The Decibel - Do you feel broke? How to overcome ‘money dysmorphia’

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

In the social media age, it’s challenging to know what’s ‘normal’ for your finances. How are others able to afford lavish trips and expensive dinners? Are your friends getting ahead while you���re left behind? Will you be able to afford your long-term goals? This confusion has inspired a new term – money dysmorphia. And for some, this disconnect can mean worry, low self-esteem and a you-only-live-once spending mentality.Shannon Lee Simmons is a Certified Financial Planner and author. She’s on the show to explain what’s driving all this stress, its effect and what we can all do to have healthier relationships with money.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

When it comes to finances, it can be hard to know where you stand compared to others. And that can lead to confusing feelings about money. Can someone tell me what a normal amount of money for a 23-year-old in their savings account should be? So what do y'all feel like you need to make annually to be comfortable? Because I don't feel comfortable. I feel like I see people saying like they have no savings. I feel like I see people having insane savings

and I just don't know what the normal is. Some people are now experiencing something called money dysmorphia when your perception of your financial situation doesn't match your reality. And young people are the most affected by this. A US study from last year found that 43% of Gen Z and 41% of millennials reported money dysmorphia. So today, we're speaking to Shannon Lee Simmons. She's a certified financial planner and the author of several books on financial management.

She'll tell us what's driving all this confusion, the effect it has, and what we can all do to have healthier relationships with money. I'm Maynika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Shannon, thanks so much for being here. I'm so happy to be here. So what exactly is money dysmorphia? To me, money dysmorphia is when the reality of your financial situation doesn't actually align with how you feel about your financial situation, right?

So that's a dysmorphia is that here are the facts, which are numbers, with how you feel about your financial situation, right? So that's a dysmorphia, is that here are the facts, which are numbers, but how you feel inside is absolutely different than what the hard numbers are saying. We hear the term body dysmorphia, where the way you think your body looks isn't actually how you look. Imagine this is similar, then.

Very similar to that, right? So here are the facts, here's all the stats on where you should be from a healthy person perspective, and then like, here's your personal view on yourself. It's very similar. Okay. What does this actually look like for people? Yeah, so I see it crop up in a bunch of different ways.

I think the typical way that I think when we hear the term financial dysmorphia, what we would harken to or what we would think is someone is in a really good financial position or a normal, I say that with quotations, like a standard financial situation where they have enough to pay their bills, save a little bit of money, maybe go on a vacation every now and then. But the way they feel is so deeply anxious, like they're screwed. They are never going to be ahead. They are never going to be okay.

It's a rooted in anxiety. So something like a tariff or something like stock market volatility can Send you into a spiral because you already feel like you're not okay and your finances you're in trouble Even though on paper you're not in trouble. Maybe you're saving maybe you have an emergency account You have all those things in place, but it doesn't feel that way. So I see it coming up in losing sleep lots of like 3 a.m. emails in my inbox, which is like, Oh my god, oh my god over this one, things are actually okay. And I also see it on the other side, which is things are not okay. And someone's

like, whatever, YOLO, I'll spend way out of my means, right? So that's another form of financial dysmorphia, which is like, again, your actions and your feelings about your money is not reflective of necessarily the numbers on paper. So it can be both ways. I typically see it coming up in a very anxious way where you feel broker than you actually are. Okay. Okay. So, you know, some people might be in debt and they know they're in debt and they're

worried about it. That's not exactly what we're talking about here. No. It's kind of that you're actually doing okay, but you're really worried about your financial situation. Yeah, and even if you have some debt, the debt is not necessarily reflective of a lifetime of agony that you're about to face. And this $3,000 you can't pay off on your credit card

is not indicative of you not having a secure retirement and never being okay. And I think that's dysmorphic in itself, right? We have this, this is a fact, you have $3,000 of debt, we can pay it down over this many years, but it's really that logical brain long-term thinking that gets totally overridden by the anxiety and the dysmorphia, and that's where it starts to spiral.

Okay. I feel like a lot of people may not have heard this term before, this money and dysmorphia. Is this something new? I think it's always been there. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years on the financial front lines, if you will. And I work with people from all different walks of life. I think that's really important.

At my work, we don't have an investment management minimum, so we have people who are in financial, you know, like they're having a hard time, and we also have people who are not. And so it's interesting from my perspective to hear the similar terms coming up all the time. Part of my job is to say, hey, it's not as bad as you think, or it is, or you need a reality check. That's always been there. But what I think is it's on the rise, and I think social media has a huge part of that.

And I feel like in the last five to 10 years, especially pandemic plus, this dysmorphia or the amount of times that I'm telling someone like, hey, look at your numbers, like whoa, whoa, whoa, has increased exponentially. And especially with a younger demographic like that Gen Z demographic.

