Why Money Feels So Stressful: The Nervous System Connection | Generational Financial Beliefs Pt. 3

Welcome back to Tea Time with Erin, where we share honest conversations about entrepreneurship, money, mental health, and the stories that shape the way we build our businesses and lives.

In this episode, Erin continues Part 3 of her four-part series on generational financial beliefs by exploring the connection between money and the nervous system. While previous episodes focused on where financial beliefs come from and how they impact paying yourself, this conversation shifts into the body and examines why financial decisions can feel so emotionally charged.

Erin explains how our nervous systems often respond to money before our conscious minds have a chance to think. From the knot in your stomach when you open your bank account to the tension that shows up when it's time to pay yourself, these reactions are often rooted in old experiences, inherited beliefs, and generational patterns rather than your current financial reality.

Through neuroscience, nervous system regulation, and practical body-based tools, Erin introduces the first two steps of her GLOW Framework—Ground and Lift—and shares how entrepreneurs can begin creating safety around money so they can make financial decisions from a calmer, more empowered place.

In This Episode, You'll Hear:

• Why your nervous system reacts to money before your thinking brain does
• How financial stress shows up physically in the body
• The connection between generational financial beliefs and nervous system responses
• Why paying yourself can trigger fight, flight, freeze, or fawn behaviors
• How childhood experiences shape financial reactions in adulthood
• What neuroplasticity is and how it helps change money patterns
• The four nervous system responses commonly seen around money
• Why shame is often grief in disguise
• An introduction to Erin's GLOW Framework: Ground, Lift, Own, and Win
• Simple practices to regulate your nervous system before looking at your finances

Key Takeaways

• Financial stress is often a nervous system response, not a discipline problem.
• Your body may be reacting to old money stories before your conscious mind has time to think.
• Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn patterns commonly show up in financial decision-making.
• Awareness creates the opportunity for change.
• Safety and comfort are not the same thing.
• Small nervous system regulation practices can improve financial decision-making over time.
• Neuroplasticity allows you to create new patterns and healthier responses around money.

Connect with Erin

Learn more about Erin’s work around money mindset, financial therapy, and building businesses that support your life.

• Book a free financial clarity call with Erin
• Instagram: @‌erinthemoneytherapist

