Have money worries ever kept you awake at night, triggered headaches, or left you feeling overwhelmed and stuck?
In this episode of the Pain Free Living Podcast, osteopath Bob Allen and therapy coach Clare Elsby explore the often overlooked connection between financial stress, mental wellbeing, and physical health.
Clare brings her unique perspective as both a former accountant and coach, sharing a powerful real-life story of a successful professional whose financial anxiety was quietly affecting every area of her life. Despite earning a good income, a cycle of stress, alcohol use, impulsive spending, and avoidance left her feeling trapped and ashamed. You'll find out how small changes, curiosity, and support helped her regain control of both her finances and her wellbeing.
Bob explains what happens to your body when stress becomes a constant companion. You'll learn how financial worries can contribute to muscle tension, headaches, migraines, digestive problems, poor sleep, increased pain sensitivity, and feelings of exhaustion. He also shares practical ways to help calm your nervous system and reduce the physical impact of long-term stress.
If money worries are affecting your confidence, health, or relationships, don't worry, you're not alone. In this day and age financial stress is a common experience, particularly during periods of economic uncertainty.
The good news is that support is available, and small steps can make a significant difference.
This episode highlights the important message that there is no shame in asking for help. Whether the challenge is financial, emotional, or physical, support and practical solutions exist.
Key Takeaways
Financial stress can have a genuine impact on both your mental and physical health.
Long-term stress may contribute to headaches, migraines, muscle tension, digestive issues, and increased pain sensitivity.
Avoidance often makes financial worries feel bigger than they really are.
Understanding where your money goes is the first step towards regaining control.
Mindfulness, movement, creativity, and asking for help can all support recovery from stress.
Every Mind Matters (stress support) - https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/
Disclaimer: Please note that any tips or advice given in this podcast does not constitute medical, healthcare or any other form of professional advice. If you have health or other issues, please seek advice specific to your circumstances from a qualified healthcare, medical, or other relevant professional.
About Your Hosts
Bob Allen is an osteopath, patient educator, podcast host, and public speaker with over 17 years' experience helping people understand pain, movement, and recovery. Drawing on both healthcare and a previous 20-year career in IT project management, Bob specialises in translating complex health topics into practical advice that people can use in everyday life.
Clare Elsby is an experienced therapy coach who uses positive psychology together with a background in accountancy to give her a unique perspective on the relationship between mindset, behaviour, and life challenges.
🌐 Social Media & Podcast Platforms: https://linktr.ee/Painfreeliving
Transcripts
Speaker A:
Welcome to the Pain Free Living podcast with myself and Bob. We're talking today about finance and stress that's born out of financial worries. I do feel I could talk about this a bit.
I've trained as an accountant and that's been my day job for many years until I retrained in positive psychology. But I also have clients that I see in terms of managing finances from, from a coaching perspective. So I see both aspects of it.
One of the big worries about finance is, well, big one is scarcity. It's a scarce resource. Unless we've got a really well paid job, then actually, you know, it's difficult to make ends meet.
Things can come out of absolutely nowhere. Redundancy, changing circumstances, through no fault of our own. And it's almost like the rug is pulled from under us.
You throw in family, you throw independence. So, you know, we do have genuine financial worries.
A lot of us, and especially at the moment with the, you know, the economic situation that we're in, it's, you know, it's understandable. These anxieties and these worries are actually, I would say, quite normal. But we can manage them.
The big one, the big question is we don't know how long we're actually going to live for. So how much do we save for our future? How much do we put into our pensions? So these are all big questions.
Finances are always, when I talk to clients with my kindancy hat on, there's always questions about do I have enough? So it's a lot about scarcity, it's about anxiety about the future, but then it can be really specific.
So I just thought I'd talk about a client, particular client that I've got who very, very well paid job. In her job she would actually be responsible for quite a significant budget in the business.
And the whole thing with her job was that she had to make sure that everything was accounted for properly. So her spreadsheets were immaculate. But her home life was completely different.
She was really struggling financially even though she got this well paid job.
And what it turned out to be was that it was only when she started to get curious and change her relationship with alcohol that she realized that actually what she'd be doing on a nightly basis was spending money on buying things through Amazon and social media.
And so she had the, almost the shame when she woke up the next morning of thinking, oh my goodness, I shouldn't have drunk again, but I did last night. Then she would think, oh my goodness, how much have I spent? And then the things that she'd ordered would start arriving. And it literally just.
There was like, almost like a triple shame wheel going on day after day after day.
And it was only when she got curious about her alcohol, and that was because her sister was actually an alcoholic, she decided, I think I need to take a break.
And it was when she was taking her break that she realized that actually she wasn't going online and she wasn't shopping in the way that she had been, but she was left with her kitchen table full of unopened envelopes and bank statements that had been there for over a year that she just hadn't looked up.
So the help I was able to give her with my accountancy background as well, was to actually go through the very small steps of getting back in control of her finances. Because again, this is about control and losing control. And where she felt in control at work, she was totally lost, literally.