And there's some stats to back that up. In January of last year, there was like a study from in the US by Qualtrics that found that 43% of Gen Z and 41% of millennials reported experiencing this money dysmorphia. And I can say that anecdotally in my practice, I've seen that. Okay. We talked a little bit about like the effects of it, but I guess I kind of want to get to the emotions that are wrapped up in it. Like, what does this disconnect between your financial reality and your feelings towards your financial reality?

What does that feel like for people? Yeah, I think that because it's a distorted perception of your own reality, I think it leads to a sense of fight or flight. More often than not, you can spiral easier. So you might be making your breakfast and then you hear on the radio or you read a headline that says something scary because you know there's wild things that happen in the news and we read them. And if you have this sort of distorted perception of your

own journey, your own financial journey, you can start to spiral like, oh, I'm so bad with money or oh, this is going to be me or oh my gosh, I'm not prepared to handle this. And I think the emotion behind that, yes, it's anxiety, but also what I've really noticed is that it bleeds into all aspects of your life. So money is how we pay for if you want to go back to school, if you want to buy a house one day,

if you want to pay off that mortgage one day, if you want to get a nicer apartment for rent, you want to go to Mexico, you want to go somewhere, it all costs money. So if fundamentally you have a distorted view of how you manage this resource that leads you to spiraling out into anxiety and fear and a lack of hope, then what you're actually saying is I'm like bad at life, right? I'm bad with money is dripping into I'm bad at life because that they are linked. And so there's this fun level that we all,

that I hear a lot of people using that kind of language sometimes like, oh, I just suck at money. And they say it like frivolously or like, I'm just not a math person. Like, oh, this other person in my household handles that. But when you actually drill down, when I'm talking about financial dysmorphia and I'm talking about someone who has that distorted reality

That is where I think triggering events can lead to spiraling anxiety and excessive worry It's excessive worry which can then also lead to irrational spending. Yeah I guess I wonder though How do people know like what is normal in terms of money, right? Because we actually off the top of the show We played some tick tocks of people asking others to share what's in their savings account just to get a sense of what other people are doing. So, so yeah, how do we know where we should actually be financially?

That's a great question. And I think that that's one of the main causes that I've seen this on the rise, especially like post pandemic or like the last 10 years is that what's normal has become distorted. I think social media is one of the main reasons. So you might see your friend who has the same job as you or same similar income bracket. And then on their social media feed, you see all their like awesome clothes

and vacations that they take. And that's a distortion in itself. How can that be? What's normal? What's wrong with me? That right there, that moment of comparison, which is a human thing to do. We always say keeping up with the Joneses with this shameful sort of tsk tsk attitude. And I'm like, that's human. It's literally like biologically bred into us to try to see who's like us,

where we stand socially, so that's like part of our survival skills that are like in there. So to shame it is not really fair. And so when you're comparing yourself to someone who seems like a peer, but they have more money than you or less money than you, it distorts our reality. Right. Like that's a distortion in itself. So I think that's number one. The reason that this is happening is that our brains are processing so much comparison data on social media. Some are killing it, some are not.

What's real? Really hard to get a grip on that. Number two, especially post pandemic, the cost of living skyrocketed with inflation, interest rates went up. Inflation on paper, when you hear in the news that inflation has come down, but that doesn't mean that things feel cheaper.

Everyone still feels like life is so much more expensive, even though you read a headline that says, like, whoa, great job. We have inflation under control, but that doesn't translate to your grocery bill. So that's distortion in itself as well. So you have these headlines that say it should feel one way. You don't feel that way.

You certainly don't spend that way. And then you have peers who are all over the map. And I think that it's really hard to know what's normal. So what can you do? Well, I think number one, honest conversations about money with peers. Talk to your friends about money in a detached way. What do you make? What do you spend on your rent?

How much did you buy your house for? Did your parents help? This kind of blunt feedback is one of the main ways that you can break through your dysmorphia, because you might realize that, oh, I just have $15,000 of credit card debt. You're like, oh, well, I shouldn't be comparing myself to you. Then that's totally different than my situation.

Or, oh, my parents gave me $100,000. Oh, mine didn't. I can't compare myself to you. So really talking about it. And sometimes you think you know what your friends make, and you don't. So I think that that's like you can everybody can do that I think is a very important trend to do and number

two I think financial literacy has a huge part of it. Just understand like where you need to spend or where you can spend and where those limits are I guess. Where the limits are for yourself and trying to block out that comparison thing like where is it for you what's actually real what's not getting a third party I mean this feels biased because I obviously run a financial planning company, but getting a third party to say you're okay and trusting that, you know what I mean? Like trusting that they're not trying to sell you something or like pull the wool over your eyes. That can also help break through the distortion as well as having somebody who's not a family

member or you who's worried about you and terrified for you or thinks that you're irresponsible telling you that you're okay or you need to shift things. I think that that's another way. And I think with the literacy piece, really understanding like when you read those headlines, how do those headlines actually impact you tomorrow or like next week? Because those are scary scary headlines and if you don't understand exactly how that could translate to you as far as your like consumer spending goes on your microeconomic you know situation then it can seem scarier than it is right which leads to the spirals.

