Research Review: Why More Money Doesn't Always Quiet Money Worry

The MyMoneyCoach Research Team offers this plain-language review as educational content, not financial, legal or medical advice. It is not an independent peer review. Where the evidence is thin or contested, the review says so.

Abstract

More money often helps wellbeing but does not always quiet money worry. Large studies of income and lottery winners generally link more money to better wellbeing, yet some surveys find financial stress is still common among higher earners. Why worry lingers is unsettled: nervous system and inherited stress explanations are hypotheses, not findings.

Many people expect that earning more will end money worry. This review looks at what the research says about that expectation. The answer is mixed. Large studies of income and of lottery winners generally find that more money goes with better wellbeing, not none. At the same time, some surveys find that financial stress is still common among higher earners, and a famous 1978 study of 22 lottery winners found they were not happier than a comparison group.

The review also looks at popular explanations for lingering money worry, including early-life programming, inherited stress and nervous system "set points." These ideas are plausible to many practitioners, but the studies cited in earlier versions of this paper did not test them. They are presented here as hypotheses.

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1. Introduction: A Billionaire Who Still Worries About Money

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, told CBS in an interview: "I am not afraid of paying taxes — my only fear is being poor."¹ The remark was reported while California voters were weighing a proposed billionaire tax. We could not confirm the exact interview date, so we do not date it here.

One quote from one person does not show how money worry works in general. It does show why the question is interesting. Many people assume financial worry ends once income is high enough. This review checks how well that assumption holds up.

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2. What Is Meant by Money Worry

By money worry we mean persistent stress or concern about money. Researchers have built scales to measure it, for example the financial anxiety measure developed by Shapiro and Burchell (2012).² Money worry is common. The American Psychological Association's Stress in America 2014 survey, released in 2015, found that 72% of adults reported feeling stressed about money at least some of the time.³

Earlier versions of this paper described money anxiety as something that exists "independently of one's actual financial situation." That is not an established finding, and the sources below do not support it. Money worry can reflect real circumstances, past experience, or both.

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3. What the Evidence Shows

3.1 Do lottery winners end up happier?

Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman (1978). This is the most-cited study. It compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and with 29 people paralyzed in accidents. Winners had each received at least $50,000 in the past year, and some as much as $1,000,000. Winners were "scarcely more happy" than controls on present happiness (4.00 versus 3.82), and rated everyday pleasures lower (3.33 versus 3.82).⁴ The sample was small, and the study did not measure anxiety.

Later, larger studies point the other way.

• Gardner and Oswald (2007) followed British people who had medium-sized wins of between 1,000 and 120,000 pounds. Compared with controls, winners had "significantly better psychological health," an average improvement of 1.4 points on the General Health Questionnaire two years after the win.⁵
• Lindqvist, Östling and Cesarini (2020) surveyed Swedish lottery players 5 to 22 years after a major lottery event. They found that large-prize winners had "sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade," with no sign of fading. Effects on happiness and mental health were smaller.⁶

Taken together, lottery research does not show that wealth fails to help. Winners' overall life satisfaction rose in the large Swedish study, and mental health improved in the British one. Neither study measured money anxiety specifically, so they cannot tell us whether money worry persisted.

3.2 Income and day-to-day wellbeing

Killingsworth (2021) analyzed over one million real-time reports of experienced wellbeing and found that wellbeing "rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it."⁷

A 2023 collaboration between Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers reanalyzed the data. It found a flattening pattern only for the least happy roughly 20% of people. For that group, happiness rises with income up to about $100,000 and then levels off. For happier people, wellbeing keeps rising with income.⁸

The Killingsworth results are the closest the research comes to a "paradox." For most people, more income goes with more wellbeing. For an unhappier minority, it may stop helping at higher incomes. These studies measure happiness, not money anxiety, and show association, not cause.

3.3 Do high earners still feel financial stress?

Salary Finance and FinFit, in the fifth annual report of Inside the Wallets of Working Americans, state that "even among those making over $200,000 a year, 39% of them still experience financial stress."⁹ This is a survey of working Americans. We could not confirm the survey year, sample size or how financial stress was measured. It shows that financial stress is not limited to low incomes. It does not show that income makes no difference, and it gives no comparison figure for lower earners.

Earlier versions of this paper also cited a Morgan Stanley survey of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, a Boston College study of wealthy households, and a meta-analysis from the Financial Therapy Association. We could not find any of them as described, so those figures have been removed.

