Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
It's really important to know that our survival wiring, especially if we're in a state of acute or chronic stress, our survival brain is going to do whatever it takes to prevent us from rewiring our nervous system. It does not want us to break up our neuro tags and create new ones because that requires calories, that requires energy. It's energetically expensive to rewire ourselves. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level.
Kate Northrup:Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups. You may have heard me say it. You may have heard somebody else say it. Money loves clarity.
Kate Northrup:Clarity is magnetic to money. It is also magnetic to everything else. However, for so many people engaging with money, looking at money, doing math, having to do with money brings up so much stuff, so much emotional baggage, so much nervous system dysregulation that they can't actually get the clarity that they know they need to have, and they end up just avoiding it for years, possibly decades. I certainly know because I was one of those people. I was racking up a whole bunch of credit card debt in my early twenties.
Kate Northrup:I had no idea how much I spent. I had no idea how much money I made. I had no idea how much debt I had, and I thought unconsciously, because when I say this out loud, you will see that this makes no sense, but, like, there was a part of me that I think was magically thinking that someday, somehow, someone would come along and save me so that I would never have to deal with it. Well, spoiler alert, that never happened. And I'm so grateful that no one came along and saved me because I never would have found out what I was made of.
Kate Northrup:I never would have built the strength that I have now and the level of financial power that I feel right now and the level of clarity that helps me move through the world in a way where I have agency and choice and where I feel like I can cocreate the reality that I desire, or at least that is in my highest possible purpose, because, you know, sometimes I don't get what I want, I get what I need, just like everyone else. So, what do money, what does money clarity have to do with you? Well, if there's any part of your life where you have financial vagueness, and this is really, really common, the bummer is that financial vagueness is a money repellent. When money does not feel safe and cared for, it will not come to you, and so financial avoidance is a surefire way to make sure that money will avoid you, but financial clarity creates magnetism. Now so many people, like I said, don't actually feel fundamentally safe with money, and that's usually unconscious.
Kate Northrup:I don't think most people would say, like, I don't feel safe with money. Most people would say, I want more money, but then they ignore their money. So that doesn't align. Right? That's a misaligned action.
Kate Northrup:That's a mis misalignment in their energy around money. But what is it? Why is it that we don't feel safe getting financial clarity? Why is it that sitting down and creating a spending plan with your partner can bring up so much emotion? Why is it that when we sit down with our CPA, we can, feel like our heart is beating or we disassociate and, you know, leave our bodies or whatever may happen.
Kate Northrup:Well, that is because of something called neuro tags. So neuro tags are kind of like a fingerprint, a fingerprint of brain and nervous system activity, and neuro tags are a series of inputs of different stimulus in our external environment that creates a particular output, and those inputs are associated with particular experiences so that we create an output, and that output might be a specific behavior, a specific sensory experience, a specific emotional experience, or some kind of dysregulated nervous system response in the hyper or hypo department, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop. So what do we do about our neuro tags having to do with money? Well, I'm gonna give you a practical example. So every year at tax time in my household growing up, there was a tremendous amount of stress.
Kate Northrup:My dad would have piles of paper all over the dining room table, all over the living room floor, and there would be several nights where he stayed up all night long. He was clearly unavailable for anything else. There was tension between my parents. There was this real sense of stress and pressure around time and money. Now I didn't know really what taxes were at the time.
Kate Northrup:I was a kid, but I knew they had to do with money, and I knew my dad was stressed out, and I knew that, emotionally, my parents were not were not available at that time. And so there was a sense of retreat, of emotional nurturing, and emotional safety. There wasn't, you know, there wasn't, like, crazy yelling, or it wasn't particularly scary in a direct way, but there was an absence of presence. So what that created from repetition, right, the more, an experience is repeated, the more, little the literal more space that neurotag takes up in your brain. I'll explain that in a minute.
Kate Northrup:But, basically, it was repeated, so it got ingrained in my neural pathways. So there were several several stimulus stimuli that created that neuro tag of money, dealing with money leads to emotional discomfort. Like, that was the straight and narrow neuro tag, right, for me. So there was the stimulus of paperwork. There was the stimulus of tax time.
