Living in a nation in which home loans are getting bigger and jobs are becoming sparser, it is no wonder that one in four Australians (and one in three women) have reported experiencing anxiety.
While for many it is a matter of fleeting stress, for others the problem can seem much bigger. When I told a friend that I was having a hard time managing stress, she suggested a technique her therapist had taught her, called the ‘Emotional Energy Bank’.
While my history with budgeting isn’t so great, I found this strategy to be both practical and useful.
The idea, in a nutshell, is that each day you are awarded $500 dollars from your ‘emotional energy bank’.
These dollars are to be distributed according to the emotional demands of each day, whether that be a full day of doing the washing and the dishes (aka adulting), or a full day at work followed by school pick up.
Since you only have $500 emotional energy dollars to spend on any given day, you must be considerate of how you distribute them. To begin with, you are encouraged to spend at least $100 on self-care. This could be going for a run in the morning or maintaining personal hygiene.
The idea is that if you let self-care fall by the wayside, everything else might begin to seem a whole lot more difficult.
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Rule number one = self-care.
The remaining $400 must be distributed amongst the rest of your day’s activities. Let’s say you have organised to meet an old friend from high school, you could allocate $100 into this activity. If the lunch goes exceptionally well, and you leave feeling rejuvenated, you might make a profit to go into savings, however, if your friend spends the entire time whinging and whining, you might end up spending $200 on your friend instead of $100.