Many people encounter a strange phenomenon: the moment a new month begins, they naturally feel a heavy sense of worry, or even fear—even when nothing overly serious is happening at that moment.
So, what is the cause behind this beginning of the month anxiety?
Internal and External Pressures at the Start of the Month
The start of a month marks the end of an old month and the beginning of a new one. It is also a reminder that time keeps passing by.
1. Internal Pressure from Unmet Goals
When time passes while your previous month’s goals remain unfinished, while new month goals are starting or piling up, your brain feels that the burden is growing heavier.
This is pressure coming directly from within yourself.
2. External Pressures Appearing All at Once
However, that is only one part of it. The beginning of the month is also when a lot of external pressures appear at the same time:
Rent, utility bills, and bank loans
Employee payroll or a series of bills that must be paid
If you overspent last month or face a account balance deficit, your brain instantly recognizes this as a risk to your safety.
For many businesses, the start of the month is also the time for inventory, audits, performance evaluations, or summarizing the previous month’s results. This continues to increase the pressure.
How the Brain Uses the Past to Predict the Future
When internal and external pressures appear together, the brain begins doing a very familiar thing: scanning for risks to predict the future.
If you handled these pressures smoothly in the past: If you consistently achieved your goals and created good results, your brain registers that this is a familiar and safe situation. You step into the new month with confidence and calm.
If you struggled to get through previous months: If you experienced failure, were reprimanded, lost face, or fell into a financial crisis, your brain will use those exact experiences to predict the future.
The more your brain recalls those past failures, the more unsafe it feels. When this unsafe state combines with a series of internal and external pressures that may exceed your capacity to process, an anxiety signal is triggered. The more pressure there is, the stronger the anxiety signal erupts, even turning into new month anxiety and fear.
In short, you find the start of the month scary because large pressures are combining with a past where you struggled or failed to overcome those pressures.
The True Root Cause: Overthinking and Avoidance
However, that is still not the root cause.
The reason you fail to overcome these pressures time and again usually revolves around just two behaviors: overthinking and avoidance.
Overthinking drains your energy without creating any solution.
Avoidance makes the problem bigger day by day because it is never addressed.
Don’t forget to Subscribe to follow upcoming articles where I will demystify these two mechanisms in detail and show you how to escape them!