Kate Northrup:There was the stimulus of conversations about money. There was conversations between my parents about money. There was, like, financial details. Right? So these were all particular stimulus associated with a particular experience that I had as a child that I didn't really have information or details about, and so it created a neurotag, which is an unconscious way that we respond in our brain and nervous system to particular stimuli, and the more often that particular pathway, neural pathway is used, the more myelinated it becomes.
Kate Northrup:What is myelination? Myelination is basically if you have a neural pathway, which is specific neurons that get fired together over time, they actually get a coding in them called myelin, and that coding gets thickened over time. So those neuro tags literally take up more brain space, like, more area, more mass. It is similar. Myelination is like if you have an iPhone charger or you have any kind of electrical cord, that plastic coating around the outside so that it sends the electrical signal or the electrical current where it needs to go and so you don't get shocked, that's the same thing as myelination in our brain.
Kate Northrup:Our nervous system is essentially our body's electrical system. So the my the deeper the the the thicker the myelination is is determined by the the repetition of the number of times you have used that neurotag. Now that was, like, a lot of science, and you may have already left your body. So come on back. Like, if you just spaced out, it's okay.
Kate Northrup:You totally don't need to understand everything I just said. If you're a science nerd like me, welcome. I'm so glad. Now now you know a little bit more about neuroscience. But for anyone, whether you like that or whether you like science or not, what we need to understand is that our response to financial situations is largely illogical, and our beliefs get wired in with those neuro tags based on emotionally charged experiences in our life, and they are neuro tags are essentially the anatomy of beliefs that live in our brain and nervous system.
Kate Northrup:Those beliefs, that wiring, those neuro tags, that neural patterning, like that footprint that sends out a repeated series of neural signals in our system is not necessarily based on whether or not a belief is true. Right? So if you were to, if I were to articulate exactly what my neurotag had to do with financial clarity, and getting clear on numbers, I could say that my belief unconsciously was that financial clarity is emotionally unsafe. Right? That was my experience.
Kate Northrup:I witnessed my father moving towards greater financial clarity. And as a result, there was an emotional fallout and a lack of emotional attunement in my household. Okay? So that belief was wired into my nervous system. It was a neuro tag.
Kate Northrup:It didn't mean it was true. Right? Of course, logically speaking, moving towards financial clarity does not automatically mean there's emotional distress. In fact, as I've over time rewired myself and worked with my own circuit circuitry to dismantle those neuro tags and build new ones, which is what I teach people how to do in the relaxed money program. As a result, I have new neuro tags and therefore new beliefs.
Kate Northrup:And a new belief that actually I have found to be true over and over and over again is financial clarity leads to abundance and peace. So that is absolutely true now in my lifetime. It took a while though because I was a big financial avoider. So in order to create financial clarity, which is absolutely essential for your financial health, you first need to learn how to feel safe in your body as it relates to money. If you have past neural patterning that associated anything financial with any kind of physical lack of safety or emotional lack of safety, this is gonna take a minute, and I promise you, it is worth the investment in repatterning yourself.
Kate Northrup:So where can you start? Well, if you've been listening to Plenti for a while, you know I have a lot of different nervous system healing tools that I recommend, But one of my favorite ones is quite simple, and it is breathing into your lower back ribs. So we can try it together right now. So if even if you're driving, even if you're walking, you can practice this tool. So what you wanna do is, on your next breath in, send your breath to your lower back ribs.
Kate Northrup:I recommend breathing in through your nose and out through your nose because that helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system response. So here we go. We're gonna inhale, sending the breath to your lower back ribs and then exhaling in your own time. And take another one when you're ready, inhaling lower back ribs, exhaling. And let's do another one, and this time on the exhale, you can let out an audible sigh, which tones the vagus nerve is also excellent for parasympathetic response.
Kate Northrup:Inhaling, exhaling with an audible sigh. Obviously, that one you have to do through your mouth. Okay. So that is one simple tool you can use to, in small doable parts, over time, signal to your body that it is safe to engage with money. Now one thing to understand, which I've talked about before on the podcast, but if you're new here, hello.
Kate Northrup:Welcome. I'm so happy you're here. And for all of us, we need to hear this stuff a 1000000 times. I said that our nervous system is the electrical system of our body. So if our body were a house, our nervous system would be the electrical wiring.
