Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will know the word ‘mindfulness’ has quite a buzz about it.
CEOs are into it, so are talk show hosts, pop stars, famous actors, sports stars and lately it’s being rolled out in corporate wellness programs for thousands of stressed-out employees.
If you’ve ever persisted with a disastrous job or relationship or PhD in the hope it will somehow get better, or ‘chased your losses’ by placing risky bets in a game of cards, you might want to pay attention.
Maybe you’ve endured reading a novel you hated from the first 50 pages, or stayed through a concert just because you bought tickets – despite the fact you would rather be anywhere else.
Giving gifts in ancient history began as a show of worship and over centuries has morphed into a show of appreciation. In the age of consumerism it’s become an expensive habit too, especially in Holiday season.
That said gifts are costs we bear without much complaint; giving feels good and it’s accepted as a cultural obligation. Besides, we have special labels for people who don’t play along: ever fear being labelled a Scrooge or Grinch?
Our expensive habit of gift-giving is, roughly speaking, a material indicator of the value of one person to another. Megan McArdle, writing for Bloomberg, argued “there is a higher logic to the gift economy … that mandates we keep giving and receiving objects of dubious value”.
Gift-giving, she said, was connected to “an innate human value called “reciprocal altruism” which makes the costs of gifts “a maintenance fee for your relationship”. All of this is warm (and as McArdle noted) fuzzy too. There are however real problems beyond conceptual warm fuzzy feelings.
The tinsel and decorations may be long packed away under the stairs, but eight weeks after the festive season more than two million Australians are still paying off holiday credit card debts, according to Roy Morgan Research.
One of the leading pressures on many people’s already-strained financial position is the habit of over-spending on gifts; gifts that don’t necessarily prove our love for others. In this three-part series we will explore the size of our national gift-buying problem, look at the health impacts of the financial stress that follows and then explore how a targeted mindfulness practice can help change the auto-pilot approach to gift-giving while potentially bringing us even closer to loved ones.
We know that divorce – the unsettling reality for one in three marriages – usually has an immense but largely immeasurable emotional impact on couples and their children.
But the financial costs can be quantified – and a detailed recent report by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling for AMP (called Divorce: For Richer, For Poorer) shows a $14 billion cost to “the nation [in] government assistance payments and court costs”, up $2 billion from 2012.
The word ‘mindfulness’ seems to be everywhere these days
Mindfulness stress-reduction programs are fast becoming a solid plank in corporate wellness strategies.
Mindfulness programs, run by external trainers and delivered in-house to stressed-out employees are in steady demand as employers seek to curtail the impacts of a big range of lifestyle and mental health issues that lead to costly absenteeism and its sneakier sibling, presenteeism.
When it comes to the subject of ‘financial stress’ a lot of energy and attention is paid to our spending: where does all our money go, we are urged to ask of ourselves and our partners.
The insinuation is that we share a horrible flaw: reckless and clueless impulse spending. That we are over-spenders, who at best use money to still difficult emotions and at worst cannot control our greedy desires.
Financial stress is rife in the western world, perhaps no more so anywhere than the United States.
In 2015 the American Psychological Association released research from interviews with 3,068 Americans showing 72 per cent of them “reported feeling stressed about money at least some of the time during the past month”. For a big majority (64 per cent) money was a “somewhat or very significant source of stress”.Read More
A huge 47 per cent of Australians between 26 and 64 – 6.1 million people – are not likely to have enough money, even accounting for superannuation, assets and the aged pension, to maintain a “comfortable standard of living” in retirement. That’s according to CommBank’s ‘Retire Ready Index’, which is compiled using data from 10 million Australians’ superannuation accounts and Australian Bureau of Statistics’ data on personal wealth.