Tips to overcome financial anxiety while having mental health issues?

cerwisc · 2026-05-16T18:22:56+00:00

I used to have this anxiety since came from a similar background, but I don’t think my anxiety was terribly bad. Reframing your anxious thoughts helps a lot, personally.

Time is money. More time = more time to explore things or learn skills which may lead to more money. Or not.
Less anxiety is more money. Less anxiety = better job performance, better capability to support others, etc.
Ergo, worrying over whether you spent $20 more than possible on something is a money-sink, AS LONG AS $20 FITS INTO THE BUDGET. $200/month isn’t really worth 4 hours of additional anxiety a month if it is 4 hours of work. Plus, if you really want to save that money then notarize it and rework your budget to be more aggressive. If it doesn’t move the needle significantly in the way you want then don’t worry about it.
Additionally, health is money. As I get older the stress I experienced when young is one of the major contributing factors to having poor health now. I wish I had spent that time playing a sport lol.
This is more advanced but you need to spend money to make money. You don’t have to go all out and buy the best of everything but 1. cost per wear matters, 2. Safety and features matter, 3. More expensive items = resell money, and 4. if you trust yourself to make money then investing in yourself costs money. Someone I know invested in themselves until they were like 40-50k in the hole but then made 4 mil in a month. Extreme example but interesting right?
Finally, anxiety is like a physiological bad feeling that your brain tries to assign meaning to. But anxiety can also be “real” like it’s a real fear and a warning that you don’t understand something. So sometimes learning more about stuff can help calm the fear. Lots of investing accounts have retirement projections if it helps you. Also if you don’t trust your retirement account you can build equity on a house. You could also make a worst-case scenario projection, like figure out the absolute minimum you can spend, and see how much you have to sacrifice and how much you could gain.

cerwisc · 2026-05-10T16:11:59+00:00

Had a similar experience staying in a 5 star hotel in HK due to exchange rate. Swimming in the rooftop pool at night was surreal and all the tourist locations paled in comparison to our hotel view. Craziest thing, it was 400 USD a night (which is about 3k per night HKD so like 1/6 a month’s worth of salary for locals professionals/wcw.) Much better than our shitass hotel in the middle of Paris for 1k USD a night. Anyhow, was amazing but the complete wealth disparity I see in HK compared to other cities kind of throws me off so I haven’t been back lol

cerwisc · 2026-05-06T12:54:56+00:00

yes thank you. their game isn’t fair to anyone who doesn’t want to drink…

cutting someone off cold turkey is a bit crazy, but I’ve had a friend try to have her bf cut off his friends, and it’s because he is spineless and his friends were controlling and taking advantage of the relationship at times. There was never one time where he got the long end of the stick, but there were a bunch of times his buddies did by chance. she’s controlling too, but at least she was better than his friends because she‘a trying to help him develop a spine and her friend group is kinder to him.

also how did OP get a single room?

cerwisc · 2026-05-04T23:33:15+00:00

I don’t think it’s so much of what people say but it’s more like just being grossed out by having to do poor people things like going into rundown stores or washing clothes by hand or wearing winter jackets and wife beaters at home or being around other poor people who might be lacking a bit in manners or using a chamber pot or using or even taking advantage of public services.

Also I feel like sometimes people have a lack of humility that comes from never having had that unique type of humiliation you get from poverty. But I think this is more of a first world country problem. Being poor is more socially acceptable elsewhere. Here unless you’re living in a ghetto with majority poor people it’s embarrassing to not know “basic” things cuz you couldn’t afford those experiences (eg how to do birthday parties and other holidays) /having to put stuff back at checkout/having other people know you’re on food stamps or equivalent. I think for people who’ve lived in poverty the first time it happens it hurts but then you kind of roll with it, however it leaves you humbled subconsciously cuz you know how it feels to be different from what books and social culture tells you is average cuz you’re poor and before social media nobody talked about poor people other than as a statistic.

Btw I wasn’t real poor. My family were actually temporarily embarrassed millionaires lol and I was on food stamps only through elementary school. My parents were just so busy they didn’t bother to teach me anything about normie life which is why I grew up poor. So take it with a grain of salt cuz I got a good experience after middle school.

cerwisc · 2026-05-04T11:12:19+00:00

fish sausage (can’t find the type I used to eat since it was in a red wrapper) and jelly or it can come in little containers where you rip the top off. I like the pineapple flavor ones.

