This Is Your Stressed-Out Brain On Scarcity

NPR:

Being poor is stressful. That’s no big surprise.

In a poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, 1 in 3 people making less than $20,000 a year said they’d experienced “a great deal of stress” in the previous month. And of those very stressed-out people, 70 percent said that money problems were to blame.

…

Money seems to rule Boria’s brain. Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir says that’s normal for someone who’s not making ends meet. Shafir studies the brain on scarcity. He told me that it doesn’t matter what kind of scarcity you’re dealing with. When humans don’t have enough of something, that fact dominates our consciousness.

“When you’re very lonely, or when you’re hungry, or when you’re poor, a large portion of the day is spent entertaining thoughts related to the source of your scarcity. If you’re lonely, you spend a big part of the day worrying about how to make social connections, which is actually distracting you from other things.” And if you’re poor, you worry about money. Constantly.

Read the whole story: NPR