136: How to Feel Safe Earning More (Without Sabotaging or Overspending It)

Have you ever made more money… only to find yourself overspending, shrinking back, or feeling anxious instead of abundant? If so, you’re not alone — and there’s nothing wrong with you.

In this episode, I explore one of the most important — and most misunderstood — pieces of financial growth: your money nervous system thermostat. We often think that earning more should feel good, natural, or easy. But the truth is, if a part of your body doesn’t feel safe with more, it will unconsciously pull you back to what’s familiar, even if what’s familiar is financial stress, inconsistency, or sabotage.

I share:
 ✨ Why lifestyle inflation, overspending, or freezing with money isn’t a lack of discipline — it’s a nervous system response.
 ✨ How our childhood environment (not just money memories) sets our internal “thermostat” for how much abundance feels safe.
 ✨ The science behind why expansion often triggers threat responses like guilt, fear, or shame — even when something good is happening.
 ✨ Powerful, practical tools to build your capacity to earn more and keep more, including nervous system healing practices and co-regulation in community.

I also share personal stories — including the moment Louise Hay offered me my first book deal and why my immediate response was a shame spiral rather than celebration. This is such a potent example of how expansion can overwhelm our body if we haven’t updated our internal capacity to receive more.

You’ll walk away understanding:
 🌿 Why financial strategy can’t stick without nervous system safety
 🌿 How to start signaling “you are safe” during both contraction and expansion
🌿 The key questions to ask your body to uncover the stories and sensations running the show
🌿 How safe community accelerates your capacity to hold more wealth with ease and consistency

This episode will help you stop the patterns that have kept you cycling between making more and losing it — and instead begin to create a nervous system that can hold, grow, and enjoy wealth. When you practice feeling safe with more, more becomes normal.

"If you've ever made more money only to find yourself shrinking back, overspending, or sabotaging it, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you — it’s because a part of you doesn’t feel safe with more." –Kate Northrup

🎤 Let’s Dive into the Good Stuff on Plenty 🎤

00:00 Welcome + Why earning more can feel unsafe
02:10 Justin Bieber example: making more ≠ keeping more
04:05 Lifestyle creep + hedonic adaptation explained
06:00 What your “money nervous system thermostat” really is
08:15 How childhood environment shapes your financial capacity
10:20 Why expansion can trigger sabotage, fear, or shame
12:45 Overspending, overgiving, or freezing: different dysregulation patterns
14:30 Tools to signal safety during financial expansion
17:05 Kate’s Hay House book-deal story + co-regulation
19:40 Questions to ask your body to expand your money capacity
21:30 Closing + The Money Reset invitation

Links and Resources:

Neurosomatic Intelligence
Relaxed Money Live

✨ The Money Reset: Feel Good with Money—No Matter How Much You Make

Making more money doesn’t guarantee financial ease… but this will. The Money Reset is a free audio experience designed to help you rewire your nervous system for wealth—so managing money feels effortless. 🎧💸

Inside, you’ll learn how to:
💡 Break the “money in, money out” cycle and create lasting stability.
🎯 Relax into a new relationship with money—where structure meets flow.
✨ Use the 5-Minute Calm Cashflow Ritual to bring instant clarity to your finances.

More money won’t solve money stress—a resourced, supple nervous system will. Ready to shift? 👉 Get The Money Reset now! 👈

Related Episode:

Debt, Shame, and the Stories We Don’t Tell (134)

Episode Transcript

Kate Northrup (00:00):
If you've ever made more money only to find

(00:04):
yourself feeling anxiety orshrinking back or overspending
or sabotaging in some other way,I want you to hear me. It is not
because there's something wrongwith you, it is because there's
a part of you that doesn't feelsafe with more. Welcome to

(00:24):
Plenty. I'm your host KateNorthrup and together we are
going on a journey to help youhave an incredible relationship
with money, time, and energy,and to have abundance on every
possible level. Every week,we're gonna dive in with experts
and insights to help you unlocka life of plenty.

