"Looking makes me feel sick"

For some readers the reasons so far are beside the point. You know the bills don't shrink in the drawer. You know the rough idea is unreliable. You don't look because looking produces a physical reaction. Your stomach tightens and your heart speeds up, and you get a wash of shame or panic. The app icon alone can do it. Knowing that avoidance is irrational doesn't help, because the reaction comes from somewhere below reasoning.

I take that seriously, and the research does too. Thomas Richardson, Peter Elliott and Ronald Roberts pooled 65 studies on personal debt and health. Across them, the odds of having a mental health problem were about three times as high for people with unsecured debt as for people without, and the link with depression was nearly as strong. The authors are careful to say that causality is hard to establish. Debt can cause distress, distress can cause debt, and other things can cause both. But the association is large and consistent. Money trouble and mental distress go together, and if looking at your finances makes you feel ill, you're having a common human reaction to something that matters.

There's also evidence about what money worry does to the mind. Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao ran a study in which people were asked to think through a financial scenario and then given tests of reasoning. Among participants who were short of money, thinking about finances lowered their scores. Among those who were comfortable, it didn't. In a second study, farmers did worse on tests of the same kind before the harvest, when money was tight, than after it, when they'd been paid. The researchers' explanation is that money concerns take up mental room and leave less for everything else. I should add that this line of research has been debated since it was published, and I wouldn't lean on the exact sizes. But the general idea matches experience. Money worry is heavy, and it occupies you even when you're trying to think about something else.

That last point bears on the habit. You might suppose that not looking keeps the worry out of your head. I don't believe it does, and this is my own view. You don't stop knowing that the drawer exists. Some part of you is aware of it all the time, and aware that the number is out there, unseen. The worry runs in the background, like a program you can't find to close. You're using up the mental room either way. If you don't look, you carry the weight and get no information in exchange for it.

If the sick feeling is what stops you, I've three suggestions.

Separate the number from the verdict. Chapter 2 suggested that a balance feels like a judgment on you. It's a fact about a bank account on a particular day, produced by pay dates, bill dates, prices and a few decisions. It isn't a measure of your worth, your intelligence or your adulthood. Plenty of competent, admirable people have low balances, and plenty of fools have high ones. When you look, try to read it as you'd read a thermometer, as information about conditions.

Make the looking small. The reaction is strongest when looking is a rare, dreaded event with the whole state of your finances riding on it. Chapter 10 proposes ten seconds a day. It's hard to stay frightened of something you do every morning while the kettle boils. This is the ordinary principle that fear shrinks with repeated, harmless contact. I'm applying it here on my own reasoning, since I haven't found it tested on bank balances.

Don't do it alone if you don't have to. For the first proper look, and especially for emptying the drawer, having another person in the room makes a large difference. They don't need to see the numbers. They only need to be there, making tea. Harkin's review in the last chapter found that monitoring worked better when it was reported to someone else. My guess is that company also makes the feelings more bearable.

If the reaction is more than discomfort, the book may not be enough on its own. You might have panic, sleepless nights, or a low mood that has lasted weeks. The NHS advises seeing a GP if you're still feeling worried, anxious or low after a few weeks of money trouble. Chapter 14 comes back to this.