You’ve built wealth. So why does anxiety persist?
For most of my life, I thought the answer was more.
One more degree. One more role. One more milestone crossed off a list I kept endlessly extending. Enough was always just out of reach. I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t let people in. I had decided, somewhere deep and early, that needing others was a risk I couldn’t afford. So I built everything alone, and called it strength.
Voilà. That’s what had been modeled to me — by family, and by a world that seems to reward people who need nothing from anyone. Or so I thought.
Then my health stopped cooperating. In the stillness that followed, a question finally caught up with me — one I had been outrunning for years:
Who am I when I can no longer rely on achievement to prove my worth? Am I still worthy? Loved? Seen?
If you’ve built significant wealth and still feel that low hum of unease, you likely already know this question. You may not have named it yet. But it’s there.
I’ve come to believe we’ve had it backwards all along.
Here is what I found on the other side of that question.
The Wealth That Doesn’t Show on a Balance Sheet
There’s a kind of capital that does not appear in a financial statement. Spiritual capital is the invisible architecture of values, meaning, and connection that operates almost entirely beneath our conscious awareness. It shapes so much: how we show up for the people we love, how we respond when the market drops, what we ultimately believe our life is for. We rarely choose these responses deliberately. They arise from somewhere older and deeper: the stories we absorbed about worth, safety, and what it means to be enough.
Most of us don’t know this architecture exists until something disrupts it.
If the word “spiritual” feels abstract, think of it this way: it’s the relational glue that holds us together when external circumstances shift. It shows up in two ways.
The first is horizontal: our bonds with family, friends, and community. The people who would notice if we were gone. The relationships that remind us we don’t have to navigate life alone.
The second is vertical: our connection to something larger than ourselves. Whether that’s faith, a deep sense of purpose, or a set of values we refuse to compromise, it provides a kind of stability that circumstance can’t easily touch.
Together, these connections shape our sense of safety and what “enough” actually means — in ways that have very little to do with a number.
Mattering: The Question Beneath the Anxiety
For decades, researchers across psychology and sociology have studied what they call “mattering” — the felt sense that we are significant to the world around us. That others notice us. That our presence makes a difference. That we would be missed.
It sounds simple. But for many high-achieving people, mattering has become deeply entangled with productivity. Worth gets attached to output, roles, and accumulation rather than to the simple fact of existence.
And society rewards this. Each milestone delivers a hit of validation, which raises the bar for the next one. The hedonic treadmill is the official term for this phenomenon— the tendency to return quickly to a baseline level of satisfaction no matter what we achieve. In practice, this means the next goal must always be a little larger, a little further away. The treadmill keeps moving. We keep running. And we call it ambition. Until something stops us: a job lost or a diagnosis. A moment of stillness we didn’t choose. Suddenly the treadmill is gone, and we’re left standing in silence we don’t know how to inhabit.
During my recent group coaching session with financial psychologists Ted and Brad Klontz, the question “Why do I matter?” prompted a powerful reflection. Beneath most financial anxiety — the checking of accounts, the rerunning of projections, the seemingly unexplained dread in otherwise comfortable lives — is some version of that question.
Research in wellbeing science consistently points toward three important contributors to happiness and life satisfaction: a felt sense of agency over our lives, the feeling that we matter to others, and a sense of meaning and direction. These are among the most well-supported findings in the field.
And yet when connection feels uncertain and purpose feels elusive, money becomes the one thing we believe we can control. In response, we may grip it tighter, or do just the opposite, and try to buy our way into happiness.
What’s Actually Happening in the Brain
This isn’t just philosophy. Neuroscience is beginning to map what happens when we cultivate connection, meaning, and reflective practice — and the findings are very encouraging.
When we meditate, pray, spend time in nature, or simply sit with ourselves in stillness, we are doing more than finding peace. We are changing the brain. Research suggests these practices strengthen the regions associated with empathy, self-awareness, and emotional regulation. It further suggests that sustained contemplative practice increases cortical thickness in the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for deliberate thinking, values-based decisions, and the ability to pause before reacting. Over time, the brain may become less reactive to threat and better at responding from wisdom rather than fear.
Put simply: the practices that connect us to something larger also make us more available to the people around us. Vertical feeds horizontal.
And connection is its own medicine. When we feel genuinely seen and supported by another person, the brain releases oxytocin — sometimes called the bonding hormone, though it is far more than that. It deepens trust, softens the perception of threat, and signals to the nervous system that we are safe. We are wired, at a biological level, to regulate through each other. Isolation doesn’t just feel painful. It makes everything feel more dangerous.