(00:48):
Let's go fill our cups. So Ijust saw an interesting article.
It's about a TMZ documentaryabout Justin Bieber, believe it
or not. And apparently, in 2022,he sold his entire catalog for
$200,000,000 because he had runout of money. There was a tour

(01:10):
he had that got canceled.
However, you think about someonewho is a household name like
Justin Bieber, who, you know, Idon't know how much he had made
previously to that point, buthe's been famous for like a
really freaking long time, andwho knows what happened with his
deals with Scooter Braun, likethe whole thing behind the
scenes. But it was such a goodexample of how making more at

(01:35):
one point or another does notmean keeping more, and certainly
doesn't mean actually creating asense, like a deep felt sense of
abundance. So have you ever hadthe experience of growing your
income only to then increaseyour expenses to match it or

(01:58):
even exceed it? That's calledlifestyle inflation or lifestyle
creep. We're so conditioned tothink that the next purchase of
fitness equipment, or the nextfanciest car, or the next
handbag, or the next vacation,or the next boat, or the next
house, or the next whatever isgoing to make us finally feel

(02:21):
successful and worthy anddeserving and happy, and that
will never happen from apurchased item.
To be honest, it just neverwill. It's something called
hedonic adaptation, where weincrease our level of lifestyle
or we buy the thing that givesus the initial rush, and then
very, very, very shortly, likewithin hours sometimes, and

(02:44):
certainly within days, we returnback to the general level of
happiness that we had beforethat purchase or before that
moment. That general level ofhappiness or general sense of
well-being or lack of sense ofwell-being, that set point is
what I call your money nervoussystem thermostat. So your money

(03:06):
nervous system thermostat is setaccording to what it felt like
when you were growing up. Whatdid the environment feel like?
What was the general vibe? Whatwas the general emotional tone
of your childhood environment?Now we can take that further and
say what was the generalemotional tone of your childhood
environment as it relates tomoney, but the truth is, and I

(03:31):
just really actually got this,like got this got this a couple
of weeks ago, our money nervoussystem thermostat is not only
set according to what it feltlike with money in our childhood
environment. Our money nervoussystem thermostat, level of
general well-being that we'llreturn to no matter what is

(03:55):
going on with our financiallife, that we will unconsciously
sabotage our financial life, infact, to get back to that
thermostat setting, That getsset not only according to what
it was like with money when youwere growing up, it also gets
set according to just what theenvironment was in general. What

(04:16):
did caregiving feel like?
How safe did it feel? What wasthe attachment style? Like what
was just the feeling in yourchildhood home? For me, without
going too much into the details,my childhood home had a sense of
somewhat inconsistent presence.And that was due to my parents'

(04:40):
careers, being in the hospitalall the time, not because I was
sick.
They were they were doctors. Andjust they were super focused on
their careers and whatever. Andso as an adult, I have found
that without consciouslyupdating my nervous system
thermostat, and I'm gonna tellyou a couple of ways you can do
that today in a moment, so staywith me. But without doing that

(05:04):
conscious healing work, I wasunconsciously recreating a
feeling of an adrenaline rush ofgoing from consistency to
inconsistency in terms of mylevel of safety and support and

(05:25):
security in my life. Like I'mgoing to be, because of the
environment I was raised in, Ihave a greater tendency towards
risk taking in my business andin my financial life, because
the sense of being unsure aboutwhether or not I'm going to be

(05:47):
safe emotionally actually feelslike home.
Which is wild. Right? Like, it'swild to think about, okay, there
are things that I do, and forexample, you can listen back to
the full story of this if you goback to episode 108, which was
about journey to scaling togetting to nearly $3,000,000 and

(06:09):
how I healed my nervous systemalong the way to build the
capacity for stability in mybusiness. But one of the things
I realized in retrospect is thatit wasn't only, because honestly
financially things were prettyconsistent in the environment in
my childhood. And so it didn'ttotally make sense that I kept

