Title: How Does Valuing Money Affect Your Happiness?
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How Does Valuing Money Affect Your Happiness?
Two new studies find that tying your self-worth to financial success hampers happiness and well-being—even for the well-off.
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About the Author
Jill Suttie
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Content: Afterwards, they reported on what coping strategies they would use in response to the situation. Research assistants analyzed the essays and found that participants who scored high in FCSW used more emotionally negative words and reported more disengagement strategies—like giving up or avoiding solutions—when writing about a financial stressor versus an academic stressor than people scoring low in FCSW. None of the results were affected by the actual income of the students. People who are facing a problem should, logically, be focused on figuring out ways to solve it, says Park. “ But what we found is that high financial contingency of self-worth somehow blocks that response.” Why would this be? Park believes that when people feel their self-concept is threatened in some way, they will become more self-protective so as not to experience low self-esteem. So, if your self-esteem is tied to money, a financial stressor will cause a lot more stress than it would for someone who doesn’t feel that way. Some support for her argument comes from another part of her experiment, where having participants high in FCSW remind themselves of their character strengths—like their intelligence or sense of humor—seemed to negate these avoidance effects. Affirming Important Values
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“When people take a step back and have a broader perspective on their sense of self, that’s often enough to take them out of the self-esteem rumination/narrow focus they otherwise have,” says Park.