How do I forgive myself for the years of irresponsible spending I'm still paying for?
Still paying for past spending mistakes? Your brain is wired to punish you for them — here's why that's making everything worse.
You know that specific feeling — the one where you’re scrolling through an old bank statement, or a credit card bill lands, and before you’ve even opened it there’s a tight, sinking sensation in your chest? That’s not weakness. That’s not proof you’re bad with money. That’s a nervous system that’s learned to associate financial information with pain, doing exactly what nervous systems do: protecting you from pain by making you look away.
The problem is, looking away doesn’t make the numbers smaller.
And the cruelest part? The very thing your brain is doing to try to protect you — the self-criticism, the replay of every stupid purchase, the internal monologue that sounds like a disappointed parent — is actively making it harder to change.
There’s real science behind that. Let’s talk about it.
Why your brain keeps dragging you back to the past
You’ve probably heard of the sunk cost fallacy. In academic terms, it’s the tendency to continue investing time, money, or emotional energy in something because of what you’ve already spent — not because of what you’ll gain in the future. Researchers Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer identified this back in 1985, and it’s been one of the most replicated findings in behavioural economics since.
We usually talk about sunk costs in terms of bad investments or finishing a terrible film because you’ve already watched an hour. But the same cognitive trap applies to emotional debt.
When you think “I’ve already wasted so much money, what’s the point in trying now,” that’s the sunk cost fallacy, wearing shame as a disguise.
The money is gone. What you do today is the only financial decision you’re actually making.
The past spending isn’t retrievable. The self-punishment doesn’t repay it. And yet the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex trying to extract a lesson from the loss, keeps serving it back up. It thinks it’s helping. It is not helping.
The identity trap that makes shame spiral
Here’s where it gets more interesting, and more important.
Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist and researcher who’s spent decades studying money behaviour, has written extensively on what he calls money scripts — the unconscious beliefs about money we form in childhood and carry, largely unexamined, into adulthood. One of the most damaging isn’t “money is evil” or “rich people are greedy.” It’s simpler and quieter than that.
It’s: I am someone who is bad with money.
Once that belief is installed, it stops functioning like an opinion and starts functioning like an identity. And here’s the behavioural trap: people act consistently with their identities. If you believe, at a core level, that you are irresponsible with money — not that you made irresponsible decisions, but that you are an irresponsible person — then every small slip confirms the story, and every success feels like a fluke.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a cognitive mechanism. Psychologists call it identity-consistent behaviour, and it operates largely below conscious awareness.
The shame isn’t just making you feel bad. It’s actively maintaining the behaviour you’re trying to escape.
Why self-criticism doesn’t work (and what the research actually says)
There’s a persistent cultural idea that being hard on yourself is a form of discipline. That if you let yourself off the hook, you’ll just do it again.
Dr Kristin Neff, whose research on self-compassion at the University of Texas has been cited thousands of times, has tested this assumption directly — and consistently found the opposite. People who practise self-compassion after failures are more likely to take responsibility, more likely to change behaviour, and less likely to repeat the mistake than people who engage in self-criticism.
Self-criticism, it turns out, activates the same threat response as external danger. Cortisol rises. The brain narrows its focus to survival. Creativity, long-term planning, and motivation all take a hit. You’re essentially putting your financial decision-making brain under mild but chronic stress — and then wondering why you can’t seem to think clearly about money.
Self-compassion, by contrast, activates the caregiving system. It’s not soft. It’s not letting yourself off the hook. It’s the difference between a good coach who says “that didn’t work, here’s what we try next” and a bad one who says “you’re useless, you’ve always been useless.”
One of those coaches produces better athletes. The research is clear on which one.
What identity reframing actually looks like (it’s not affirmations)
I want to be specific here, because “reframe your identity” can sound like the kind of vague advice that belongs on a motivational poster and does precisely nothing in the real world.
This isn’t about telling yourself you’re great with money when the evidence doesn’t support it. Your brain won’t believe that, and it will reject it immediately. What actually works — and this is grounded in cognitive behavioural research — is shifting from being statements to doing statements.
Not: “I am good with money.” But: “I am someone who is learning to make different choices about money.”
Not: “I’ve always been irresponsible.” But: “I made decisions in the past that I wouldn’t make now, because I know more, and I’m in a different situation.”
The first set of statements requires you to argue with your own history. The second set doesn’t. It just adds a word — learning, different, now — that creates a small but real cognitive gap between past behaviour and future identity.
That gap is where change lives.
One small thing you can actually do today
Lower the cost of looking.
Not “make a budget.” Not “track every penny.” Just make it fractionally easier to look at one number today than it was yesterday.
That might mean opening your banking app and closing it again without acting on anything — just proving to your nervous system that looking doesn’t cause the thing you’re afraid of. It might mean writing down one financial fact on a piece of paper. Not a plan, not a goal. A fact. “I have £X in my current account.” That’s it.
The anxious avoidance that keeps people stuck isn’t laziness. It’s a protection mechanism that has calcified over years of association between financial information and shame. You don’t break that with a 30-tab spreadsheet. You break it, slowly and gently, by accumulating evidence that looking is survivable.
Every time you look without the sky falling, you’re updating the data your nervous system uses to assess the threat level. That’s not a metaphor. That’s how threat extinction actually works in the brain.
The years behind you don’t define the years ahead
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Forgiving yourself for past spending isn’t a one-time decision you make and then it’s done. It’s more like a practise — something you’ll have to return to, especially when a bill arrives or an old debt surfaces. The goal isn’t to feel nothing about those past decisions. The goal is to feel the discomfort without letting it become the story of who you are.
You are not your worst financial year. You are not the dress you bought on a maxed credit card. You are not the subscription you forgot about for eight months. Those things happened. They cost you money. They do not get a vote on what happens next.
The sunk cost fallacy says: keep paying, emotionally, for what’s already gone.
The research says: redirect that energy entirely to what’s actually in front of you.
One of those approaches compounds into something better. The other one just costs more.
If you’re curious about the specific beliefs that might be driving your relationship with money — the ones that operate quietly in the background and shape decisions before you’re even conscious of making them — the Money Beliefs Quiz is a good place to start. It takes about three minutes and gives you something concrete to work with.
— Joel