In this 30‑day Healthy Habits Challenge video, Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, returns to the topic of money, explaining how financial stress undermines wellbeing and how a single, future‑focused money action can reduce that stress and support overall health. She cites research showing that meeting financial goals improves mental health, then outlines a simple habit: within ten minutes, choose one small financial move that strengthens future financial capability—examples include setting up an automatic savings transfer, automating bill payments, or increasing a retirement contribution by 1%. McColgan emphasizes the power of compounding interest, especially when savings start early, and encourages participants to treat the task as a quick, low‑stress step that can be revisited during weekly resets. She directs viewers to the habit tracker and the program site (healnourishgrow.com/habits) for additional resources and study links, and invites anyone not yet enrolled to join the challenge.
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Hey everyone, I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, and welcome to day 26 of the 30 Days Healthy Habits Challenge. Today we're back to money. We did this one habit earlier in the challenge and we're coming back to it again because as we learned from the previous one, if you read any of the research or just listened to the podcast from before, that money is quite a source of stress for a lot of people. And, and this is no surprise, right? But it does show. In the literature that making progress, making financial goals and taking some of your financial stress away actually creates greater wellbeing. It just helps you feel more settled, less anxious, less stressed. So addressing money things now and again is a good idea. Obviously I think we should be considering what we're consuming, what we're spending money on, that sort of thing every single day. But when you're doing these future plans or kind of more extended timeframe things for savings, that's maybe not something that you're thinking every single day. So I didn't mean to say that. Obviously you shouldn't be focusing on spending on a daily basis, but these kind of larger goals might be something that's more a once a week, once a month sort of thing. So back to today's habit is to make one Future You money move today. And so this is going to be something that lowers financial strain and just gives you stronger financial capability in the future. And that's all associated with better health and well-being. It reduces stress, as I said before, creates stability. And having stability and having control of your finances supports other healthy healthy habits as well. It gives you the finances and the ability to invest in other areas of your health if you need to. And it also— having less stress in your life makes all the behaviors easier to repeat when you don't have stress cropping, cropping up. So to give you some examples to make this easier, do something like set up an autosave program at your bank or on an app, taking $10, $20, $1,000, whatever works in your particular financial situation. To automatically save each month, automate a bill, have a bill or two or all of them that are scheduled to pay every single month so that it takes the stress off of you remembering to send a check or to submit your payment online. Maybe increase your retirement contribution by 1%. This is an area that I'm really interested in because I have always been involved in some degree in my, both my partners have been in finance and I actually ended up doing a speech about it in college. But the compounding interest is such a huge thing. The earlier you start saving, even if it's a small amount, and then I say earlier, I'm like the younger that you start saving, you're— that money just has more time to double and double and double again over time with the, you know, compounding interest. And if you start saving much later in life, it doesn't have as much time to grow. Now that's not to say you still can't start, cuz like every, all of this, you can start anytime, but the younger that you start saving, the better. It'll just set you up much more in the future for having some, again, gains without having to do anything else. So once the money's in there and it's growing with interest, it's kind of just keeps building on itself. If the automation seems too much, maybe it's something like setting yourself a calendar reminder or writing a financial, a small financial plan, maybe for the next week or the next month. So it's, we're doing it in 10 minutes or less. We're not like making a spreadsheet here or creating an empire of things. Of course, if you want to do that at some point, I think that's awesome. But this is just meant to be, again, a small doable habit that doesn't turn you off from it. So setting up an automation, something quick like that, or setting aside more money to save is a good choice here. So if it's triggering too much stress, just do a small step, something in relation to it, and then stop. And we, you can always come back to this at a later date or give it some further thought when it comes for the weekly reset and reflect. As always, the studies are linked in the email that you received and in your tracker. And if you haven't joined yet, that link to join is healnourishgrow.com/habits. You can join anytime. It's never too late. That's probably the theme of this series so far, but, uh, hope you enjoyed this and I will see you again tomorrow.