3.4 Money worry and psychological distress

Money worry goes with distress. Ryu and Fan (2023) analyzed the 2018 National Health Interview Survey and found that higher financial worries were significantly associated with higher psychological distress. The association was more pronounced among unmarried adults, the unemployed, lower-income households and renters than among their counterparts.¹⁰ Nasir and colleagues (2025) studied 19,821 young adults aged 18 to 26 in pooled 2013-18 survey data. About 17% reported high financial stress, and high financial stress was associated with an odds ratio of 6.17 (95% CI 4.43-8.61) for high psychological distress.¹¹ Both studies are cross-sectional and rely on self-report, so they show an association, not that money worry causes distress. Neither measured physical health.

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4. Explanations: What Is Known and What Is Hypothesis

4.1 Scarcity and mental bandwidth

The effect of scarcity on mental bandwidth is the most debated part of the evidence, so both sides are set out here.

Findings in favor. Mani and colleagues (2013) found that prompting people to think about financial problems reduced cognitive performance among poorer participants but not among better-off ones. In a second study, the same farmers showed lower cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, than after harvest. The authors reported that stress did not account for the difference and concluded that poverty-related concerns consume mental resources.¹² Shah, Mullainathan and Shafir (2012) reported across several experiments that scarcity changes how people allocate attention, leading them to engage more deeply with some problems while neglecting others, which can help explain behaviors such as overborrowing.¹³ Huijsmans and colleagues (2019) induced scarcity and abundance mindsets in the same participants during fMRI. Under scarcity, activity rose in the orbitofrontal cortex (linked to valuation) and fell in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (linked to goal-directed choice).¹⁴ Ong, Theseira and Ng (2019) offer real-world evidence. A charity cleared debt for low-income households in Singapore. Among 196 beneficiaries compared before and after relief, each additional debt account paid off improved cognitive functioning by about one quarter of a standard deviation and reduced the likelihood of anxiety by 11%.¹⁵ That design was quasi-experimental and not randomized, and the authors' explanation, the mental cost of tracking separate debts, is their interpretation.

Findings against. Wicherts and Scholten (2013) reanalyzed the Mani data without dichotomizing income and reported that it "fails to corroborate their findings," pointing to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests.¹⁶ Mani and colleagues replied that the interaction between income and the experimental manipulation held with a continuous income measure, that their cognitive control results did not appear driven by ceiling effects, and that the post-harvest improvement held up when learning was considered.¹⁷ A 2021 PNAS audit replicated 20 scarcity-priming studies and reported "considerable variability in the replicability, with some strong successes and other undeniable failures."¹⁸ The authors of the original scarcity work answered that the audit mischaracterized the literature.¹⁹ This dispute is open. Separately, Carvalho, Meier and Wang (2016) randomly assigned low-income US households to be surveyed before or after payday. They found no before-after differences in risk taking, decision quality or cognitive function, although choices about money were more present-biased before payday.²⁰

What we do not claim. We do not use the widely repeated "13 IQ points" figure. It is press framing and not a number reported in the Science abstract. All of this evidence concerns people with real shortages. It does not explain worry among the wealthy, and none of it shows that affluent people lose cognitive bandwidth.

4.2 Early experience and inherited stress

Growing up around money stress plausibly shapes how a person feels about money later. Money-script research points in that direction. Klontz and Britt (2012), studying 422 people, found that some money beliefs, such as money vigilance, were associated with higher financial health, while money status and money worship were associated with lower financial health.²¹ That is an association between beliefs and financial outcomes. It is not evidence about anxiety or its causes.

Yehuda and Lehrner (2018) reviewed whether trauma effects pass between generations through epigenetic mechanisms. Their abstract says that "the most compelling work to date has been done in animal models" and that, given how few human studies exist, "it is not possible to attribute intergenerational effects in humans to a single set of biological or other determinants at this time."²² Earlier versions of this paper applied that research to economic hardship and to Huang's family background. Nothing in the source supports that step, and we have removed it.

4.3 The nervous system framing

Some coaches and therapists use Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory to describe money stress.²³ Critics, including Grossman (2023), argue that its core physiological premises are not supported by the evidence, and Porges disputes that view.²⁴ Earlier versions of this paper presented a table linking specific money situations to specific nervous system states. No study cited here tested those links. The nervous system language can be a useful way to describe how stress feels, but it is a working metaphor, not a demonstrated mechanism of money anxiety.