Kate Northrup:Our brain defaults to survival patterning because we are animals, and especially if we have a an overflowing stress and threat bucket. So maybe we have a lack of sleep, maybe we have high cortisol levels, maybe we are feeling lonely, maybe there's been a lot of negative media, Maybe we've been eating a lot of junk food. We've been traveling a lot. We are having a conflict with our partner. Our kid is having trouble at school.
Kate Northrup:Maybe there's toxins in our environment. Like, there's so many different ways that stress and threat. Maybe we are having an experience of perceived or real financial lack. All of those things can contribute to your stress and threat bucket, and they diminish. They reduce your ability, your capacity to approach new things that consciously or unconsciously feel a little hard, like, to do things that require focus, clarity, and a little more energy.
Kate Northrup:So if you've been a financial avoider or if you just suspect that more financial clarity would be useful for you, then you need capacity. Doing nervous system healing drills can help you to dump or essentially metabolize your stress and threat bucket so that you can increase capacity. Why is this important? If our body were a house, our nervous system and our brain are the electrical, and redoing the electrical is expensive. From a physiological standpoint, what that means is changing neural pathways, especially if they are deeply myelinated, like, if that myelin is thick and they've been used a lot of times, rewiring, like, breaking that down and then repatterning takes a lot of calories.
Kate Northrup:It literally takes a lot of energy. If you are dealing with mitochondrial dysfunction, if you are dealing with metabolic dysfunction, if your energy stores are jacked up, which most of ours are for a variety of reasons, which is kind of another topic for another day, but you can go back and listen to the Sarah Kleiner wellness podcast about light, and we can dive you can dive into that a little bit. We'll link it in the show notes. It's really important to know that our survival wiring, especially if we're in a state of acute or chronic stress, our survival brain is going to do whatever it takes to prevent us from rewiring our nervous system. It does not want us to break up our neuro tags and create new ones because that requires calories.
Kate Northrup:That requires energy. It's energetically expensive to rewire ourselves. So we engage in nervous system healing practices. We love on our nervous system. We practice increasing our energetic capacity to metabolize our stress and threat to dump the stress and threat bucket so that we increase the energy available to be able to engage in things that feel a little or a lot hard.
Kate Northrup:And that's why I love to teach practical nervous system healing practices, like the lower back rib breathing and the audible sigh. So know that your financial clarity matters. It is probably, if not the, one of the most important factors for creating financial power and abundance. Clarity is power. Money loves clarity.
Kate Northrup:Clarity is magnetic. But in order to create financial clarity and actually know, what do I spend on a monthly basis? What do I make on a monthly basis? What do I have in invoices for blessings already received, also known as debt? What are my financial goals?
Kate Northrup:What do I need to have in investments in order to be work optional someday? Like, all of these things require very simple math that you are more than capable of doing. However, you may have neuro tags that tell your body that engaging in financial clarity is actually a threat to your survival. Engaging in financial clarity is not a threat to your survival. You know that logically, but your body doesn't.
Kate Northrup:And so when you signal safety first and free up more capacity, you then can repattern yourself so that you don't have to freaking feel like you're pushing a boulder up the hill and like you have to use willpower and motivation every time you do a financial clarity activity. Over time, it will become who you are, and believe it or not, it'll actually become fun and something you look forward to. That is coming from someone who has had the experience of going from a chronic financial avoider to someone who really looks forward to my money date every single week. I promise you, you can have this experience too. And all it requires, it's not easy, but it is simple, and it is straightforward, and it can be easier in community, is some rewiring.
Kate Northrup:So money loves clarity. Clarity requires safety in your body. I'm so glad you listened to this episode. It is not a common conversation that other financial, folks are having, having, but it's an important one. It is an absolutely critical ingredient.
Kate Northrup:And if you wanna dive deeper, I do encourage you to check out the relax money program because this is what we dive into among so many other things. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. If you're seriously committed to healing your relationship with money, the place to start is my book, Money, A Love Story. It's available in print. It's available digitally, but it is also available on audio in a completely updated and revised edition.
Kate Northrup:So no matter what your book consumption preference is, this is the place with exercises, healing strategies, and repatterning strategies to get started healing your relationship with money. Money, A Love Story is available wherever books are sold. Go get yourself a copy.