Nurture your money to boost your finances

Build a close relationship with money - it will pay off in leaps and bounds.

Gary Clement for The National

I live a dangerous life. Being tactile is often cautioned against in any social setting, more-so in the gender/social-conduct-sensitised GCC.

Those on the receiving end should consider themselves lucky – I am helping them release a super hormone. Not only is it connected to our emotions – we feel better when we get a dose – but it is now being credited with helping create bigger brains and higher salaries. Oxy­tocin is the name, aka the hug hormone.

However, you and I might have missed that boat, as it is a 20-year study involving premature babies. It found that those born pre-term, who were nurtured at the start of their lives through skin-to-skin contact with their primary carer – so their mother was their incubator – commanded salaries nearly 53 per cent higher than their incubated counterparts.

Along with more money in their life, their cerebral development was significantly higher and they had less stressful lives.

More on the findings of tactile parenting later.

I’m bringing this up because I am especially interested in the relationship between body and mind. And I believe that most of us would benefit from very simple, tactile, or what’s known in learning styles as kinaesthetic methods, to stay on top of managing our finances.

What’s more simple than adding and subtracting a bunch of numbers – at the most basic level of personal finance information: money in, out, what is left?

What is difficult about setting time aside to have a helicopter view of our financial issues: investment, debt, savings, goals?

Nothing. But hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on self-help books and guides to “teach” us the “best” method to do this.

There is no best way. The best way is whatever way you stick with. And I’m advocating going back to basics, and incorporating what neuroscience tells us about how we learn and stick to things best.

Point 1: Movement and cognition are powerfully connected.

2: The right setting and tools help us build positive, powerful relationships with whatever it is we are learning or doing.

3: It is all about building relationships, with yourself and with the matter in hand. In this case, your personal finances.

I am cancelling my membership with a powerful budgeting tool. It’s very clever, and one day I plan to review it. But I’m no longer going to use it because I am disconnected from the input, and therefore the output it calculates. Instead, I am going back to basics.

I bought a beautifully bound notebook. It is a happy shade of orange. Just because. I write down every single item of spend. Then highlight things that group together and add them up.

Yes it is old school and it takes time. But it allows me a connection, a relationship, an emotional resonance with my finances. Doing it this way mixes up various alleged learning styles – there’s the visual, and the doing. It is embodied learning.

The place we do things in is also important. The message from neuroscientists is that reducing stimuli helps to declutter the mind. This is why a walk in a park before settling to do something cognitive serves us better than a walk in a mall or through a built-up area. A walk is statistically linked to oxytocin release too.

There is also irrefutable evidence that being physically active literally feeds the brain. It is said Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity while riding his bike.

Why not incorporate all these findings and create the “best” way of managing our finances – best being whatever way we stick to. My routine as of this week will be: jump up and down – if weather, time or children don’t permit for a walk. Make a piping hot cup of tea. Have my highlighters, calculator ready. Settle in my cubbyhole – decluttered – with my orange notebook – filled in daily, plus any other information I need to look at that week. Phone on silent, face down.

The following hour will be my date with me – my current self and my future self-hovering.

Set aside an hour that works for you. We need to do this weekly. It is relationship building at its best: a boost of oxytocin in situ, your favourite beverage at hand, in a calm setting, with all the information you need.

Just like any other relationship, we need to work at this one every day, build up comfort, trust and a safe feeling – the sort that only comes from knowing what you’re dealing with.

What I outlined is not all kin­aesthetic – there are strong visual elements too. It is said that 65 per cent of us are visual learners. Some studies rate 50 per cent of high-school children as kinaesthetic learners – they learn through doing. I know I am both.

Kinaesthetics is often called tactile learning. And this is how powerful being tactile is: the premature kangaroo mother care babies I mentioned in the study had more than twice the chance of living than incubated babies. Incubated babies are twice as likely to die (7.7 per cent versus 3.5 per cent).

We don’t know for sure how much skin-to-skin contact we had as babies, but what you do know is how you choose to be and behave today. Go on.

Be an oxytocin-releasing super- ­hero whose special power is actually managing money in your life. May the force be with you. It is certainly within you.

Nima Abu Wardeh describes herself using three words: Person. Parent. Pupil. Each day she works out which one gets priority, sharing her journey on finding-nima.com