We'll be right back after this message. So this is interesting so you're saying you know Frank talk this is an important after this message. So this is interesting. So you're saying, you know, Frank talk, this is an important way to kind of combat this. But there's a lot of factors around people like social media and just kind of the general climate to right now that make it difficult sometimes because you focus on social media, Shannon. I guess I want to talk about the generational differences here because I

imagine this has an impact on different generations differently. So what are we seeing there? Yeah, and again, this comes from my anecdotal evidence of what I've seen over the years. So I've been working with teenagers all the way through to my Boomer clients. So I really do have like an interesting lens. I would say it's truly impacting everybody, but the level of it is different. And I would say that because let's take one of my Boomer clients, for example. They have not had a lifetime of social media, right?

So it's come in in the last 20 years and really started to be used in that demographic, maybe in the last like 10 plus. They still had a physical relationship with money for most of their life where you took money out of a machine, like you took it out or went to the bank. Like physically you held it. Physically held money and then you spent it. So I would say that those sort of hardwired money relationship for the boomers is ingrained in a non-digital way with most of their life having a sort of idea of what was normal and you could get there faster, you could, it wasn't as distorted, right? So now I see it playing out with them as far as,

you know, I'll hear comments like, well, I don't know how our neighbors keep traveling in their retirement. Like, you know, we're on a pension, they're on a pension. So that kind of thing is happening. But I don't see it having the same impact on like, the spending or the spiraling in the same way. We moved down the generations.

It's like GenX, I would say similarly, they had an analog childhood, an analog relationship with money, non-digital, so they have that. But their kids are like Alpha or young Gen Z right now, who are all digital. And so I would also say that they're being impacted by the kids if they have them, about what's normal. And often the Gen X people are sandwiched between caregiving for elderly parents and kids. And so they're really feeling the constraint. And that sort of dysmorphia is like, I find it starting on the social media,

is in how are other people managing? Because I'm struggling. Even though I have a middle class job, which it should pay something. And I also think with my GenX clients, what I hear a lot is like, you know, when they were coming up in their 20s and 30s, this idea of getting to six figures, like think about the sunshine list, right? And it was like, who makes over $100,000?

And now if you make over $100,000 and you're struggling, you think what's wrong with me. So those sort of metrics feel like they haven't changed. So if you've gone up the income ladder, you should feel like you have it way easier than you do. And you don't. And that's distortion. And then the millennials and the Gen Z. This is an interesting cohort. Millennials, some of us had, I mean, I did like a totally analog childhood. I didn't get any social media until I was 23.

And I'm grateful. And I, you know, I watched my parents get money out of the machine and then give it to the pizza man. So like I have a physical relationship with money and it wasn't as distorted but it does impact us too because I think we were the first generation where it was like we spent our youth like in our 20s and stuff online and then Jen said they have a very different relationship with money. They haven't touched it. Their parents have been tapping for a lot of their life. So there's not a physical relationship with it. They are, went through formative years during the pandemic, where everything was online and a lot of volatility, uncertainty, economic uncertainty,

all that stuff has been in those prime youth times, plus social media when they were in high school, very difficult to know what's real and what's not. You've talked a lot about this like tangible relationship with money and I guess, can we just linger on that for a second? What is the significance of that? What do you see differently if you have to like physically hold money and then give it away?

I think it's one of the biggest reasons that we have this dysmorphia and this distortion in our life. I'm not saying everyone should just bust out the cash and stop getting the points. Everyone's going to roll their eyes when I say this. However, I don't think that we can have a conversation about distortion and dysmorphia financially without talking about the fact that we don't touch it anymore. It's gamification of money. It's points. Whereas I feel like when you see the money, you get emotionally attached to it. It's harder to part with it when it's in your hand. And that kind of

like cost benefit analysis, mindfulness, sober second thought, shopping, this kind of cost benefit analysis, mindfulness, sober second thought, shopping, this kind of thing, weighing the pros and cons of what's truly important to me, it is an exercise in mindfulness that we don't even get to do anymore. Because now, a credit card has no actual limit. I mean, there's a limit, but not in the moment. And you can tap, which means that if you're just like,

I want this, and your kid is bugging you, and they're like, I want it, I want it, I want it, you can just say, fine. You know what I mean? Like, there's just not the same level of care put into purchasing that we used to. And I think that's also what distorts things for us. Yeah.

