Money - spending - anxiety - such like

some chick called Leigh in a comment on Gala Darling's post

This pay period I've been finding it a little harder to control my spending than I did last week. The novelty of accounting for all my money has warn off and now I don't feel so much thrifty as horribly broke. Even thinking about the unicorn hasn't been as awesome as it was initially.

However, putting aside my incredibly short attention span with such things, I've been doing pretty well in controlling spendspendspendspend urges. And when I suddenly* was arrested by the need to SPEND ALL THE MONEY NOW just before lunch today I was surprised. The more I thought about it though, I felt as thought the feeling had a more physical than mental origin. That's not terribly clear; what I'm trying to say is that I realised, a split second after I was feeling it, that the urge was the manifestation of my physical feelings of anxiety.

Over the years I've struggled a lot with anxiety, and I've worked really hard in more recent times to get that under control. Part of getting the feelings of anxiety under control for me has been recognising the physical sensation of my anxiety before I start reacting to those sensations in my head. That is, I often feel anxious without having those sensations associated with one particular thing in my life, and then behave kind of extremely without really thinking about why I'm doing what I'm doing. In the past I've lashed out and acted totes crazy at various family members and boyfriends and innocent workmates. And quit jobs at a moments notice. Apparently, this list also includes buying things I have absolutely no need for, something I've just this moment discovered! AMAZING, and possibly why I spent so much money op shopping in Melbourne.

How did I deal with all this? The moment that I felt that urge to go crazy shopping, and realised that it was anxiety-based, I settled down and used my Ginger-based anxiety tool kit** to come up with a solution to the anxiety (mostly: a nice walk in the sunshine and some nice calming audio book listening as I walked). I thought about what was actually making me anxious, and it's all stuff I can deal with easily when I take the time to think it through, and to break it down and discuss it with myself.

This whole episode made me think about my budgeting and spending patterns in an entirely new light, and I think that it's a light that's going to help me out with my money situation. I've read a couple of really awesome things that people have written about the urge to SPEND and BUY and I'm going to make myself a little flash card to tuck in my wallet and to remind me to keep on target. Better still, since I know that there is a root to the SPEND ALL THE MONEY NOW urge I can deal with it as it's happening.

*like, TOTALLY OUT OF THE BLUE.

** built up over years of therapy.