4.4 Looking away, shame and delay

Some research shows people looking away from money information. Karlsson, Loewenstein and Seppi (2009) described an "ostrich effect," in which investors monitor their portfolios more when markets are rising than when they are falling.²⁵ Sicherman, Loewenstein, Seppi and Utkus (2016) used daily account logins and reported that "account logins fall by 9.5% after market declines."²⁶ These studies cover investors and market news. They are not the same as avoiding bills or debt. Shapiro and Burchell (2012) reported that financial anxiety is a separate construct from depression and general anxiety and that it is marked by avoidance of financial information in lab tests.² In an incentivized lab task, Hilbert and colleagues (2024) found that participants put into a financial scarcity condition were more likely to delay paying an expense, but an eye-tracking measure of looking away showed no effect.²⁷ Gladstone and colleagues (2021) reported across six studies (N = 9,110) that shame induces financial withdrawal, which increases the probability of counterproductive financial decisions that deepen hardship. Their designs mixed experiments, archival and correlational data.²⁸

Each of these studies covers one piece of the pattern. No single study shows the full chain from financial anxiety to avoidance to worse outcomes, and we found no primary study of avoidance of bills or debt in daily life outside the lab.

4.5 Stress hormones, stress and risk taking

Stress changes how people take risks, and the direction depends on the setup. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over experiment, Kandasamy and colleagues (2014) raised cortisol in volunteers over eight days to a level seen in traders. Participants became more risk-averse, which the authors read as the stress response calibrating risk taking to prolonged uncertainty.²⁹ A meta-analysis of 32 datasets (N = 1,829) found that brief laboratory stress led to decisions that were "more disadvantageous, more reward seeking, and more risk taking" than control conditions, with a small overall effect (d = .17).³⁰ These two results point in different directions, and both come from the laboratory. Neither tests money worry in daily life.

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5. What the Research Says About Interventions

Financial education. A meta-analysis of 168 papers covering 201 studies found that interventions to improve financial literacy "explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviors studied," and that effects decay over time, becoming negligible 20 months or more after the intervention.³¹ This is about behavior, not anxiety. The debt relief study in section 4.1 is the closest evidence we found that removing a concrete money burden changed anxiety and thinking, and it concerned low-income households, not people with high incomes. Earlier claims here that education "does not reduce financial anxiety in individuals with trauma histories," and specific effect sizes for CBT and for combined financial and somatic therapy, could not be traced to any source and have been removed.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). Church, Yount and Brooks (2012) randomly assigned 83 non-clinical people to one hour of EFT, supportive interviews or no treatment. Cortisol fell 24.39% in the EFT group, compared with 14.25% and 14.44% in the other groups.³² A 2020 re-examination with 53 participants found a larger cortisol drop in the EFT group but no matching improvement in self-reported distress.³³ Neither study involved money or financial anxiety. They do not show that EFT reduces money anxiety, and they do not show an effect on the amygdala.

In short, we found no rigorous study showing that any specific approach, somatic or otherwise, reduces money anxiety better than alternatives. That is a gap in the research, not proof that nothing works.

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6. Practical Takeaways

The takeaways below are reasonable conclusions from the evidence above, not prescriptions.

1. More income tends to go with better wellbeing on average, so earning more is not pointless. It is also not a guarantee that worry will fade.
2. If money worry stays high when your numbers improve, that is common enough to be worth noticing. Surveys find financial stress at high incomes too.
3. A financial professional can help with the numbers. A licensed therapist can help if worry is affecting your daily life or health.
4. Body-based and mindfulness practices may feel helpful to some people. Research specific to money worry is limited.

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7. Open Questions for Researchers

1. Do people whose income rises see their money worry fall, using repeated measures of anxiety rather than happiness?
2. How common is financial anxiety across wealth levels, measured with a validated scale and a clearly described sample?
3. Do approaches that combine financial planning with therapy outperform either alone, in controlled trials?
4. Does childhood experience with money predict adult money worry after accounting for current finances?

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8. Conclusion

The evidence supports a modest version of the idea in the title. More money often helps, and it does not always quiet money worry. Surveys find financial stress among high earners, and an unhappier minority may stop gaining from higher income. Money worry is associated with psychological distress, and some studies show people looking away from money information when the news is bad. Whether worry uses up mental bandwidth is disputed. The stronger claims, that money anxiety is mainly a nervous system state, inherited, or independent of circumstances, are hypotheses that this body of research does not test.

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References

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MyMoneyCoach Research Team For questions about this research, contact research@mymoneycoach.ai

Footnotes

1. Huang, J. Interview with CBS, as quoted in "NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Embraces Tax Liability, Says He Fears Poverty More Than Payments," Tiger Brokers news. https://www.itiger.com/news/1122328363 (secondary report; interview date not confirmed). ↩

2. Shapiro, G. K., & Burchell, B. J. (2012). Measuring financial anxiety. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 5(2), 92-103. doi:10.1037/a0027647 ↩ ↩²

3. American Psychological Association. (2015). Stress in America 2014 (survey released 2015). ↩

4. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/690806/ ↩

5. Gardner, J., & Oswald, A. J. (2007). Money and mental wellbeing: A longitudinal study of medium-sized lottery wins. Journal of Health Economics, 26(1), 49-60. doi:10.1016/j.jhealeco.2006.08.004 ↩

