Wallet, body and mind: The connection between financial wellness and physical and mental health

Everyone experiences stress differently. While short-term stress can be good for us, long-term daily stress is proven to have negative impacts on our bodies and mental health.

While we can’t eliminate daily stress entirely, employers should understand how this stress affects their employees, their workplace and their bottom line. Employers also need to recognize the role they play in one of life’s top stressors: Money.

When employees are stressed, employers are likely to see declined productivity levels, higher employment costs, delayed retirement and more. Simply put, financial stress is making your workforce feel sick, and it’s impacting your bottom line.

That’s why financial wellness is such an important topic today. By helping your employees understand their full financial outlook, they can build their confidence and generally feel better — financially, physically and mentally.

Let’s take a closer look at how finances and health are intertwined, and how a tailored approach to financial wellness may be the prescription you and your employees need.

How financial stress affects employees

The American Psychological Association (APA) details the ways mental stress affects us physically, including the respiratory, musculoskeletal, circulatory, digestive and nervous systems — there’s no question that stress manifests in our bodies.

Stress has varying effects on each person, and medical research estimates as much as 90 percent of illness and disease is stress-related.³ Stress is also linked to increases in caffeine intake, alcohol consumption and smoking.

Stress causes many unwanted symptoms that may affect people’s physical ability to complete tasks and their demeanor. And while a “bad mood” is hard to track, the 2023 Employee Financial Wellness Survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that 55% of respondents said money worries had a severe or major impact on their mental health in the past year.⁴

How stress affects your workforce

Physical symptoms can include:

• headaches
• migraines
• muscle tension
• fatigue
• elevated heart rate
• upset stomach
• trouble sleeping
• gastrointestinal problems
• sexual dysfunction
• weight gain

Mental health symptoms can include:

• irritability
• restlessness
• lack of focus
• “snapping” or quick loss of temper
• depression
• anxiety disorders

How financial stress affects employers

Stress doesn’t just impact individual employees — their employers are also footing the bill. From PwC’s 2023 Employee Financial Wellness Survey, we learned:

• Financially stressed employees are nearly five times as likely to admit personal finance issues have been a distraction at work.
• 56% of those employees spend 3+ hours per week dealing with or thinking about their personal finances.
• They are less engaged at work.
• They are twice as likely to be looking for a new job.

Financially stressed employees scored lower than their not-stressed counterparts in every published data point. And financial stressors have significantly increased over the last two years, thanks to inflation and economic turbulence. In 2023, 59% of employees agreed that compensation was not keeping up with inflation (up from 41% in 2021), and 49% are having difficulty meeting household expenses each month (up from 41% last year).⁴

In summary, one in every three employees saw negative impacts to their productivity at work due to their financial worries.⁴ So what can employers do to combat the significant effects of stress on their employees, their productivity and, ultimately, their bottom line?

Tips to create a financially confident workforce

Voya aspires to help clear the path to financial confidence for more fulfilling lives, so we’re committed to helping your employees become more financially literate. In doing so, we can help alleviate the mental anguish and physical manifestations of stress to create a healthier, more productive workplace.

Here are a few ways employers can demonstrate their care and attention to their employees’ financial well-being:

1. Acknowledge internal and external pressures

• Economic concerns are weighing on employees’ minds, and they need help understanding how to make their income stretch as much as possible. As an employer, you’re in a unique position to offer your employees a path to reduced financial stress, a greater peace of mind and improved retirement outcomes through financial wellness.

2. Invest in financial wellness programs

• Financially-stressed employees are twice as likely to look for employment elsewhere. Of that group, 73% would be attracted to a company that cares more about their financial well-being.⁴ A robust financial wellness program can help alleviate financial stress and, in turn, reduce related physical symptoms.

3. Give personalized options within those programs

• The one-size-fits-all approach to employee financial wellness often fails to meet the mark. Voya takes a tailored approach to helping your employees find a healthy balance between living for today, preparing for tomorrow and feeling confident about their future.

  In 2024, Voya is taking financial personalization to the next level with our newly announced employee account experience. Employees will be able to add their external accounts to their dashboard, create budgets and track expenses — creating a unique view that helps them see the connection between their long-term retirement savings and their everyday financial habits. They’ll also have access to other personal finance tools and interactive life events designed with behavioral finance in mind.

4. Enlist Voya’s help

• Voya’s financial wellness experience leverages six pillars to address employees’ entire financial lives. The first step on a lifelong financial wellness journey is a brief Financial Wellness Assessment — an interactive, digital quiz that gauges an employee’s financial comfort and knowledge. This simple experience is proven to work: After completing the assessment, 94% of employees have taken action or plan to take action to improve their financial situation.⁶

Voya’s entire employee experience is centered around the modern employee, with a wide library of education available like articles, calculators, live and on-demand videos and tools covering all aspects of financial wellness — personal finance, retirement, insurance and more.

Reach out to your Voya Relationship Manager or visit the links below to learn more.

• New online account experience
• Voya Learn
• myVoyage
• myOrangeMoney
• Managed accounts
• Financial wellness

This article has been updated from the original March 11, 2021 version.