It’s not our choice as children to be emotional deprived, which is the feeling that we’re not loved or are important enough, which can persist into our adult lives, as having a mindset of scarcity. This is the feeling that we never have enough of the things that we want or need more of.
What this sense of insecurity does is it harms our closest relationships, as what we’re expecting is that they’ll let us down somehow. We never express our needs directly to them, while also avoiding intimacy. We feel deprived of emotions such as love, time, and money.
We also act as if we’re always in panic mode, constantly penny pinching as much as possible, or scheduling every moment of our day. These are the thoughts of scarcity instead of abundance, that things will get worse rather than get better.
Making Errors In Time Management
You wake up and instantly feel that you don’t have enough time, you wake up feeling you didn’t get enough sleep, and deprive yourself of all the important things that you needed to do that day.
You’re bad at time management. You have no idea how the days, weeks, and years of your life slipped by so fast. You over schedule appointments and then spend too much time changing them. You’re always late paying your bills.
You think you’re losing it but you’re just incompetent at managing time. These fall into the laws of scarcity. It’s found that those living in limited resources, who are poor, are more likely of making these types of bad decisions.
This occurs especially when it comes to money making decisions, it’s found to be completely instinctive and not their fault, as that’s how the brain responds to scarcity.
Our Reaction To Scarcity
Once we develop a mindset of scarcity, what doing so does is it narrows down our time frame, which causes us to make short term decisions which are usually impulsive.
Doing so throws our long term goals in disarray, such as we’ll delay paying our credit card bills, hoping that they’ll disappear, or not answer the phone thinking it’s bad news.
Farmers who have a scarcity mindset will become stressed when planting their seeds, but will relax once they’ve had a successful harvest. They become short on money, become uncertain about the weather, and worry about the market conditions.
Whenever someone is forced to deal with extremely limited resources, what that does is it increases the problems and the barriers that they need to deal with, which results in mental fatigue.
Those who are constantly deprived of what they want develops an unhealthy obsession of overvaluing the things they don’t have. The nature of scarcity itself, however, impedes our efforts of coping.
Motivation And Scarcity
Stress, and the anxiety which is associated with it when it comes to scarcity interferes with our motivation, which causes us to become more vulnerable towards temptation.
This is the reason why some will purchase sale items which they don’t need right after an emotional period such as the holidays, even if they can’t afford it. This because of our scarcity thinking, we perceive that we’re unable to resist the limited time of the sale, which the marketers prey on.
Those who are alone will often see themselves and others in a more negative pessimistic light, and may avoid joining social gatherings and activities based on the fear of rejection.
Avoiding The Scarcity Mindset
So how can we correct living in this scarcity mindset while not becoming overly complacent. Feel more comfortable at various levels of scarcity vs an abundance mindset, feeling not as deprived.
• Practicing Gratitude – Always focus on what’s currently good about your life, which includes all those who support you, the community you live in, and your healthy active lifestyle. What doing so does is it takes the focus off scarcity, such as time and money.
• Never Compare Yourself To Others – You’ll always meet others who will have more money, time, or possessions than you, and you may feel a tinge of envy. But in reality, you have no idea what it’s like to be them.
So never compare how you feel inside to how the exterior of someone else appears. What your struggles may have created are internal strengths which you don’t completely appreciate.
• Stop Obsessing Over Things – It becomes extremely easy to get caught up in all of the mental scripts regarding the wrong decisions that you’ve made, or worrying about the “what ifs.”
Breaking away from this cycle requires plenty of preparation and effort. Create a plan so you won’t catch yourself ruminating. What getting active does is it activates the left hemisphere of your brain, which breaks away from being moody, depressive, and emotional.
So decide to go for a run or a walk, call someone, tidy up your closet or garage, read a good book, keep busy.
• Take Precautionary Measures – Make a grocery list whenever you go to the supermarket so you won’t impulse buy, set up prepayment withdrawals for all your bills from your bank account. Leave your credit card at home, remove all the sweets and refined sugar products from your home.
• Never Become Greedy – Whenever there’s a feeling that resources are becoming scarce, what people will get is competitive with each other, this since they believe that if someone else gets more, that means they’ll get less.
Once you decide to help someone grow their business, for instance, they may be more than willing to refer new business to you, your way. Being helpful towards others leads to gaining greater respect and reputation, which develops deeper relationships, while creating exchange and making new allies.