(06:33):
re creating unconsciously asituation in which things were
not stable financially for me inmy business by launching a
million different offers,launching a successful offer,
and then pulling the plug on itbecause I didn't have the
capacity to experience thatlevel of consistency and that

(06:55):
level of stable success overtime.
When we experience somethingthat is different than what our
childhood environment felt like,our nervous system registers it
as a threat. Because our nervoussystem is always wanting to keep
us in the narrow band of thatwhich we have experienced

(07:17):
before. And so the thing that'stricky is that when we earn more
money, most of the time, we'renow experiencing something that
is outside what we'veexperienced before. And so our
nervous system, which rules ourunconscious and our
subconscious, and it alsomitigates our emotional

(07:38):
experience, The thing is, ournervous system is then will
freak out when we earn more. Soit's like, yeah, I'm earning
more.
That's a good thing. Right?Well, yeah, according to your
conscious mind, that's a goodthing. But according to your
unconscious and yoursubconscious, you are now
experiencing something new. Andyour whole survival wiring is
now sifting and sorting to seeif it's a threat.

(08:01):
And especially if we're notconsciously metabolizing our
emotional stress, if we're notconsciously doing things on a
daily basis to dump our stressand threat bucket and build
capacity for life in general, weare going to be more likely to

(08:22):
experience that which is new asa threat if we're already
overloaded by stress and threatin our life. And so let's say
you get a raise. Let's say youget an unexpected bonus. Let's
say you get a windfall of somekind. Let's say you have the
biggest launch ever in yourbusiness, and it's like, woo

(08:44):
hoo.
Yes. Consciously, this is such agood thing. But then the
sabotage can really sink in, andwe can overpay. Right? Overpay
our team.
Overpay contractors. Give themoney away unconsciously to
friends or family that we feellike are quote unquote less
fortunate than us, and we havethis guilt or shame that is

(09:09):
imprinted from childhoodexperiences. Right? So for
example, if you grew up in anenvironment where your
caregivers were always talkingabout how awful rich people are,
of course if you don't do thework to heal that patterning and
repattern your brain and nervoussystem, if you start to make

(09:29):
more money and become a richperson, of course you're going
to sabotage that, and make surethat you either get rid of the
money or that you don't enjoythe money so you won't end up
like one of those bad richpeople that your parents talked
about growing up, for example.That's just one example of how
this happens.
So overspending, over giving,just going unconscious. I I know

(09:54):
people who make a lot of money,and then their response isn't
actually to get rid of themoney, it's actually to go into
freeze with the money, so itjust sits there. And they keep
it like in their checkingaccount, or in a savings account
that's not even keeping up withinflation. Right? So they're so
paralyzed to do anything with itbecause that's also how

(10:20):
financial dysregulation showsup.
So if you're resonating with anyof these examples, I want you to
know it's not because you're badwith money. It's actually just
because you need to wire yournervous system to feel safe
having more. So there's a fewthings you can do. One of them

(10:41):
is to practice nervous systemhealing tools on a daily basis,
but then also and especiallywhen you actually get larger
cash deposits or when youreceive a raise. Like when we
are actually experiencing theexpansion, that's the time we

(11:04):
need to signal to our nervoussystem, to our body, that we are
safe so that it begins to expandits range of resonance around
experiences with money, and itbegins to see, oh, this is safe
and familiar.
I don't need to do anythingunconsciously or subconsciously
to bring us back down to thethermostat setting. Now my

(11:26):
thermostat setting is higher,and so this feels safe to me.
And we do that by consciouslymetabolizing our emotions, and
we'll link the episode about howto do that below. And then also
by learning to signal safety toyour body at those times of
expansion so you can grow yourrange of resonance, so that you

(11:50):
can grow your capacity in realtime. And when you do that,
you'll notice that you won'tfeel so compelled to go spend
the money, that you'll feellike, oh wow, there's this money
in my checking account, and nowI'm going to transfer it into a
high yield savings, and now I'mgoing to learn how to invest it
so that I can actually grow thismoney.

