How planning my week broke me out of poverty

If you're somebody who tends to spend your money rather than save your money, let me just tell you, first of all, like most of the financial budgeting advice out there is not meant for you. So if you feel like you've tried a bunch of different things and they don't work, don't blame yourself, don't beat yourself up. It's just like, nobody is out there speaking your brain's language. If you're a spender rather than a saver, let me just describe the difference between these two kinds of people, okay? A saver is somebody who likes predictability, they like structure, they like planning, they like routine, they don't like surprises, okay? They like spreadsheets, they're meticulous, they're calm, they drink green tea in the morning, okay? The spenders, we ain't that, okay? We don't like spreadsheets. We usually, thank God for the spreadsheet people, but it's not us. We are very intuitive. We like to go with, like, a vibe and how things feel and like we don't want to be restricted and we're very dopamine driven, and dopamine is the molecule of more. And I'm going to speak now for my neuroscience background. Dopamine is the thing that gets us to repeat a behavior, okay? And it's like, it just wants more. It just wants more. This can be a good thing and a bad thing for us spenders depending of what we want more of, because that's, it's the same kind of like pathway as addiction, um, that dopamine, like the molecule of more. And so whatever behavior we repeat, we tend to get rewarded for. So if we are rewarded consistently for spending, then we will continue to spend. And one of the ways that I actually was able to break out of this cycle was I had to learn the skill of saving in a different domain of my life, with my time. When you plan your week, you're actually budgeting your time, okay? And the reason why planning your week is actually so great for people who have ADHD, who are spenders, who tend to like a little bit of chaos, maybe CPTSD, is because planning your week is not about the plan going according to plan. If you can throw that out the window, it'll actually make planning a lot more fun. Planning your week is about getting a part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, online, because what happens with us intuitive people is that we're not really thinking, we're doing, which is great, but we need more thinking and less doing sometimes. Um, prefrontal cortex gets the blood to flow out of the amygdala, which is the action center of our brain, it's fight or flight, and it's impulsive. Um, the prefrontal cortex is in charge of decision making, planning for the future, executive functioning, and impulse control. All things we need for what? Budgeting? Here's what I'm getting at here. If you tend to be a spender, you tend to be late for things all the time. And the reason that you're late for things all the time is because you're not budgeting a buffer between the things that you're doing. And that's the same thing with your money. It's like the reason you keep getting down to zero, the reason that you keep feeling like you're stuck in survival mode and you can never get ahead is because there's no buffer. So if you can learn to just write down what you're going to do this coming week, just write it down in a planner, and just create some space between what you're doing, you're going to give yourself one, the opportunity to use your prefrontal cortex, and two, you're going to give your nervous system the opportunity to go into that parasympathetic part of your nervous system, the rest and digest. And this, my friends, is what has helped me break out of poverty. It's what's helped me break out of a survival mode. It's what helped me call my nervous system down. And then somebody this morning, like, were like, my schedule is calming down, and I can finally take a breath again. Let me tell you what happens on the other side, dude. You have so much more creativity. You're so much more present with your friendships. You do better at your job. You stop resenting your job so much for taking up so much of your time. It just, you feel a lot more abundant with everything. You feel the less of an urge to spend your money because you're just, like, not frantically running through your life. Try it out. Just like, fuck around and find out. See what happens.