I wanted to improve my financial position. With this in mind, over the past year I attended enough Bali and online money workshops to develop a mild allergy to the phrase “abundance portal.” On this quest I heard that I have financial blocks from an insufficiently open womb, low self-worth, poor energetic alignment, and a limited understanding of quantum wealth embodiment, which, reassuringly, I can unlock at level 3 of the program.
Somewhere between the cacao ceremonies and EFT tapping for financial success, I started noticing that spirituality, self-help, neuroscience, and HustleTok were all rebranding the same fear using slightly different fonts.
Money has an annoying amount of influence over survival, dignity, exhaustion, freedom, dependence, attractiveness, romantic options, the ability to leave bad situations, and whether life setbacks and mistakes are minor or catastrophic. Because the stakes are so high, humans are deeply uncomfortable with the possibility that financial outcomes may be partly random, and not entirely deserved. No wonder every era becomes obsessed with discovering the perfect formula for who gets to feel safe and who doesn’t.
In the HustleTok universe, money is framed as an extension of identity and self-worth. Here income reflects what you believe you deserve. To my surprise many mindset seminars reminded me of the prosperity gospel. In both systems, financial success becomes evidence that you are internally aligned with the right force, whether God, discipline, mindset, or masculine optimization (I sat through a couple of these too). In Ubud-style energy-based teachings, money is described as something that responds to frequency, openness, and alignment, flowing more easily when resistance and internal blocks are reduced. Ancestral and lineage frameworks see financial patterns as an inherited experience, suggesting that what we carry forward from past generations shapes our financial behaviour.
What made the nervous-system explanation especially persuasive to me is that it offers a scientifically and biologically respectable interpretation of many shaky neo-spiritual ideas. Like much of modern culture, I too tend to trust things more once they acquire medical terminology and a diagram of the vagus nerve.
And to be fair, the theory does genuinely explain a lot.
A body under chronic stress shifts into survival mode. In that state, immediate relief outranks long-term strategy. Impulsiveness, compulsive spending, addiction, emotional volatility, avoidance, and self-sabotage all become forms of short-term regulation. None of this is especially compatible with the slow, repetitive, often emotionally unrewarding behaviours that financial stability often requires.
Viewed through the nervous system lens, many spiritual practices can be reinterpreted without requiring metaphysics. Manifestation, visualization, abundance rituals, or “future self” exercises may work less because they magnetically summon wealth from the quantum field and more because they slowly make previously threatening experiences feel psychologically safer. Repeatedly imagining yourself negotiating confidently, charging more, tolerating visibility, or handling larger amounts of money may reduce emotional reactivity around those situations. Over time, people hesitate less. Recover from setbacks faster. Avoid less and are able to be more consistent. The result can look remarkably similar to vibrational manifestation, minus the spiritual rebranding of basic exposure therapy.
At the same time, I still can’t fully tell whether nervous-system theory is genuinely more accurate, or whether it simply feels more credible because it is wrapped in the soothing authority of science. Previous eras spiritualized uncertainty. We medicalize it.
And honestly, I remain emotionally susceptible to all of it. Part of me still wants to believe that sufficiently optimized inner work can overpower external reality. That there exists some correct combination of regulation, confidence, embodiment, openness, discipline, breathing, and aligned action capable of transcending circumstances.
Interestingly, it was the classic spiritual traditions that ultimately felt more honest to me. Neo-spirituality often promises control: align correctly, heal correctly, regulate correctly, and reality will begin cooperating with you. Classical spiritual systems are often less interested in controlling chaos than in teaching people how to endure it without collapsing. Forget guaranteed abundance, here surrender is the emotional stabilisation.
Which becomes a much more useful philosophy once you notice reality has very little interest in behaving fairly. Emotional regulation may improve decision-making, but it does not erase geography, class, family background, timing, institutional gatekeeping, mediocre passports, bad economies, and the occasional catastrophic run of luck. If nervous-system regulation, discipline and all that alone determined wealth, every emotionally healthy kindergarten teacher would own a sprawling villa in Seseh while every unstable narcissist would be bankrupt.
Unfortunately, reality shows very little interest in rewarding good breathing techniques.
The older I get, the less interested I become in systems promising control, and the more drawn I become to the psychological problem of how humans survive uncertainty without turning wealth into evidence of moral worth.
