Like the film Radinby Dany Boon, you can accumulate several hundred thousand euros in your current account or savings accounts… without ever feeling reassured. Indeed, with half a million aside for example, your retirement supplement is financed, your mortgage loan is certainly repaid, we can even say that your precautionary savings are overflowing. And yet, as soon as the press headlines about a drop in the stock market or the price of gold, or even a return of inflation, concern returns. You check your accounts several times a week or day, you tell yourself that it’s not yet enough…
If this picture sounds like you, you are not alone, and the root of the problem is probably not financial. Boris Charpentier, psychologist and coach, sees things this way: “You can lack money without feeling anxious, and you can be rich without ever feeling secure. The difference lies more in the brain than in the bank account. » The work of Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, two Nobel Prize winners in economics, established in 2010 that beyond a certain level of income (4,900 euros per month at the time), additional money hardly improves well-being on a daily basis. “Money objectively improves financial security. But it does not guarantee a feeling of security”assures our psychologist.
Anxiety does not seek reasonable security
Why is 500,000 euros not enough to reassure certain people, when this sum objectively places them in the income bracket? richest 20% in heritage in France ? “The brain does not measure risk objectively: it measures uncertainty. For an anxious person, 500,000 euros does not meet the fundamental question: “what if something goes really wrong?” Anxiety does not seek reasonable security, it seeks absolute security; however, this does not exist »replies Boris Charpentier. So, each new financial level brings temporary relief… but the brain quickly gets used to it and moves the safety threshold further.
Some answers may be found in childhood. Most of our implicit beliefs about money are constructed early on from of the family environment : “We can lose everything overnight”, “you always have to plan for the worst” or even “the stock market is risky”. An adult can thus have comfortable assets while continuing to react emotionally like the child who experienced the fear of lack.
Several biases do not help us put these beliefs into perspective: hedonic adaptation, for example, quickly transforms what was exceptional into ordinarybecause humans get used to everything. We also have loss aversion, described by behavioral economics, which shows that losing an amount causes much more intense psychological suffering than the pleasure provided by an equivalent gain. Boris Charpentier also cites the bias of social comparison (“I have a lot, but less than my neighbor”) and the availability bias, which pushes overestimate the crises we hear about endlessly in the media.
The solution is not in his bank account
To free yourself from this anxiety, Boris Charpentier asks the question: “Are you looking to be safe, or are you looking to never feel worried again? These two objectives are radically different. The first is realistic, the second is impossible. » Continuing to accumulate savings when the anxiety comes from elsewhere is treating the wrong problem. “Some people don’t have a money deficit. They have a lack of feeling of security. And no heritage can fill this gap. »