This is why, under stress, we default to what behavioural finance calls System 1 thinking: fast, reactive, and driven by fear rather than values. And this is why the antidote is rarely more information. It is regulation. It is relationship. It is the simple, human experience of not being alone with it.
When the Numbers Are Fine but You’re Not: David’s Story
The individuals in this blog, David and Pat, are composite characters. They are not real people, but they represent real experiences that come up often. Any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental.
David is 61. He built his wealth over three decades in commercial real estate — methodically, patiently, at considerable personal cost. By any reasonable measure, he has more than enough. His financial plan is sound. His advisor has told him so, more than once.
Then the market turns. Not catastrophically — but enough. His portfolio drops 18% over six weeks. He starts watching the numbers daily. Sometimes hourly. He stops sleeping well. He cancels a planned charitable donation to the community foundation he’s supported for years. He begins moving assets into cash. He tells his wife, Pat, 65; they should “wait and see.”
On paper, David is fine. The numbers, though humbling, have not touched his actual life. But the body doesn’t read spreadsheets. Something far older than logic has been disturbed: his sense of safety.
Here is something we rarely say in financial planning, but probably should: for many high-achieving people, money has become a surrogate for connection. Not by choice. Not consciously. But when early relationships taught us that people are unpredictable and love is conditional, we migrate toward what we can control. Toward what won’t leave. Toward what we can build, measure, and defend.
People disappoint. Balances don’t.
Until they do. And when they do — even briefly or mildly — it doesn’t just feel like a financial problem. It feels like the ground is gone. Because for most of human history, it would have been. Our ancestors survived not through individual wealth, but through belonging. To lose standing within the tribe, to be cast out, to be left without support, was often a death sentence. Our nervous systems have not forgotten this. They were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years in that world.
Money, by comparison, is brand new. As a medium of exchange it is perhaps 5,000 years old. As the primary measure of human worth and security, it is newer still. Many of the financial systems we now organize our lives around are younger than our grandparents. Canada’s RRSP system was only introduced in 1957. The TFSA arrived in 2009. And yet we have handed money the oldest job in human experience: to tell us whether we are safe. So when the numbers drop, something ancient stirs inside us that has very little to do with markets and everything to do with survival.
The background script begins running beneath awareness, sounding the alarm: Am I going to lose my social standing? Will I still belong? Am I enough? Will I still be seen, still be loved?
These are not irrational fears. They are ancient ones. And they deserve to be met with something more than a revised projection.
This is what researchers on scarcity have documented: that a perceived threat to resources, even among those who are objectively wealthy, triggers measurable changes in cognition and decision-making. The mind narrows. Focus collapses onto the immediate danger. Capacity for reflective thought shrinks. We move, almost automatically, into protection mode.
Loss aversion — the tendency to feel losses roughly twice as acutely as equivalent gains — becomes amplified in moments like these. Even seasoned investors make decisions that contradict their long-term values and goals. This is not a weakness or lack of willpower. It is neurobiology at work, something we too often overlook in financial planning.
David’s advisor, rather than presenting updated projections or reassuring him with historical data, asks a different kind of question:
“When you imagine your life ten years from now, what do you want to have stood for?”
The question interrupts the loop. It creates a pause, small but significant, between the emotional flood and the reactive decision. What David needs in this moment is not better data. He needs connection before correction. Regulation, it turns out, is not a solo sport.
David begins to realize that the market downturn has thrown him into prolonged stress; he has slowly drifted away from the very things that once helped him feel grounded, connected, and alive. In the weeks that follow, he intentionally reengages with what sustained him in the past: early-morning walks, time with his faith community, and being present with his grandchildren. These are not simply distractions from stress, but forms of genuine regulation that help create the internal conditions for calmer, more reflective thinking rather than ongoing reactivity.
Slowly, something begins to change. David reconnects with a truth the market downturn had temporarily obscured: his security was never actually in the numbers. It was in his values, his relationships, and his sense of purpose — the very things the portfolio was always meant to serve. And it still does. The market didn’t fail him. It did exactly what markets do: it moved. Volatility isn’t a crisis. It’s the normal, anticipated rhythm of long-term investing. What had felt like the ground shifting beneath him was simply the price of participation.
From that more grounded place, he reinstates the charitable donation he had cancelled. Not out of obligation, and not because the fear has disappeared — but because he has returned to himself.
