Do you ever feel like, no matter how much money you make, it doesn’t satisfy you? You may be stuck in the “cult of never enough,” says Manisha Thakor, who earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and is the author of “MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your ‘Enough,'” which will be released August 8.
“What’s soul destroying about it is that you end up having this relationship with money, work, success, and accomplishments that puts you on this hamster wheel because you can never get enough of them,” Thakor tells CNBC Make It.
She herself had spent most of her life on that hamster wheel, she notes, while working in the financial services industry. In the process, she damaged her relationships, and mental and physical health.
She realized she was living her life based on the equation, “Self worth = Net worth.”
Since money is used to measure how well a company is performing and growing, it can be easy for people to unintentionally use that same mindset when evaluating their own success and happiness, she says. The problem with that way of thinking is you can end up running a race in which there’s no finish line.
That can lead to feeling unsatisfied with your life despite your accomplishments and how much money you’ve earned, she says.
“In the absence of emotional well-being, incremental money above and beyond what you need doesn’t increase your life satisfaction,” she says. But it does help to have confidence and clarity about your relationship with money and the role you want it to play in your life.
With that in mind, Thakor recommends a better equation: Financial health + Emotional wealth = Money Zen.
What is financial health and emotional wealth?
Your financial health is your ability to use money to meet your needs, such as paying rent, buying groceries and putting money toward your retirement and emergency savings, she says.
While those goals are important, meeting them won’t amount to feeling satisfied with your life unless you build emotional wealth too.
That means cultivating the things that will help you live a full and intentional life outside of money, Thakor says. For her, emotional wealth means lingering, exploring, and discovering all the small moments and experiences that bring her joy in her everyday life.
How to build emotional wealth
When thinking about what defines emotional wealth for you, try asking yourself what you would start and stop doing if you had unlimited financial resources and very limited time, Thakor says.
People usually say they would stop worrying or stop doing tasks or chores they don’t care about, Thakor says. Instead, they would start spending more time with friends and family, or start traveling more.
To find your own definition of emotional wealth, ask yourself questions such as, “When in my life was I the happiest? Where was I? What was I doing?” or “What creative activities did I once do that brought me joy?,” Thakor says.
Your answers to questions like these can help you to figure out how to allocate your time toward filling your emotional wealth bucket.
“So many things that build emotional wealth are actually free like connecting with other humans, reading, being in nature,” she says. “That’s how you have a truly rich life.”
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