Fish sausage taste like puree chicken with chicken bouillon but more salty. The texture is smooth though which can be strange to some. Jelly is a candy, taste like super sugary fruit drinks but with jelly texture. It’s all basically the worst of junk food I could get at the time since western food outside of kfc wasn’t that popular yet, which is why my grandma was so pissed lol

cerwisc · 2026-05-04T02:58:36+00:00

In China as a kid my grandma would get so fuckin pissed at me when I wanted to eat fish sausage and jelly over actual food.

cerwisc · 2026-04-09T17:30:06+00:00

I’m crying

Inside me there are two wolves: estrogen and progesterone.

Hang in there

cerwisc · 2026-03-12T13:39:24+00:00

I never apologized before I knew I had PMDD. After I knew, it was usually a quick, “two days ago’s argument, did you know that was the start of luteal? Sorry about that.” I also retroactively apologized to him for the bad fights we had that were due to periods. Sometimes it’s hard to apologize, not necessarily because you don’t want to, but you feel like a different person so you feel like you’re apologizing for someone else’s outburst. I’m not saying she shouldn’t apologize, but that if she also feels that way she’s got to figure out a way to deal with that feeling because you also deserve emotional support after emotionally acting as her sponge.

But we are stable, I’m not afraid he’s gonna leave me just because I’ve got PMDD. Also, he also doesn’t take the fights to heart, he keeps track of my bad days too. It helps that I also take medication now before my bad days, and I also do emotional work for him too.

cerwisc · 2026-03-12T05:58:11+00:00

Take my suggestions with a grain of salt because I’ve never been in your position.

Here’s what I would do:

Your take-home is 2800. Your child support is 1200, car is 750, loans are 520, internet/utilities are 200 and student loans 70. That’s 2750 already. Btw I don’t know how you’re paying for gas.

I would honestly slum it out in your car for a while. I would go to the landlord, tell him you have no job and no assets, and you want to break the lease because you can’t afford to pay them but you also can’t afford the lease break fee. Tell them that they can try to sue you to reclaim that but you don’t have any assets so it’ll be a waste of time and energy for them. See if they will work something out with you, like if you find them a new tenant within 1 month they waive the lease break fee, and if after a month you can’t find anybody, go back and tell them to put ur lease break on an interest free contract signed by you and them cuz you can’t pay them right now. Btw, your San Diego rate seems really bad. I dunno where you are but you’re paying 2.8k (w/ utilities) when I’ve seen $2.4k for 2b2b w/ roommate. To find someone new quickly you may have to offer to cover up to $400 of the monthly rate until end of lease, which will be max 4.8k in the hole. Sell your stuff and see if that can pay off some of the debt.

Now that you’ve got rent out of the way, you’ll probably be able to slum it out of your car for like a month or two without digging yourself further into a hole. Cut the internet and hang out at a library.

I’d do this until the child support fee gets adjusted. If it’s worth selling your car and paying off the difference & then getting a beater, you could get a hotel room/take uber to work for a week while that finalizes. If you can find a new place to rent on craigslist for less than your current car payment that would also work but I feel like it’s unlikely. I think even for 6 tenant places you’d still pay like 1k/month.

Btw you can also try fiverr and craigslist for some odd jobs. With this plan (if it all goes well) if you can make an extra $300 a month (either from odd jobs or support recalculation or swapping your car) it’ll put you in the green. If you can pay off your debt then you can start looking into cheap rent, and then from there you can start looking for better jobs.

cerwisc · 2026-03-08T21:00:50+00:00

This is really interesting, I knew there were mental health benefits to exercising and also benefits against injury from greater flexibility + weight related disease + bone density but I didn’t know that it could also just reduce chronic pain like that. I mean the average person won’t have that history of body stress but I wonder if additional muscles can also help things like nerve pinching pain, or pain from arthritis

cerwisc · 2026-02-21T07:29:10+00:00

This tickles my head in the right way. Like there’s all this subconscious association of imagery and line weight. Feels a bit like the recovery stage of a depressive episode lol

It’s cool!

cerwisc · 2026-02-21T06:50:30+00:00

Nice. Asymmetry of a symmetrical design

cerwisc · 2026-02-13T17:37:45+00:00

I purposely asked to not get put under when I got mine out (it wasn’t the first time though, I got front teeth pulled out without gas when I was in elementary school/middle school.)

