Why You Still Feel Broke Even Though You're Not

You make more money than you ever thought you would. Your savings account has a comfortable buffer. You can afford things that used to feel impossible. But you still check your bank balance anxiously. You still hesitate before spending on yourself. You still feel like it could all disappear tomorrow.

The numbers say you’re financially secure. Your nervous system says otherwise.

Money anxiety isn’t actually about money - it’s about control, worthiness, and past scarcity that achieving financial success doesn’t automatically resolve, and earning more rarely fixes what feeling broke is really about.

The Problem

You hit the income milestone you thought would make you feel secure. You saved the emergency fund amount all the advice said you needed. You built the net worth that should create peace of mind. But the anxiety didn’t go away - it just found new things to worry about.

When you made less, you worried about paying bills. Now you worry about market volatility, tax optimization, whether you’re saving enough for retirement. The specific concerns changed but the underlying anxiety is the same. You traded one flavor of money stress for another.

Or you notice that you still live like you’re broke even though you’re not. You buy the cheapest option automatically. You feel guilty spending on yourself. You say “I can’t afford it” about things you absolutely can afford. Your behavior doesn’t match your actual financial situation.

The disconnect is confusing and frustrating. You worked hard to get financially stable specifically so you wouldn’t have to stress about money anymore. But the stress didn’t decrease proportionally to your income. Sometimes it even got worse - now you have more to lose, more to protect, more to worry about.

Here’s what’s actually happening: you’re trying to solve an emotional problem with a financial solution. The anxiety isn’t coming from your bank account - it’s coming from your relationship with money, which was shaped by experiences that earning more doesn’t erase.

Maybe you grew up with financial instability. Maybe you saw your parents stressed about money. Maybe you experienced a period where you genuinely struggled. Those experiences created patterns - hypervigilance about finances, difficulty trusting stability, scarcity thinking - that persist even when the circumstances that created them change.

Why this happens to knowledge workers

Research suggests that high achievers often develop what psychologists call “conditional security” - the belief that safety must be continuously earned and can be instantly lost. This manifests as money anxiety that persists regardless of actual financial status.

For knowledge workers specifically, income feels precarious in a way manual labor doesn’t. Your value is based on intangible skills that could theoretically become obsolete. You’re one bad performance review, one industry shift, one company downsize away from income disruption. Even when you’re currently successful, the abstract nature of your work makes that success feel fragile.

Many people find that the higher they climb, the more anxious they become. When you made $50k, losing your job meant finding another $50k job. When you make $200k, losing your job means potentially having to take a significant pay cut because high-paying positions are scarcer. You have more to lose, which creates more fear.

The achievement-oriented culture in knowledge work also creates a specific kind of money anxiety. You’re supposed to be optimizing, maximizing, making the most of every dollar. So normal financial decisions become laden with performance pressure. Am I investing optimally? Am I saving enough? Am I making smart choices? Money becomes another arena where you could be doing better.

For high performers, there’s also a deep reluctance to acknowledge that you struggle with money anxiety when you’re objectively doing well financially. It feels ungrateful, privileged, or irrational. So you don’t talk about it, which means you don’t address it, which means it continues to run in the background draining your mental energy.

What Most People Try

The first response is usually to achieve more financial milestones. You’re anxious now, but surely if you save more, earn more, invest more, then you’ll feel secure. So you set a new target - $100k in savings, $1M net worth, whatever number feels like “enough.”

You hit the target and the anxiety persists. So you conclude the target wasn’t high enough. If you just had $200k saved, or $2M net worth, then you’d feel safe. The goalpost keeps moving because the anxiety isn’t actually about the number - but you keep treating it like a financial problem.

Some people try to logic themselves out of the anxiety. They run the numbers, prove to themselves they’re financially stable, create detailed financial plans that show they’re on track. The spreadsheets are reassuring in the moment, but the anxiety returns because logic doesn’t resolve emotional patterns.

Others try to ignore it or minimize it. They tell themselves they’re being irrational, that they should just be grateful for what they have. This creates shame on top of anxiety - now you feel bad about feeling anxious when you “shouldn’t” be. The suppression makes it worse, not better.

The self-help version is gratitude practices and abundance mindset work. Affirm that money flows easily to you. Feel grateful for what you have. Visualize abundance. These practices can help shift perspective, but when they’re used to bypass real anxiety rather than address it, they become another form of denial.

Some people cope through control. They track every dollar meticulously, optimize every financial decision, maintain rigid budgets even when they don’t need to. The control provides temporary relief from anxiety but reinforces the belief that constant vigilance is necessary for safety.

The fundamental problem with all these approaches is they’re trying to fix the anxiety without understanding where it actually comes from. You can’t spreadsheet your way out of a nervous system response. You can’t earn enough money to resolve an emotional pattern created by past scarcity.

What Actually Helps

1. Separate current reality from past experience

The anxiety you feel about money today is often a response to circumstances that no longer exist. Your nervous system learned to be hypervigilant about finances during a time when that vigilance was necessary. Now it’s running the same program even though the situation has changed.

