Wellness and Wealth: How to Manage Anxiety and Practice Care

Living with wealth comes with unique responsibilities and expectations. While it opens opportunities for you and your loved ones, it also contributes to your anxiety and stress. To maintain your emotional and psychological well being, recognize these challenges and explore self-care behaviors that optimize your happiness and your ability to lead well in your wealth.

Anxiety in a Wealthy Family

Stressors and pressures of wealth include high expectations, societal scrutiny, and complex family dynamics. It’s common to feel overwhelmed by the feeling that you need to uphold your family's reputation or shoulder the ebbs and flows of your family’s fortune.

Among millionaires, there’s a tendency to believe things won’t feel better unless they exponentially increase their wealth. In a Harvard Business School study of millionaires across many levels of wealth, there was a common refrain from respondents, that they’d need to increase their wealth by 500-1,000% in order to be fully happy.

These feelings might compound with guilt, if you feel like you can’t talk to others about the burden of wealth. While you might worry that your concerns will be blown off as so-called “first-world problems,” your feelings are shared by people with modest levels of prosperity. A LinkedIn report revealed that people making $250,000+ were less happy than workers making $50,000-75,000. So your anxious feelings aren’t unrelatable and hush-hush—it’s OK to acknowledge these pressures to yourself and others and to take action steps toward keeping your mind and body healthy.

Self-Care Tactics to Alleviate Anxiety

Accept

Recognize anxious feelings surrounding the burden of wealth. Acknowledge that it’s natural to feel overwhelmed and that getting support is a sign of strength—you’re keeping yourself in mental and physical condition to lead your family.

Connect with Support

Reach out to a trusted confidant, such as a friend, family member, or therapist. If you want to do therapy but need to complement a high-paced lifestyle, consider telehealth options. In 2021, 37% of Americans used some form of telehealth treatment, according to the CDC, and there are plenty of platforms for telehealth counseling.

Set Healthy Expectations

What are your family members asking of you, and what are you asking of yourself? Create a fresh set of realistic goals that line up with your family vision as well as your limitations. When needed, outsource responsibilities to family members, your family’s board, or your family office. Set boundaries when you’re being pulled into tasks that are beyond this scope.

Find Healthy Outlets

Fight the urge to see exercise and rest as diversions of your time. Whether it’s tennis, cycling, boating, pool time, or reading, the activities that strengthen you physically and mentally have a place in the schedule of a balanced, successful person.

Expand Your Self-Care Portfolio

When the same old tricks aren’t helping you relieve stress, then why repeat the same cycles? Introduce a self-care practice that takes you out of your comfort zone. It could be yoga, a mindfulness retreat, a meditation and breathing app, cold plunges, or anything else that you might’ve scoffed at in the past. It’s better to have an open mind than to repeat your same process and expect different results.

Your Best Self Leading a Legacy

With your wellness prioritized, you’re optimizing yourself for sound decision making regarding your family legacy and your wealth. Considering how sound choices now can create manifold benefits to your descendants, it’s time to justify the hours you put toward breathing techniques, books on the beach, tennis matches, and therapist sessions.