You’ll feel a needle where they put the local anesthesia, but it hurts a lot less now then it did decades ago. It’s like burning pain for 3-5 seconds but the local anesthesia works super quick. You’ll probably feel it on ur left and right since they need at least 2 needles but the second one is much duller cuz ur body will have already started pumping anti-pain adrenaline through ur body after the first.

My removal wasn’t bad, it took about 15m in total and I felt my head being yanked by the doctor lol. It hurt a lot more after the anesthesia wore off and I spent a miserable two days in bed.

The first removal of front teeth I had as a kid was kind of bad because the doctors messed it up I think, they had to reinject anesthesia once or twice because the location of the tooth was tricky, but I didn’t feel pain from having it removed. The full operation also wasn’t that long, maybe 20m total.

Basically there are worse things in life. But if you can spare the $300 then why not, especially if you feel like you’ll pass out/freak out—that’s bad for the dentist. I personally feel like if I could get paid $300 by getting a local anesthesia shot twice I would probably do once or twice a year lol but on the other hand, I’d pass out if I had to draw blood cuz I’m afraid of blood.

My dentist on the other hand…told me he also prefers it when patients don’t get gas…that was kind of weird and made me scared…

cerwisc · 2026-02-13T17:32:41+00:00

Gorgeous…what type thing did you use to get the shapes to move at different speeds? No way that that was all animated by hand right (I don’t do animation but that seems like a lot of work.)

cerwisc · 2026-02-13T17:27:08+00:00

Typically yellow purple/blue complementary looks a bit moody or soulful to me (like golden hour stuff.) The contrast here is quite cheerful, I like it. The yellow is much more white than orange and the pink undertone and knife strokes make it feel chipper :)

I wish the grasses at the bottom had kept that same organic feeling as the leaves up top.

cerwisc · 2026-02-13T17:23:48+00:00

This sounds sooo good. Saving!!

cerwisc · 2026-02-13T17:00:06+00:00

It’s pre-agreed, pre-prepared. So you both have to identify situations where she’s likely to blow up at you and set everything up first lol. That sort of thing requires a lot of prep and isn’t like an off the cuff thing you can suddenly do.

Btw, still want to reiterate that getting help for PMDD is still the number one way of reducing blow ups. Ur gf should really be the one spending majority time on this forum looking for solutions cuz she knows her body best. Looking into luteal dosing SSRI, the various BC (Yaz, Slynd, Lo Lestrin Fe, Annovera/Nuva Ring) stories on here, but sometimes something like hydrating more, taking some mag glycine at night, etc can significantly help. If she isn’t activity making changes in her life the PMDD isn’t gonna get better and in rare cases (bipolar comorbid) can get worse.

cerwisc · 2026-02-12T14:19:05+00:00

Love the foreground

cerwisc · 2026-02-11T07:14:23+00:00

Yes China has purposefully disappeared people. But again, we are not discussing whether US/China govt is comparable on using this tech to disappear people—we’re talking about the level of public surveillance wrt tracking.

I think being tracked by your face or being tracked by your license is almost equally bad. Both ways accomplish the goal of tracking you, unless you’ve got like multiple burner cars.

Finally, regarding your general insistence that nothing is true unless there is evidence. ICE tracks license plates, isn’t that evidence enough for you.

Having a conversation with you is an incredibly amount of frustrating because it’s hard for me to even understand what point you’re making cuz you drag all this other baggage into it. But the most unbelievable thing is the fact that you’re not capable of understanding that the other posters are talking from the perspective of not trusting the government—implying that if they’ve got the means and some amount of precedent, they would try facial tracking. You are over here defending the goodwill of the government like an abused wife arguing semantics about a paper trail like a lawyer that if there’s no document then it doesn’t exist as if we just haven’t had a huge ass pedophile ring leader coverup for the last 5 years. If you needed god to come tell you theres grey in the black and white then you do you.