The practice is noticing when anxiety arises and asking: is this response about my current reality or about a past reality? If you’re anxious about a $100 purchase when you have $50,000 in savings, that’s not about current reality - it’s a pattern from a time when $100 mattered more.

Many people find it helpful to literally talk to the anxious part of themselves. “I know you learned to worry about every dollar because there was a time we didn’t have enough. That was real. But we’re safe now. Look at the actual numbers. The worry made sense then, but it’s not serving us now.”

This isn’t about dismissing the anxiety or telling yourself to just get over it. It’s about recognizing that the anxiety was adaptive at one point - it protected you - and thanking it while also updating it with current information. Your nervous system needs to learn that the rules that kept you safe before need adjustment now.

Research on trauma and anxiety suggests that the nervous system doesn’t automatically update based on changed circumstances. You have to consciously teach it the new reality through repeated exposure and reassurance. Each time you notice the anxiety, you can choose to respond to current reality rather than past fears.

The specific practice: when money anxiety arises, pause. Check your actual financial status - not to reassure yourself once and for all, but to give your nervous system current data. “Right now, I have X in savings. Right now, my income is Y. Right now, I am okay.” The repetition gradually updates the internal model.

Start today: Notice the next time you feel money anxiety. Before responding to it, write down: “What I’m anxious about” and “What’s actually true about my finances right now.” The gap between them will often be significant.

2. Give yourself explicit permission to spend based on your actual situation

Money anxiety often manifests as difficulty spending on yourself even when you can afford it. You’ve internalized scarcity so deeply that you can’t access abundance even when it exists. The numbers say you can spend, but emotionally you can’t give yourself permission.

The solution is creating explicit permission structures that bypass the emotional block. Instead of asking “can I afford this?” every time - which triggers anxiety regardless of the answer - create predetermined rules about when spending is allowed.

For example: “I can spend up to $X per month on discretionary purchases without deliberation.” Or: “I can buy books, courses, or tools related to my work without guilt.” Or: “I can spend money on experiences with friends without checking my bank balance first if I’m within my monthly spending budget.”

Many people find that these rules work because they remove the emotional decision-making in the moment. You’re not asking “am I allowed to spend?” when you’re already anxious - you’re following a rule you made when you were thinking clearly about your actual financial situation.

This also helps identify when the anxiety is truly irrational. If your rule says you can spend $200 on something but you still feel intense anxiety about it, that’s clear evidence the feeling isn’t about the money - it’s about the pattern. That information helps you address the real issue.

The practice starts small. Pick one category of spending that currently triggers anxiety but shouldn’t based on your finances - maybe eating out, buying clothes, or spending on hobbies. Give yourself explicit, rule-based permission to spend in that category without guilt. Practice following the rule even when the anxiety arises.

Notice what happens. Usually, the anxiety spikes initially but decreases with repetition. Your nervous system learns that spending within these bounds doesn’t lead to catastrophe. Over time, you can expand the categories where you have permission.

3. Address the real question: what are you actually afraid of?

Money anxiety is rarely just about money. It’s usually about what money represents - security, control, worthiness, freedom. Until you identify what you’re actually afraid of, you can’t address it.

Ask yourself: if I lost all my money tomorrow, what specifically am I afraid would happen? The first answer is usually “I couldn’t pay my bills.” Go deeper. What would that mean? “I’d have to move.” What would that mean? “I’d lose control of my life.”

Keep going until you hit the core fear. For many people, it’s ultimately about worthiness - the fear that financial failure would prove they’re not good enough, not smart enough, not deserving of security. For others, it’s about control - money represents the ability to protect themselves from chaos.

Many people find that their money anxiety is actually anxiety about their value as a person. They’re high performers who learned that their worth is tied to achievement. Money is both a measure of achievement and a resource that could be lost, which creates double anxiety - fear of losing the resource and fear of what that loss would mean about them.

Research on money psychology shows that people with scarcity mindsets often experienced early situations where financial stability was unpredictable or where money was tied to love, approval, or safety. The adult anxiety is an echo of that childhood experience.

The practice is working backward from the anxiety to the underlying fear, then addressing that fear directly. If the core fear is worthlessness, the work is building unconditional self-worth that isn’t tied to financial success. If the core fear is chaos, the work is developing trust in your ability to handle uncertainty.

This often requires professional help - a therapist who understands money psychology can help you trace these patterns and develop new ones. But you can start by simply asking: what does money mean to me beyond its practical function? What am I really protecting when I protect my money?

The Takeaway

Money anxiety in high performers isn’t about the actual numbers - it’s about nervous system patterns from past scarcity that don’t automatically update when circumstances improve. Earning more won’t fix it, and achieving financial milestones won’t resolve it. What helps is separating current reality from past experiences and consciously updating your nervous system, creating explicit permission structures to spend based on your actual situation rather than your anxiety, and identifying the real fear underneath the money anxiety so you can address what it’s actually about. Financial security is real, but it’s emotional work, not math.