Erin’s Tea for This Episode

Erin is drinking Soothsayer Tea House Masala Chai during this episode. Receive 15% off your first order with Erin’s discount link and code WITHERIN.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You are joining me for a special series of Teach Time with Erin. Over the next several episodes, we're exploring something I get asked about more than anything else. The money beliefs we didn't choose, the ones that were passed down to us through our families, our upbringing, and generations of financial experiences we weren't even alive for. We're gonna trace the thread from Great Depression all the way to the entrepreneur sitting here listening right now. We're gonna talk about what our grandmothers were and weren't allowed to do with money, what our mothers absorbed from watching them, and what we picked up before we were old enough to clock it. This series is for the woman building something new who keeps bumping into old beliefs she can't quite explain. The one who undercharges and doesn't know why, the one who avoids her numbers and feels ashamed, the one who wonders why success still doesn't feel safe. You're not broken, you're carrying something. And this is where we start to look at what that is. So grab your tea, settle in, and let's do this together.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Welcome back to Tea Time with Erin. I invite you to settle in, grab your warm drink, and let's dive in. Today I am drinking masala chai from Soothsayer Tea House. You guys know I am a creature of habit. I am always drinking the same teas because once I pick a favorite, that's what I go back to. So you know what? This is where I always land. I love my chai from Soothsayer. And if you want to try it, there is a link in the show notes for 15% off your first order with her. All right, so today, this episode is a really tender one. It's a little bit spotter, a little bit slower, a little more felt and held than the last two. Um, so if you are joining me, this is part three in a four-part series all about generational financial beliefs. And if you go back and listen to the other two episodes, you're gonna hear lots of information about generational financial beliefs, how they exist, what they look like, giving them some names. And today we are going to just kind of pull it all back into the body. This is a very, like I said, felt episode. So no notebook required today. You might just want to listen with your hand on your chest. So, quick note at the end of part two, I was talking to you guys about something that I refer to as a safe framework. And I have been using a safe framework for years, but recently I have kind of shifted the language. I've been using something called a glow framework. Those letters G-L-O-W stand for ground, lift, own, and win. This is the framework that I use inside of my executive suite program where I help CEOs essentially glow up, right? This is the kind of terminology that we use in that program where I'm helping them embody their authority as a CEO. Um, so that is the framework that we are going to use as we talk through it here today. Same heart, same body work, same energy, just a better name, um, that is more aligned with the brand. So that is what we're going to talk about more today. The concepts are all still here. I just changed the name just a little. So we are, as I said, three parts into a four-part series on generational financial beliefs and behaviors. In part one, we looked at where those beliefs come from, four generations deep. In part two, we went under the hood and looked at how they show up the moment you go to pay yourself. This one is really key. This is a question I get all the time. Why is paying myself so difficult? We talked all about that in episode two. So if you missed it, go back and listen to that one. And at the very end of part two, I planted a seed and I said, the reason you can't think your way out of this is that it isn't happening in your thinking brain. It's happening in your body. When you flinch the nut in your stomach, your shoulders popping up, your teeth clenching, your fists clenching, you suddenly need to have all of these biological responses when you open your QuickBooks or you open your bank account. And we are going to talk about those things today. So, like I said, this is this is a big, I wouldn't say it's a heavy episode. It is a big feelings episode. So buckle up. Before I go on explaining things, I want to try something right now. Wherever you are, if it's safe, obviously, if you're driving, just be safe. If it's safe, I want you to picture yourself opening your business bank account or opening your profit and loss. I want you to pull that imagery up in your mind. Imagine yourself opening your phone, going to the banking app. Now don't analyze it. Just notice what happened in your body just now. Did your shoulders rise up? Did your stomach drop? Did you hold your breath without meaning to? Did you clench your jaw? I want you to notice because all of those things your body did may have done happen before you had any thoughts about it. You didn't decide to clinch your jaw. You didn't decide to squeeze your fist. You didn't decide to have a tight feeling in your chest. Your body decided for you. So that is this episode. We're going to talk all about that behavior before the decision. So obviously, this is something I say a lot in my work, but you're not bad with money. You're not undisciplined. Your nervous system is just faster than your good intentions. In the Money Scripts episode, I asked you to notice how your body feels about money, the tight chest, the shoulders, jaw. That example asked you to notice. This one is about understanding. So once we notice, then we're going to move into understanding about what is actually going on and how to start changing it. I'm going to talk a little bit about the science. I'm going to try to keep this sort of what I would call the clinical portion pretty light, only because I want you to understand. I don't want you to get lost in the language or the words. I want you to just kind of stay with me. But I am going to talk a little bit more about the science behind this. So research on the stress response shows the body reacts to a perceived threat before the conscious reasoning part of the brain even comes online. If you follow me at all, you've heard me talk about this, right? Your PFC or prefrontal cortex, which is critical for decision making, takes longer to come online. You have to purposely bring it online, especially if your nervous system is activated. The threat detection wiring runs first. The thinking runs second. In my interpretation, after years of sitting with women in this exact moment, your body files, quote, money under danger. Not because it's actually dangerous, but because somewhere in the line, somewhere in your childhood, somewhere in the lineage, money meant scarcity, conflict, shame, or fear. Your body learned to protect you and it's still doing its job. It just has an old frame of reference. Your nervous system and your brain are designed quite literally to keep you alive. That is their soul and entire purpose. So they're still doing those things. And as long as money feels like a threat or danger, your body's still going to respond to it that way. So what we have