of mental health dysfunction and cognitive rehabilitation over the last six years. Her main areas of research include the development of behaviour change interventions, the impact of stress on individuals’ physical health and the effect of chronic conditions on psychological well-being.