Workers in the U.S. are under a lot of financial stress, thanks to heavy loads of student debt and medical bills and low-paying jobs.
But that stress is actually something more, a new study shows: a form of financial post-traumatic stress disorder.
Employers might want to sit up and take notice, since financial stress not only preys on their employees, but on their own businesses’ bottom lines.
According to the study “Underwater: Measuring the Psychological Impact of Financial Stress in America, 2016” by Dr. Galen Buckwalter and David Herman, not only are Americans still suffering from the effects of the Great Recession, but the effects of being so short of money are having a long-lasting effect.
The study said that “aspects of the financial lives of many Americans are destructive to health and current levels of consumer debt appear to be in part to blame.”
It’s already known that financial stress drags down on employee productivity, distracting them from work tasks in a range of ways, from worrying to phone calls from creditors to hours or days lost to illnesses brought on by stress.
But the effects of acute financial stress (AFS), the study says, affect people’s health in drastic ways.
Buckwalter, who has worked with Marines and humanitarian workers suffering from varying states of stress, said in the report that “financial stress is affecting our cognitive processes.”
Answers provided by study subjects on their attitudes and actions toward money, Buckwalter wrote, caused researchers to see “a profound problem emerge. Feelings of stress, failure, isolation and paralyzing fear kept surfacing in our analyses with alarming regularity.”
In fact, the study found that, when considering the symptoms of PTSD and the responses of the study participants, “23% of adults and 36% of millennials experience acute financial stress at levels that would qualify them for a diagnosis of PTSD.”
Not only are people suffering PTSD symptoms (nightmares, flashbacks, isolation, depression, hyperarousal (inability to fully calm down, even in sleep) but the study said that the constant stress caused by inability to meet financial obligations and feelings of powerlessness is driving people toward such physical ailments as coronary heart disease and addiction.
Once it’s fully understood “how many people around us are traumatized by the money in their lives and how it’s affecting everything from sleep to interpersonal relationships,” the study said that “[a] reinvention of our collective relationship with money must become a priority because without it, we’re only going to incur more debt and suffer the ever-increasing health consequences of this problem.”
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