to do is update the framework with which our body responds to money today, in this scenario. Not one that's old, not a generational one, not a childhood one, but where we are actually today. So if you go back with me mentally to Money Scripts episode, remember head law, neurons that fire together, wire together. The fear around money patterns get grooved really early into the brain before you were old enough to decide. That's why they're automatic. That's why they come so quickly. And here's here's the wonderful thing about neuroplasticity is that the same wiring that got you where you are now is what is wiring that we can redo today. The same grooves that are formed in your brain right now can be redrawn. One time when I was in therapy, my therapist explained it to me like a Jeep driving on a muddy road. So the Jeep drives on the muddy road, it leaves these very deep tire tracks in the mud because that's how cars are, right? They leave the tracks in the mud. That's how your brain works. You have these pathways that are kind of set. The tires want to follow those same paths every single time. But when you choose to take a different path, in our visual example with this Jeep, we just take a different path, right? And the Jeep is responsible for forming that new path. And then it's responsible for following it again, right? So we just continually make new pathways with our Jeep tires. And we have to teach our brain not to go back to those old ones. That's what neuroplasticity is all about. So when there's money in the bank and you still feel broke, anxious, or braced, it's not a math problem. It's not a you problem. It's just a body that hasn't gotten the memo that where we are today is safer than where we were yesterday when those pathways were laid. So obviously you've heard of fight or flight, right? There's actually four states that the nervous system can exhibit when activated fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And actually, there's there's a fifth one in the world of psychology, if if you have heard of that one, but we're just gonna talk about the four today. I don't want this to be overwhelming. I'm gonna walk you through how each one shows up around money because I think you're going to recognize yourself in at least one of these. And these are the patterns I see constantly in my work. So know that you are in good company. If you identify with one of these, so does everyone. Okay, so don't feel like you're the only one, you're lost, you're alone. Everyone is dealing with these same things. That's why they come up so often in my work. So fight looks like control, white knuckling every number, unable to delegate the books and financials, rechecking your bookkeeper's work at midnight. Your body is braced for combat with the spreadsheet. Flight looks like avoidance. You suddenly have seven other things to do when it's time to pay yourself. The PL stays closed, you're busy, productivity busy, doing anything but looking. Freeze looks like the money just sitting there. You can't make the transfer, the numbers feel like a foreign language, you go still and a little numb, and the decision never gets made. This is the one that shows up the most when paying yourself. We talked about in the last episode. Vaughn looks like overgiving, discounting, overdelivering, undercharging, smoothing everything over so no one could ever accuse you of being all about money, keeping the peace with everyone but yourself. Remember the woman from part two, I called the horse girl, the one with the big contract on her desk that she was scared to take because she'd have to pay her parents back. Watch where that shows up. It's not a thinking problem. Her body breaks. When I'm talking to her about the situation, I'm watching her get anxious. I'm watching her get tense as she tries to tell me, well, the reason I'm considering or not considering this contract is because of this thing with my parents. And I'm like observing her physically have a response. And because for her, more money had always meant more money is owed. It's not necessarily because she is in voluntary debt. She didn't take on debt from her parents voluntarily, right? This is something that her body has clocked as, well, this doesn't feel right. And she's right, it's not. But her body can't not respond just because she doesn't like it. In part two, I said a lot of what we read as shame around money is actually grief in disguise. I want to bring that into the body for a second. Grief moves through you, it has somewhere to go, but shame locks you in place. It's the freeze. So part of what we're gonna do today is helping the body feel safe enough to let the grief move instead of staying frozen in the shame. I'm gonna pause here just for a second. If you just heard one of those four things and felt your whole body go, oh, I want you to know something. You do not have to untangle this by yourself. This is exactly the work I do with women one-on-one. We sit down, we look at your real numbers, your real financial story, and we do it gently with none of the panic, none of the shame. If something in you is whispering, I think I need help with this, that whisper is worth listening to. And the link to book a tea time with me is in the show notes. No pressure, no pitch. It's just me holding the door open and holding the space for you. Okay, back to it. So, what do we actually do with a nervous system that's stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? This is where my glow framework comes in. Ground, lift, own, win. Today we're living the first two letters, ground and lift, because those are the body steps. Own and win are where we go in part four. Those are all part of the glow up process. Ground is just what it sounds like. It's getting very, very real and honest about where we are today, creating enough safety in your body to actually look at the truth, the numbers, the feeling without shame, swallowing you whole. Here's the line I come back to. You can't lift what you won't name. So in the world of little children, helping them regulate their emotions, and even in adults, we use the phrase name it to tame it. If we can name the feeling, it's a lot easier for us to do something with it. Sometimes because we have so many feelings at once, it can feel like a swarm. We call that emotional flooding. When you're flooded with emotions, we can't name any particular one. It's difficult for us to do something with it. So this ground step is where we name it out loud and we just name it. We have kindness for ourselves, we have sympathy for our body. We don't do anything with it. We're simply giving it a name. Name it to tame it. So before you open the account, the baby account, the PL, whatever it is next time, I want you to try a couple of things to create that safety for your body. We're gonna engage the senses, okay? So when you sit down to open your PL, put your feet flat on the floor, notice them there. Wear fuzzy socks if that's comfortable for you. Put a blanket under your feet if that's comfortable for you. You're not at the path, you're here in this chair as an adult with options that your grandmother never has. One slow breath, breathe out longer than you breathe in. The long exhale is telling your nervous system that you're safe right now. Hand on your chest or your