Journal of Financial Planning: May 2024
WHO: Stevyn Guinnip
WHAT: Founder and Chief Wellness Officer, Grow Wellthy
WHAT'S ON HER MIND: “[To some people] financial wellness means having your estate in order and having enough money to pay your bills, and that’s about it for some people. And then it goes all the way to include the physical and mental capacity of your body to be able to fertilize your ability to earn more or deal with stress.”
Broad strokes, what are your general thoughts on the state of financial wellness and well-being in the United States?
I’ve been in this industry 25-plus years, and we’re not moving the needle. As an industry, we’re sending the wrong message to people that you have to go to the gym and you have to go on a diet to be healthy. If you can reduce your stress, while having a good financial portfolio or not being in debt or being able to pay your bills, you can get healthy that way too. And much easier, much quicker, just by managing your stressors.
I frequently have to apologize for my industry because we have sent the wrong message that you need to stress your body more to get healthy when sometimes the answer is you need to actually recover better and manage your stressors, your calendar, your finances, your relationships, or get sleep, more so than you need to go to the gym. We’re not doing so hot: 70 percent of the population, at least in the United States, is either overweight or obese. Debt has increased substantially since COVID-19 happened. And stressors, at least in the financial services industry, are 31 percent higher than they were in 2008 when the housing bubble happened. You’ve got what I would consider a toxic cocktail for chronic diseases that are going to be plaguing our population for the next few decades.
When you can manage stressors, you’re actually going to do more benefit to your body than you are by going to the gym for an hour every day. I can say that because I’m an exercise physiologist. I come at this from a place where I used to think exercise was the answer, and now I realize that it’s great, but we have to manage the stressors. You can get into two debts or prisons in life, whatever you want to call them. One is a financial prison, going into debt. And the other is the health prison: you get into a health debt. And they aren’t two separate things. They actually exacerbate each other, and they’re very closely connected.”
How does stress differ for people working in the financial industry? Is that more stressful?
Financial professionals [are] trying to manage volatile markets and people who are more stressed than they’ve ever been before—their clients. The financial professional shoulders more stress because it’s where their clients come to get help and get someone to lean on, [and] they end up ratcheting up their own stress. And then you sit behind a computer and have very sedentary days and again you’re met with a perfect suit for creating chronic disease.
There are people who do really well, and they build a whole bunch of financial income or financial resources, but then they forget that their health needs to be a partner in their plans. But then at the other side, if you don’t build wealth, then your health can tank because you are so stressed about it all the time and it’s leaching years from your health span. Money is such a common theme throughout health, and health is a common theme throughout money. I challenge anyone to be able to separate the two. But people don’t typically see them as the same thing. They don’t see how interconnected they are. That’s where I see financial wellness being something [about] how do we get your money in a place where you don’t stress about it anymore? Your cortisol can turn off and your body can repair and heal and not age as quickly.
How do you measure stress? I assume you’re not administering blood tests for cortisol with your clients. So how do you and your clients typically gauge stress levels? Is there more than self-reporting without involving needles?
[There are] three main ways that we test stress, maybe four. One way you can assess your stress really quickly and easily is to just take your heart rate. If you’re sitting still, and your heart rate is high, your body is probably in fight or flight—it’s stressed in a sympathetic nervous system. If your heart rate is low, closer to a resting heart rate, then you’re probably in your parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest and digest. If you know your resting heart rate, you wake up in the morning, you either look at your watch or you take it manually [and see your] heart beats about 60 beats per minute when [you’re] resting. But [if you’re] sitting at your computer typing away but not really moving, not really talking, and your heart rate’s at 85, then you know there’s some stress there.
Another way is something called HRV, which stands for heart rate variability. Most of the wearables like your watch or ring will test HRV now. I love it because it’s like pulling the curtain back on the inside. I have a lot of clients who say, “I’m so chill; people call me the chillest person ever.” And then we look at their HRV, and their body doesn’t feel the same way. Their body is under stress. We look at this heart rate variability and it tells us how different each of the beats of your heart are. You would imagine we want your heartbeat to be really consistent. [But] we actually don’t; we want it to be variable. And when it’s variable, it’s telling us that your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system are both talking. It’s when you have no variability that your body is in full-out chronic fight or flight, and it’s like a poison. It’s kind of like acid on the inside of your body.
You talked about perceived stress—yes. “One to 10: How do you feel right now?”
The fourth one is sleep. If we measure REM sleep and deep sleep and a percentage of those of your total night, we can tell if your body is experiencing stress or if it’s getting good recovery sleep. You might be sleeping long enough but not have enough deep sleep. Once we see [sleep data], it could be that you’re only in deep sleep five minutes a night. There’s absolutely no way your body can recover. That’s why you’ve got brain fog. That’s why you can’t lose any body fat because that’s when people are burning through those storages and repairing all the cellular walls. Five minutes is not going to do it. So you’re going to always feel lethargic, you’re going to make poor decisions. You’re going to have fights with your spouse, you’re going to yell at your kids. People think that they’re not a good person or need to have more self-control, but a lot of that is just they’re not getting really good sleep and they’re in a stressed state all the time.