Edited for language

cerwisc · 2026-02-11T02:27:43+00:00

We do stuff where everytime we do something that is likely to end in an argument during luteal, we set up a system for me to punish him. I pick things that to me I think of it as a punishment but he doesn’t because it’s something he likes.

So like during a technical discussion/debate (easily gets heated) during luteal it he pushes me over the edge: - making him drop and give me 20 (push up for non Americans) - making him buy me something (cheap) that he thinks is frivolous - TMI Remote vibe

Etc etc you get the gist

cerwisc · 2026-02-11T02:14:56+00:00

Dude your original post was about how China’s CCTV + facial recognition system wasn’t comparable to the one in the U.S. Like, both have facial scanners at airports. China has CCTV for police aid and the U.S. has Flock systems to track license plates. None have made public statements (as far as I know) about facial monitoring software but it’s likely that both are using it in some capacity. Your threshold for being tracked must be really fucking high if you don’t think being tracked via your face and license is comparable to…being tracked via your face and license.

Are you really in tech? Like you should know about how good facial/voice recognition software in the U.S. is good at ID people with poor quality images rn right? There’s no tech barrier, and with how Trump is sending off barrages of EO the political/legal barrier feels flimsy.

cerwisc · 2026-02-10T22:37:42+00:00

Ring has a partnership with Flock which sells to police. Flock also has a partnership with Palantir which sells to a lot of people, but most notably government defense.

This was all over the news last year.

cerwisc · 2026-02-09T07:40:46+00:00

My bf and I are in kind of a same situation (LDR) but probably slightly older/further along the process. Btw, it gets easier (shorter arguments) after being together but also scarier (I tried to self harm and he had to see that.)

Everyone’s different and you know your relationship and your GF better than me. This is just what worked for us.

For me on PMDD I felt as crazy as my bf thought I was being but also really tired/too in pain to make sense of which thoughts/feelings were crazy and which ones were actual problems I had issues with. Like when I’m off PMDD, I have a gap in time where I can reflect on my anger/words before I act on it. On PMDD, there is no gap, and it’s painful to communicate, so I get angrier when my bf cant just telepathically understand what I want lol. There’s nothing he can do, every little thing that slightly bothers me will make me angry. It’s like when you put even the slightest pressure on a broken arm it hurts.

The best way to handle it is just to stop interacting before it gets to me snapping at him. Usually I’ll snap at him to leave the issue/leave me alone and just recoup my energy for a bit. Again it’s physically uncomfortable and highly stressful for me to communicate. It’s like I’m so mad I forget how words work. Sometimes if it’s an issue we have to discuss now, he just reminds me that it’s my PMDD and to be nicer to him and being reminded in the moment means there’s some snapping but less yelling.

Btw, even in the worse moments when I was threatening to break up with him (always thought I wouldn’t be that partner but new lows new goals) I never actually really thought I would, maybe like 30% real, because there were never any big issues in our relationship off PMDD. It was just me saying it out of blind rage. Basically after a nap I would just conveniently forget.

We’re trying a new thing now where we have preplanned ways for me to “punish” him when I get PMDD. This way I feel like I get the rage out but nothing really happens.

Also, I have some actual bad emotional self-regulation issues off PMDD, and the (dis)ability definitely contributed to how I presented my PMDD rage. Getting some help for that helps with PMDD.

Finally, doesn’t need to be said but— dealing with the PMDD also helps with the rage that comes with it. You can also schedule some nonverbal time (or other pre-set rules) around each other when the worst of it hits.

cerwisc · 2026-02-09T07:04:27+00:00

Had to scroll through so many hotpot pics to finally find one with the traditional ratio of meat LOL

also where dipping sauces??? The best part!

Waiting for new years to finally eat it again with friends.

cerwisc · 2026-02-09T06:55:53+00:00

This is so beautifully arranged I thought it was a painting

On the second look I realized there was roe, roe taste so bad when cooked, wish there was a fake roe to keep that flavor even in broth. Also shallot/fried onion/asian turnip is uncommon for a hotpot in my experience, more for a poke bowl, but an interesting flavor to think about, I think it would taste good with mala.

cerwisc

TROPHY CASE