6. Lindqvist, E., Östling, R., & Cesarini, D. (2020). Long-run effects of lottery wealth on psychological well-being. The Review of Economic Studies, 87(6), 2703-2726. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24667 doi:10.1093/restud/rdaa006 ↩

7. Killingsworth, M. A. (2021). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4), e2016976118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2016976118 ↩

8. Killingsworth, M. A., Kahneman, D., & Mellers, B. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2208661120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2208661120 ↩

9. Salary Finance & FinFit. Inside the Wallets of Working Americans: The 5th Annual Report. https://resources.salaryfinance.com/itw-key-findings ↩

10. Ryu, S., & Fan, L. (2023). The relationship between financial worries and psychological distress among U.S. adults. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 44(1), 16-33. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35125855/ ↩

11. Nasir, A., Javed, U., Hagan, K., et al. (2025). Social determinants of financial stress and association with psychological distress among young adults 18-26 years in the United States. Frontiers in Public Health, 12, 1485513. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39845680/ ↩

12. Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science, 341, 976-980. doi:10.1126/science.1238041 ↩

13. Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2012). Some consequences of having too little. Science, 338(6107), 682-685. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23118192/ ↩

14. Huijsmans, I., Ma, I., Micheli, L., Civai, C., Stallen, M., & Sanfey, A. G. (2019). A scarcity mindset alters neural processing underlying consumer decision making. PNAS, 116(24), 11699-11704. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31123150/ ↩

15. Ong, Q., Theseira, W., & Ng, I. Y. H. (2019). Reducing debt improves psychological functioning and changes decision-making in the poor. PNAS, 116(15), 7244-7249. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30910964/ ↩

16. Wicherts, J. M., & Scholten, A. Z. (2013). Comment on "Poverty impedes cognitive function." Science, 342(6163), 1169. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24311665/ ↩

17. Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Response to comment on "Poverty impedes cognitive function." Science, 342(6163), 1169. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24311666/ ↩

18. O'Donnell, M., et al. (2021). Empirical audit and review and an assessment of evidentiary value in research on the psychological consequences of scarcity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(44), e2103313118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2103313118 ↩

19. Shah, A. K., Zhao, J., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2023). A scarcity literature mischaracterized with an empirical audit. PNAS, 120(26), e2206054120. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37339220/ ↩

20. Carvalho, L. S., Meier, S., & Wang, S. W. (2016). Poverty and economic decision-making: Evidence from changes in financial resources at payday. American Economic Review, 106(2), 260-284. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20140481 ↩

21. Klontz, B. T., & Britt, S. L. (2012). How clients' money scripts predict their financial behaviors. Journal of Financial Planning, 25(11), 46-53. ↩

22. Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: Putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243-257. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6127768/ ↩

23. Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton. ↩

24. Grossman, P. (2023). Fundamental challenges and likely refutations of the five basic premises of the polyvagal theory. Biological Psychology, 180, 108589. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108589 ↩

25. Karlsson, N., Loewenstein, G., & Seppi, D. (2009). The ostrich effect: Selective attention to information. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 38, 95-115. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-009-9060-6 ↩

26. Sicherman, N., Loewenstein, G., Seppi, D. J., & Utkus, S. P. (2016). Financial attention. Review of Financial Studies, 29(4), 863-897. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhv073 ↩

27. Hilbert, L. P., Noordewier, M. K., Seck, L., & van Dijk, W. W. (2024). Financial scarcity and financial avoidance: An eye-tracking and behavioral experiment. Psychological Research, 88(8), 2211-2220. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39158712/ ↩

28. Gladstone, J. J., Jachimowicz, J. M., Greenberg, A. E., & Galinsky, A. D. (2021). Financial shame spirals: How shame intensifies financial hardship. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 167, 42-56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.06.002 ↩

29. Kandasamy, N., Hardy, B., Page, L., et al. (2014). Cortisol shifts financial risk preferences. PNAS, 111(9), 3608-3613. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24550472/ ↩

30. Starcke, K., & Brand, M. (2016). Effects of stress on decisions under uncertainty: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 142(9), 909-933. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000060 ↩

31. Fernandes, D., Lynch, J. G., & Netemeyer, R. G. (2014). Financial literacy, financial education, and downstream financial behaviors. Management Science, 60(8), 1861-1883. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2333898 doi:10.1287/mnsc.2013.1849 ↩

32. Church, D., Yount, G., & Brooks, A. J. (2012). The effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry: A randomized controlled trial. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 200(10), 891-896. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22986277/ ↩

33. Stapleton, P., Crighton, G., Sabot, D., & O'Neill, H. M. (2020). Reexamining the effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry: A randomized controlled trial. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32162958/ ↩