belly, wherever the feeling is. Name this sensation plainly. My shoulders are at my ears, my stomach is in a knot. Naming it tells your brain that you're paying attention. And that alone starts to settle the feeling. Here's a moment for tea, right? At this point, you could grab a warm drink. Again, we're engaging the senses. Other things you could consider here would be maybe a candle that you love, or like I said, a warm drink or a cold drink if it's hot and you would prefer an ice cold drink. But the sensation is critical. So holding the warm drink in your hand, holding the cold drink in your hand, it's not just about being comfortable, it's about safety and co-regulating yourself in the space that you're in. Take the breath, open the spreadsheet, and we do hard things with comfortable spaces. Now, mind you, I'm talking all about safety and comfort here. You're not going to be comfortable. Okay. If this is a difficult process for you, you're not going to sit down and open your PL and all of a sudden feel very comfortable, even if you create the environment for you to feel safe. Safety and comfort are not the same. This is really critical in my work. I have to say it often. I am not interested in making sure that you are comfortable when you do something that's difficult. I'm interested in making sure you feel safe, but it will not always feel comfortable. And more often than not, it's going to be very uncomfortable. That's the point. We stretch our ability to do hard things when we do them, not when we avoid them. That's the point of the whole exercise here. So moving on from ground to the next step, which is lift. So lift is letting go, it's releasing the weight you've been carrying so your body can lighten. This is the heart of the body work, and it's where the somatic pieces I used to call safe all still live. Research tells us the body needs to complete the cycle in order to release the cycle. The feeling has to move and discharge through breath, through movement, sometimes through tears, or it stays trapped in the body. Sometimes you might cry and you might not realize you're crying and I understand why you're crying. And that genuinely is just your body's physical response of trying to let something out. So I always encourage people when to feel the urge to cry, just let that happen. Let yourself cry so that you can move whatever it is that's stealing trap. The knot that shows up in your stomach when you look at your numbers is not a character flaw. It's just energy that is trapped with nowhere to go. And energy can move. You're not broken, you're just backed up. You just have trapped stuff going on inside of your body. So sometimes it's as simple as the long XL, like we talked about before. A few, not just one, but a couple, right? Sometimes you need to stand up, shake your hands out, long arm swings before you sit back down. Sometimes you just need to let the feeling come. And if it feels like you want to cry or it feels like you want to scream, let those things just happen. That's just your body's response, asking for the opportunity to release whatever it may be. The goal is not to never feel the flinch again, it's to feel it, notice it, and see it as an old pattern. Notice that it's old. Notice that you don't have to carry it into the moment that you're in. The idea is to create calmness inside of yourself so you can repeat it. So remember back in part two, I said these patterns make the decision for you before your conscious brain gets to decide. This is now giving that power back to your conscious brain. Let's move that energy from wherever it is trapped into the prefrontal cortex of the brain where we can make sound decisions. The practice here: next time you go to pay yourself, next time you go to do your bookkeeping if you're doing your own, next time you go to just observe your business finances, engage the senses, feet on the floor, light the candle, grab your drink, create safety for the nervous system. And remember safety and comfort are not the same. Comfort is not the goal here, it's safety. Take what we have talked about today and remember that your body learned to brace around money to keep you safe, to protect you. And at one point in time, that was wisdom. It's not betrayal to teach your body that you're safe now. You are allowed to feel calm about money. You are allowed to let that weight go. In part two, I left you with a question: whose voice is telling me what I deserve? I want you to keep that and add one piece to it this time. The next time you feel the brace, ask yourself, whose voice is this? And where do I feel it in my body? So, not only whose voice isn't, what truth am I believing that might not be true, but where is it showing up inside of my being? You don't have to answer the question, just observe it. It's not, this isn't a fix-it kind of thing. It's just very simply something to notice, something to find, to identify. And then once you have identified it and you know how it feels and where it feels, you can start to help it let go. So, one more small practice before the next part of this series. One slow breath, longer out than in. This is applicable in so many areas of your life. It might just not just be money, but in general, extend your exhales. Sit in your car, take a deep breath in, push, breathe for four, hold for four, breathe out for six or eight counts. Teach your body that you are okay. And that long exhale brings that prefrontal cortex online. It gives your body the opportunity to say, I'm okay. I'm going to be okay. I'm going to continue to take good care of myself. So come back next in two weeks. Come, well, it might be four weeks, but come back to the next episode and we are going to move to the second half of the Glow Framework. So we talked about ground and lift. We're going to talk about own and win. This is where we take everything we have talked about in this series and we actually start to teach you, the founder, the CEO, the entrepreneur, how to do this in real time at an executive functioning level. Not just any executive functioning level, a high executive functioning level. You can do this on repeat and no longer feel the anxiety and the stress that you have been dealing with before, because you taught your body how to do it safely, and you have trained your brain how to move forward through things that used to keep you stuck. And that is where the transformation actually happens. So come back for part four and remember that when you're doing this, you're not alone, right? You can not only can you always come and find me, please come and find me. Tell me your story. Talk to me about how you feel and how you're working through this. But there's also hundreds and thousands of other female entrepreneurs who are doing this work that you're doing, who are teaching themselves things they never learned, who are creating financial legacies they never had. So don't feel like you are totally stuck and trapped in this all by yourself. We are all here to support and help you. And I want you to reach out for support when you need it. So thanks so much for being here today. This was a nice short episode. I hope this was digestible for you. I know this was kind of a more, like I said, a more feelings one. So take care of you, drink your tea, ground your space, and I'll see you next time.