What to do if you're drowning in debt

What to do if you're drowning in debt. All right, here's what you do if you're just absolutely drowning in debt. And I'm going to speak from my own experience as somebody who has lived on $10 an hour and then made $150,000 in my first year of sales, like broke out of poverty, survived homelessness. I am not a financial advisor, okay? But I do have a degree in neuroscience and I like to talk about the brain science behind it because most of the budgeting advice out there is for savers, not spenders. And if you're in a lot of debt, I'm gonna guess you like to spend your money. All right. So if the problem was a math problem, this is the issue is that most of the budgeting advice out there is just like, you just have to put it in a tracker and stick to the plan. You're not going to do that. I know you're not going to do that. You know I know that you know, you're not going to do that. If it was a math problem, fourth grade would have solved the issue. It's not a math problem, it's an emotional issue. So you're likely somebody who likes to spend their money, okay? Spending your money is a dopamine activity. Dopamine is the molecule of more. It's the thing that says do it again. So when you're drowning in debt, there's two parts of your brain that are relevant for this conversation. Your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. What happens is our amygdala is usually the one that takes over on the financial decision making because our finances are so emotional, like they're so traumatic, they're usually tied up in past trauma. The amygdala is very unconscious, it's impulsive, it's emotional, it's reactionary, okay? Its job is to determine if something in our environment is a threat. It asks one question: is this going to kill us? Okay? And so we behave from a place of I feel threatened, you're not going to make good decisions. Okay? What to do if you're drowning in debt? What needs to happen is you have to separate your objective from subjective experience. Why? Because it gets blood to flow from your amygdala to your prefrontal cortex. Okay? And so if you can separate the two and just notice that there's a difference, you get blood to flow to your prefrontal cortex and you're going to be able to make objective decisions about debt. You know, like, what do I do now? Go get that template. Start there. See if that helps out. You know, like naming things that are indisputable facts about your reality. That's going to help you make objective decisions about debt because debt is just numbers. It's just math. We just add all these stories onto it. And then when we spend our money, we add stories onto it. It's all emotional. It's all from trauma. And so if you can separate the two, the more you can separate the two, the more in control you'll be of your finances and the more likely you will be to stick to a plan. Okay? If you need a budgeting template, also people always ask me in these videos, go to the link in my bio. You can use it. It's free. Um, it may or may not help you. You can try it out. If you're like, okay, what do I do now? Go get that template. Start there. See if that helps out.