The Wise Mind: Holding Both at Once
Psychologist Marsha Linehan, in developing one of the most evidence-based approaches to emotional regulation we have, introduced a concept she called Wise Mind: the integration of emotional awareness and logical reasoning. It involves holding both as true — not suppressing emotion, and not being ruled by it. A grounded, balanced state in which both the feeling and the thought can be honoured at once.
This is precisely what David eventually found. Not the elimination of fear, but the ability to hold the fear alongside something larger — his values, his relationships, his purpose. That capacity is not abstract. It can be cultivated. And when it is, it changes not just how we feel, but how we decide.
Research on meaningful philanthropy among high-net-worth donors has documented something similar: that giving from a place of genuine values, rather than obligation or performance, profoundly reshapes how people understand themselves. We don’t give because we have excess. We give because we belong to something larger than ourselves — and because that belonging is, ultimately, what makes the wealth meaningful.
The diagram below may help make this tangible.
Finding Meaning Beyond the Role
In times of transition such as retirement, divorce, the sale of a business, a health disruption, or simply the arrival of a life stage where the old definitions no longer fit, discovering meaning outside of professional identity can feel both disorienting and liberating.
When roles shift, so does our sense of self. Many of us have unconsciously tied our worth to what we produce. Without the role, the question surfaces: Who am I now?
Relationships often become anchors during these periods. Family, friendships, and community remind us that we are valued for who we are — not what we do. Purpose-driven work, service, creativity, and spiritual practice can help create a deeper sense of direction. Meaning is often found in ordinary but deeply human experiences: gardening, mentoring, time with grandchildren, contributing to something that will outlast us.
A large Pew Research study found that the pandemic prompted many people to meaningfully shift their priorities with health, relationships, and time rising in importance relative to career achievement and status. These findings confirm what many already suspected: that fulfillment cannot be measured through titles, income, or external accomplishment alone.
A Reflection I Carry With Me
I experienced this firsthand when my own health took a significant turn, around the same time I left my previous career to start Sapling. For much of my life, I had operated in a constant state of doing, performing, and pushing through. Suddenly, that was no longer possible.
It forced me to ask a question I had been avoiding: Who am I when I can no longer rely on productivity to define my worth?
I found I had two choices. I could become a victim to the circumstances and ask “Why me?” — or I could see the experience as an invitation to ask a different question: What am I meant to learn through this experience that can create new meanings and deeper resilience?
That shift became foundational to everything I now understand about identity, transition, and what it means to have a genuinely healthy relationship with money and success.
But I’ll be honest — it didn’t arrive gracefully. It put me flat on my back and forced me to do the things I had spent a lifetime avoiding: accept help, rest, and see the world through different eyes. For someone wired the way I am, that was its own kind of reckoning.
And then, of course, because I am nothing if not relentlessly curious, I did what I always do, I went looking, trauma-forged drive and all, for the science underneath it. I needed to understand not just what had happened to me, but why. Why had stillness been so terrifying. Why had connection felt so dangerous. And why had rest felt so much like failure.
What I found changed how I think about almost everything. And the most important thing it taught me is this: letting go of old identities is rarely comfortable — but it can become an invitation to step into who we actually are, and to finally let others in.
What Financial Coaching Can Hold
Most financial planning focuses on the numbers, and does it well. A smaller but growing number of practitioners bring psychology into the room, exploring the beliefs and behaviours that shape financial decisions. But very few go deeper still, into the territory of meaning, identity, and purpose — into the question of what the wealth is actually for.
That is the work this blog has been exploring. And it is, I believe, where the most important conversations in financial planning are headed.
By integrating relational and spiritual insight, financial coaching helps individuals align their decisions with who they actually are. It fosters trust, encourages reflection, and builds a healthier, more meaningful relationship with money — one that supports not only external success, but internal fulfillment, resilience, and connection.
Because enough was never just a number. It has always been a feeling. A feeling of safety and belonging. Of knowing that even when circumstances shift, we are still held by something deeper: our relationships, our values, our sense of meaning, and our connection to something larger than ourselves.
And that feeling becomes available not when the portfolio is perfect, but when our lives are aligned with what matters most.
Next month I’ll be exploring where these stories actually come from — and why the relationship you had with your earliest caregivers may be the most powerful financial force in your life today. It is some of the most important work I know, and I cannot wait to share it with you.
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And if something in this blog stirred something in you, about your own relationship with money, worth, or what enough actually means, I’d love to talk.
Thank you for being here. It matters more than you know.
Sapling Wealth & Wellness
Where wealth meets meaning