Okay, so credit cards really do kind of perpetuate this non-physical relationship with money, as you say. I also want to ask you about buy now, pay later options, because I feel like we see these a lot these days, right? Everything from like clothing to concert tickets. So I guess how is that affecting money dysmorphia and the way that we see money? One more reason that it is exploding, I think, is because you see people at concerts, right? You see them having the coolest, latest thing that's very expensive.

And if you're sitting there being like, well, I don't have $1,000 to spend on a concert ticket, but they're there at the show and I'm not. So buy now, pay later. It's always been there. But I think it's really giving permission to spend money that technically you don't have. And therefore, because everything gets posted online amongst generations, it is adding to the distortion

that's creating the dysmorphia, which is, how does that person do it? That's the fundamental question that's leading to the dysmorphia. How are they doing it? How am I not? That's it, right there. And the more you see other people succeeding, and the less you see yourself being able to do it,

the broader the financial reality from where you think you should be gets. Okay, so we've been talking about individually, right? How people deal with this and like how that can be warped for your own sense of wealth. But I wonder too Shannon about something broader here, like our warped sense of the economy kind of writ large and financial situations that are bigger than us. You know, for example, we talked a lot about thinking it's a recession when it's not this idea of like a vibe session, right? So do you see a connection here? A vibe session is the best term ever. So yes, sometimes the headlines don't translate to the kitchen table, right?

They don't feel real. So just because you've read that we're not technically in a recession, but your company just said you're on a hiring freeze and there was just layoffs. That's the vibe, right? So the vibe feels like things are not good, but the headlines are fine or vice versa. The headlines are terrifying and you're like, should I be terrified? I don't feel terrified, but like everything seems scary. So I think that that's where that financial literacy piece on a macro session, like, okay,

what does it mean when there's stock market volatility? Should you be panicking for the fear of your future or should you be breathing through it? Like, where is your risk tolerance on that and what does that mean for you? Because for example, if I had somebody who was retiring in two years, I think that they have a right to be terrified about volatility. If I have somebody who's 25 and they've just opened an RRSP, yes, that might be painful in the sense that this is your first exposure to risk tolerance, but like great time to

learn, chill out. You know what I mean? But like that's the literacy piece there. And then also with the macroeconomic piece, knowing how inflation, how interest rates impact you, what does that actually mean for you? And if there is a recession, how does that impact you? Because when you don't know, everything seems so much scarier than it actually may be and the vibes might be off. There we go.

Yeah, exactly. All right. We have a few minutes left, so I want to get some advice from you before we leave. How can people avoid money dysmorphia in the first place? If this is something you're a little concerned about, what do you do? Yeah, I think anyone listening to this probably has felt it at some point. I have my own, right?

And that's because it's getting harder and harder, no matter who you are, no matter how well educated you are, it's getting hard to tell what's normal. So I think the first thing that you wanna do, and I practice this with some of my clients that are willing, I say that because not all of them are. A social media break is extraordinarily powerful to stop the spiraling financial dysmorphia that you have.

Number one, you take away the direct place that's causing the problem. That is where you're comparing yourself and you still can't come up with what's normal. That's wild, right? The act of comparing ourselves should help us know where we stack up. That's what we're biologically trained to do. And now the major source of our comparison is making it worse. It's so unfair. The cards are stacked against us.

So I think getting rid of social media, I'm not saying forever, but I'm saying for now, take a huge break from it. And you're seeing this more and more, like with people saying like they can feel the negative impact that it's having. So I think if you have financial dysmorphia and you're freaking out, get off social media for a while. Tell people to text you. Great.

Number two, if you're trying to get a grip on your spending because there's this buy now, pay later stuff that distorts reality, like don't do that stuff. And you want to reestablish that sort of relationship you have with money. And again, everyone's going to eye roll me here, but hear me out every now and then to the grocery store. Take some cash.

Just play around with what that feels like and remind yourself what it feels like to have to make those decisions with a cap on it. And I say that that can help with the dysmorphia because it grounds you in reality. So what you're trying to do is make things feel real for yourself again. And then the last thing that I would say is to get an unbiased, which means someone who's not selling you anything or emotionally invested in your outcome and your future, to tell you where you're at.

What are your actual numbers and are they where they should be given the life that you want to live? Because that can alleviate a lot of the anxiety that you feel if somebody that you trust isn't trying to sell you anything. It's like, you're fine. Just do this. And then you can let it go. Right? Or, no, you're not. Okay. And you need to pull it in. Okay, well, that's better to know

than the not knowing. The not knowing. The not knowing leads to more and more dysmorphia. Shannon, it was great to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. That was Shannon Lee Simmons, a financial planner and author. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. This episode was produced by our former intern, Olivia Grandy. Our producers are Madeline White,

Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.