I’m sure resolving stress for each person is an individual approach. But what’s the most common excuse for not addressing stress that you hear, and what are your tactics or solutions for resolving the excuses?
“It’s just the nature of the job; I can’t get around it. It’s just one of those things that I have to deal with.” That’s common. “I just don’t have time right now. When things slow down.” They never do. Those are the two most common. “I’ve always been that kind of a person; I work better under stress.” “I don’t need much sleep.” I call them thought traps because they’re keeping you stuck in a behavior that is not long-term healthy for you. Stress is good. It helps you get stuff done. But when you tip into the chronic state of stress, where you’re always feeling behind, that’s not where it is.
If you feel like you’re beating yourself up all the time, [that’s] punishment mentality. What I hear is, “I just need to do better. I just need to work harder. I just need to get up earlier. I just need to stop drinking alcohol. I just need to, I just need to . . . ” It’s not that easy to just do more. You’re already doing so much that it’s really important for you to understand that sometimes less is more. If you’re coming at anything to do with health from a punishment mentality, you’re only going to create more stress, and that’s the last thing people need.
I see this all the time. “I’m so tired. And I’ve got the kids, and I just have to squeeze in 30 minutes to go for a run.” They hate it. Their left knee hurts and they’re already behind on everything else, but they feel like they have to go for a run. That’s not true. You’re exacerbating the stress that’s already there and tearing down an already torn-down body. I tell people to nourish or support versus punish.
When it comes to stress, it’s all about how you get the cortisol to turn off in your body. Because when you have a lot of cortisol secreted from the adrenal glands off of the kidneys, it makes your blood sugar go crazy. Then you become a snacker and you crave things and it’s a vicious cycle. When you’ve got the cortisol high, your blood sugar is not regulated as well because your insulin is high. Then you end up storing more body fat, and that creates more stress or feelings of depression and lethargy. Then maybe you want to go buy something to get the dopamine hit. But all of those are just creating more stressors for future you.
I always encourage my clients to look at yourself right now as you are and just name it what it is: “I’m trying to get more done in my day than what’s physically possible. I have to cut some things out or rearrange or say no.” That’s really where it starts is at the bottom level of a pyramid: you have to start thinking differently. Is this action going to create more stress for future me or is it going to alleviate stress for future me?
You can work out and make yourself stronger so you can lift more weights. How about training yourself to be able to handle more stress like a muscle?
I’ve interviewed 500 financial advisers on this topic, and I would ask them stress questions, and the average financial professional has stress, on a scale of one to 10, of 7.5. It’s pretty high, chronically. The ones who were below five on the stress scale—two, three, four—they didn’t have any different stressors than the ones who were really stressed out. What they had, and this is going to be an analogy, is a bigger bucket to hold their stress, so it didn’t overflow.
A bigger bucket comes from not being in a stress debt. When you have stress this high, you have to recover [as much]. You have to match it. You can’t stress, stress, stress and have no recovery because there’s no buffer built in to overflow. You might think that you need to dive in deeper and just be better, but you have to recover harder. You have to match the recovery with the level of stress that you’re doing because you’re going to need to recover.
After around age 40, definitely 50, the ability for the human body to recover starts to diminish pretty substantially. When you’re 20, you could stay up all night and play basketball all day and be sore a little bit but then you’d be able to do it again the very next day. When you’re 50, you can’t do that; your body just does not recover. Same thing is true for stress.
How you view your stress is really important. Do you see it as good or as bad? Stress is really just you making a negative decision about what your stress means to you. You can think, “Well, stress has actually been really helpful for me; it helped me get my college degree, or it helped me in other ways.” There are definitely things about stress that are good, but if you focus too much on it, then it’s going to be perceived as a bigger bear than it actually is. And then there’s the recovery piece. It’s called metabolic flexibility: if your body knows how to use different energy sources, and it’s very well slept, and its blood sugar is not skyrocketing and crashing all over, you actually have more capacity to deal with stress. Your bucket is bigger with the same stressors.
Do you have anything you want to add that I didn’t ask?
I think that when you approach the concept of financial wellness, it means a different thing to everyone that you might ask. I’ve talked to so many people about this. [To some people] financial wellness means having your estate in order and having enough money to pay your bills, and that’s about it. And then it goes all the way to include the physical and mental capacity of your body to be able to fertilize your ability to earn more or deal with stress. I think an interesting concept is defining what is financial wellness and what scope does it cover for financial advisers. Because I’ve talked to some and they’re like, “It absolutely is part of our job to make sure people look at their financial portfolio through the lens of their health.” Then I talked to other financial advisers and they’re like, “If it has nothing to do with the numbers, it’s not my job or my wheelhouse and it should not be a conversation I’m having with my clients.” It’s very different, the ways money is going to be used from a health perspective. I find it really interesting that there are these two different ends of the spectrum when it comes to financial wellness. It’s used a lot, but when I drill people down on what it means, there’s a lot of stammering and they don’t exactly have a definition for it.