Unfortunately, anxiety relating to money is an almost universal experience. We have almost all had a night of restless sleep worrying about an upcoming debt and the current cost of living crisis has exacerbated a lot of this. Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 – which runs from May 12th to 18th – provides an opportunity to open up some of these conversations around the intertwined nature of our mental well-being and financial well-being. Sadly, our mental health and finances can both impact each other, leading to a potentially viscous cycle:

However, there are ways to break this cycle and help is available. This year, Mental Health Awareness Week is focusing on community, highlighting how fostering a sense of community and taking proactive steps can help individuals break this cycle and improve both their financial and mental well-being. Here are four key ways you can help yourself and contribute to a healthier, more supportive environment.

1. Looking after yourself

Finding ways to build and maintain good habits can be greatly beneficial during more challenging periods. Comfort can be found in the smallest of routines like keeping to a regular meal schedule or ensuring you protect your sleep. Finding ways to incorporate some form of exercise into your week can also have a major impact on your overall wellbeing. Taking care of your body can go a long way towards helping you take care of your mind.

There are also fun ways to try to ensure you stick to the routines that give you the most benefits. Building habits and rituals into our daily life can provide a sense of stability when life is particularly chaotic. Things like “Self-care Sunday” might sound silly but having some protected time to look after yourself can be great. It can also help to boost productivity, getting you into a better state of mind and able to tackle life’s daily challenges!

And if needed seek support form a mental health professional. Therapy or counselling can provide powerful tools to help you with your mental health and develop strategies to tackle issues on an ongoing basis.

2. Talking to your friends and family

Although talking about mental health has become much more commonplace, it can still be a tricky topic to broach given the sensitive and personal nature of it. And adding finances into the mix can make things more fraught. However, having these conversations can be really beneficial and we might be surprised to learn how much more commonplace money related mental health concerns are: over a third of adults in the UK report experiencing anxiety related to their finances on a daily basis1, and almost 50% state that money worries impact have negatively impacted their mental health2.

So, although these conversations can seem daunting, sharing that emotional burden with someone you trust can often lead to the discovery that they may have experienced something similar. They may be able to share personal experiences of their own difficulties, and how they managed, which is often both useful and reassuring. And opening up can provide an enormous source of relief, affording you the mental capacity to deal with your problems more pragmatically. Our natural instinct during difficult periods can be to isolate, sometimes feeling it is better to just get on with things alone. However, once we get over the hard part of opening up to those around us we can often be surprised by the generosity of spirit and help available in our inner circles.

3.Talking to your financial planner

Whilst talking to your inner circle can be hugely beneficial, seeking help from your financial planner is also a great idea during times of uncertainty and instability. Your financial planner can provide invaluable peace of mind, helping you feel more secure and confident in your financial decisions. They have a critical role to play in your holistic well-being given the intertwined nature of mental health and finances. By offering you strategies to improve your financial health, this can positively impact your general sense of stability, and people report that following taking financial advice they feel more confident, better prepared to face their day-to-day challenges and worry less³.

4. Create a plan

Using all of these tools to create a plan is a great way of setting yourself up for ongoing success. Finding a solution that suits you and your needs is important, and is something your financial planner can help you achieve this. By creating a plan and breaking it down into individual actionable steps we can start to see the wood for the trees. Things can start to seem less daunting and more manageable. We don’t need to take everything on at once, after all Rome wasn’t built in a day! A good place to begin is knowing where to start and what the journey looks like.

By creating a comprehensive financial plan, you can take control of your financial future and reduce stress. It can also be very helpful to think about the next generation and how to set them up for success. By having these conversations with your loved ones the help can go both ways and giving back can be rewarding in its own right. As mentioned, this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week has the theme of community. Educating your children, grandchildren, and other young people in your life about some simple financial literacy topics can provide a highly valuable resource to them. A recent study of UK students between the ages of 15-18 years old reported the following statistics:

• 81% said they were concerned about money or personal finances⁴.
• 82% stated they wanted to improve their financial literacy⁵.

Help can come in the form of going over some basic financial capability questions, helping their understanding of more involved topics, assisting them with ascertaining their financial goals or establishing a savings plan. By creating a supportive environment, you can help prevent the cycle of financial stress and poor mental health from continuing, building a stronger, more resilient inter-generational community.

Conclusion

Your financial well-being and mental health are deeply interconnected, but by being open about the challenges they can pose you can make significant strides towards bettering your overall wellbeing. As we celebrate Mental Health Awareness Week 2025, remembering the power of community is a great way of seeing the benefits of engaging with these topics: we have the opportunity to not only help ourselves but others as well.

The information in this article should not be regarded as financial advice. Information is based on our understanding in May 2025. Aberdeen is not responsible for the information, accuracy and views of external sources