And that was one of the words she used, lost at home. The great news is, for the first time ever, and she's probably.
She's 53, she's actually managed to save, she's got a little nest egg and she's never had that before. So, you know, you can turn things around, but it's a matter of working through. And it was tough. It was very tough for her.
But in terms of her physical symptoms, she was suffering from a lot of stress.
It was bordering on depression, it was affecting her work, it was affecting her family relationships, and she was suffering really, really bad migraines as well. And so, you know, know, just the sheer tension and the anxiety that she was going through had a physical impact on her.
Speaker B:
Yeah, and this kind of leads, leads neatly into where we always talk about good physical health and good mental health.
If you have poor mental health in the, in the case of this lady where she was stress significantly and over time that can spill over into physical health. So symptoms like migraines are not unusual when you are stressed constantly. Sometimes migraines have triggers.
Sometimes it's the physical stress that causes us to trigger. So one of the things that stress can cause is increased muscle tension. It can cause increased blood pressure, it can cause increased heart rate.
It can, because stress is a, is a fight or flight freeze or form response. The fight or flight part of that is that it restricts blood supply to the bits of the body that it. That your brain thinks you don't need.
So that is, it will increase blood supply to the heart and to the major muscles like the legs and the arms.
But actually what it also does is it reduces and restricts blood supply to things like the muscles in the neck to it reduces gut activity because who needs your gut?
Who needs to be digesting food when you're trying to run away from something or fighting also increases breathing rate which can increase tension in the neck muscles. And all of these things can lead to physical issues like migraines. It can increase your body's sensitivity to pain.
So if you have issues anyway, it can make them feel worse. So what Claire's client was experiencing was not just the physical. Sorry, not just the mental aspects of stress, but also the physical aspects of it.
But luckily there are things that you can do in addition to the therapy coaching. You can also do things like mindfulness, breathing exercises, stimul.
So, uh, we have other podcasts that cover this in more detail, but we've got sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
The, the symptoms that Claire's talking about from a physical point of view are because the sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive cons continuously whereas the parasympathetic nervous system is the rest. Digest, recover, relax part of the system.
So what we would do, what I would be encouraging from a physical therapy perspective, is to do things that will perform boost to parasympathetics like mindfulness, like listening to music, like breathing, taking a shower, like going for a walk. All of those things that really simple to do but seem much more difficult if you're in a stressed environment.
So the good news is that yes, you can improve the physical aspects of what is going on as well as supporting the mental health side of things. So I think that's kind of where I would come in as a physical therapist.
Speaker A:
Interestingly, she did get into painting and singing and wait for it, forest bathing.
Speaker B:
Yep, all things.
Speaker A:
So she definitely embraced all things mindfulness.
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
And it's worked. Yeah.
Speaker B:
And it does work. And it does work and it's a really useful counter to that sympathetic overload.
So, and this is why we work so well together because like I said, you cover the mental health aspects of it. I could cover the physical therapy aspects of it, but there is so much that goes on that's interlinked that.
Yeah, as we said, you can't have one without the other.
Speaker A:
I think there's a lot of shame actually attached to people whenever they feel they can't manage their money. But actually there's nothing. It's about understanding it that and it's about having. Putting systems in, I guess, systems and ways to manage.
Because when in the olden days when everything was cash, we'd get our rhyme pay packet at the end of the week and we'd know exactly how to raise them. No, I know I used to put the money in the pay packets, mum with the little windows. Nevermind.
Whereas now, you know, it's all digital and the danger is if it's digital and if it's night and you're having a glass of wine, you know, not necessarily being very intentional about what you're spending. Whereas what we can do is actually make use of these digital apps because you know all, pretty much all the banks.
Now you can go on there and you can see what you're spending, you can categorize it.
So actually if you use your app, if you, if you know how to use your apps, you'll get, you actually get some really good information, some data about where your money's going to. And that's one of the first things is actually to find out where is it going, what are you spending it on?
Because if you don't know where it is, you can't control it. And then it's by putting boundaries in place and understanding and limits in place to be able to manage that.
So don't feel ashamed, just talk to someone. Uh, and yeah, don't be embarrassed. But there are, there are tools and tricks out there to be able to help it with managing money.
Speaker B:
Yeah. And all I can add to that is that never be ashamed, never be afraid to ask for help because there are, there is always some help available.
Even though you may feel that nobody can help you, there will always be somebody that can help.
Speaker A:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Bob. I think that's a.
Speaker B:
Is that a wrap? Yeah, that's a wrap, I think. Okay. That's your video, people call it. It's a wrap. Okay. So we hope you enjoyed this episode.
We'll put some links in the show, notes about if you do have financial issues, where to go for help. If you feel overwhelmed and you are coping with your current situation, then we can help signpost you to people that can support you.
So hope you enjoyed the episode, hope you got something out of. And we'll see you at the next one.
