Today I ran into a little bit of luck. I was walking to campus for my 8 a.m. when I came to a stoplight and had to wait for the oncoming traffic to clear out. I looked down at my phone in my hand to change the song when I saw something flutter in the corner of my eye. I looked down on the ground and saw a $20 bill laying on the ground. A smile immediately appeared on my face as I realized I had just found my beer money for tomorrow night. It took me until I got to class to think about something I never thought about before. Why did I just get so happy? Yes I understand I had just found my beer money for the next night, that’s great, but it went deeper than that. It was as if my brain was wired to immediately feel feelings of joy. And that’s weird because money isn’t alcohol or drugs. Or is it?

Stack of One Hundred Dollar Bills U.S.

“If you’ve ever thought of money as a drug, you may be more right than you know. New research shows that counting money — just handling the bills — can make things less painful.”

Less painful? It’s not edible, it’s not a painkiller, it’s certainly not a beer, so how can it do that? An experiment was conducted that had a group of students come into a lab where they were told they would be doing a test for finger dexterity. The students were divided into two groups, one getting to count Chinese currency while the other group had to count blank pieces of paper. After a little bit the students of each group were asked to dip their fingers in a bowl of water heated to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The students who had previously counted the money didn’t find the really hot water hot at all, while the students counting the blank slips said it was pretty hot and kind of intolerable. “What stood out, Vohs says, was a feeling of strength. When subjects had been reminded of money, 10 minutes later they said inexplicably they just felt stronger.” But what about money and the brain? Can it be a substitute for love? “Researcher Xinyue Zhou, of the department of psychology at Sun Yat-Sen University in China, puts it in very human terms. We think money works as a substitute for another pain buffer — love.” In aspects related to the brain, money can act as a substitute for many things. Some of those things include, social acceptance, reducing social discomfort, physical discomfort and even pain.

This article I found goes in to detail on seven things you should know about the psychology of money and wealth. Those 7 things are;

1. More money, less empathy.
2. Wealth can cloud moral judgment.
3. Wealth has been linked with addiction.
4. Money itself can become addictive.
5. Wealthy children may be more troubled.
6. We tend to perceive the wealthy as “evil.”
7. Money can’t buy happiness (or love).

“Psychologists who study the impact of wealth and inequality on human behavior have found that money can powerfully influence our thoughts and actions in ways that we’re often not aware of, no matter our economic circumstances. Although wealth is certainly subjective, most of the current research measures wealth on scales of income, job status or measures of socioeconomic circumstances, like educational attainment and intergenerational wealth.” It’s crazy to think that a piece of green paper can do all this. It really has become such a gigantic part of the life we live and the way we live. Money can make a person do things they would usually never do. It’s been proven that being given money or even having a thought about money can make and individual act irrationally and think irrationally. There’s an old saying that I find interesting. It’s not the “Money can’t buy happiness” but rather “Money is the root of all evil”. Just think about that for a little bit.

SITES:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/06/psychology-of-wealth_n_4531905.html

6 studies on how money affects the mind