(12:10):
Now I'm going to deploy it inreally conscious devotional ways
to different avenues in mybusiness or in my life that are
good investments, that are inalignment with my values. All of
those ways of being quote,unquote good with money require
nervous system safety first. Youcannot layer strategy on a

(12:31):
nervous system that doesn't feelsafe with money and expect it to
work. Justin Bieber is a perfectexample. Right?
Like, I don't know about JustinBieber and his nervous system,
but it's just an example of,like, how is it possible that
Justin Bieber ran out of moneyand needed to sell his entire
song catalog for only$200,000,000, which, of course,

(12:51):
that's actually a gargantuanamount of money. But compared to
Justin Bieber's career, it'sactually not that much. I just
got so excited I spit. I mean,like, that's crazy. Right?
That is because fundamentallynone of us were taught how to
expand and increase our moneynervous system thermostat. So
number one, you need to learnnervous system healing tools so

(13:15):
you have your own nervous systemhealing toolkit. Those students
who are inside Relaxed Moneyalready have access to this.
I've done it for you. Nervoussystem healing tools, you know
what, like exercise actually isa great one.
Breathing into your lower backribs. There's all sorts of
tools, and I use a methodologyfrom a place called Neurosomatic

(13:38):
Intelligence. If you want tolearn more about that, the link
is in the show notes, but youcan go to
I use tools from appliedneurology because they're such a
practical application of when touse what tool for what, and
being able to see the changeimmediately. Okay, so that's

(13:58):
just one school of nervoussystem healing.
So that's an example, usingnervous system healing tools or
drills. Exercise is a reallypowerful way to metabolize
stress and update our nervoussystem programming to know that
we are safe and that the threathas passed, but the kind of

(14:19):
exercise matters becausesometimes we can actually overdo
it if we have old patterning ofmore is better, and we have old
patterning ignoring the signalsthat it's already been too much,
so exercise can be a tricky one,but you know, a walk around the
block absolutely for nearlyeveryone is absolutely powerful,
and there's so many other tools.You also, I would recommend

(14:43):
after you have really started toincorporate some nervous system
healing tools into your life andyou are actively at times of
contraction, when you'reexperiencing fear, anxiety,
overwhelm, and at times ofexpansion, when you've just had
a windfall, you've just had yourbiggest ever client, you've just

(15:05):
had a win, We actually need tosignal safety to our nervous
system when we are contracted tobuild our capacity, and also
when things expand beyond ourprevious experience. That also
is a time. I have a story aboutthis that helps to illustrate
it, and it's when I got offeredmy first book deal with Hay

(15:29):
House.
So I was like 27, and I was inUnion Square in New York, and I
will never forget it, I was atthe W Hotel in Union Square, and
Louise Hay herself said to me inthe lobby that Hay House wanted
to publish my book. And I was sooverwhelmed, I was that was so

(15:52):
far beyond my previous capacityfor success that I went across
the street to a cafe, and Istarted to cry. And I felt this
shame spiral. I felt a guiltspiral. I like, when I got
sucked down the emotionaltoilet, I felt awful.

(16:13):
It was terrible, and I did notfeel like I deserved it. And I
was thinking about telling themno. I was thinking about telling
them no. But luckily, agirlfriend of mine came to meet
me, and I told her what wasgoing on, and she was a safe
person who could help me seewhat was really going on and

(16:34):
could hold a thermostat ofsafety with expansion that I
could not hold. So I was able toco regulate with her in
community because other peopleoften see us five years ahead of
where we see ourselves.
So for her, looking at me, waslike, yes, it's obvious that you
would have a book deal. It'sobvious that you would this is a

(16:57):
match for you. It didn't feellike a match for me. But over
time I was able to, in smalldoable pieces, show up for the
assignment and expand my rangeof capacity so that through co
regulation with her and safecommunity and a bunch of other
ways, so that I could write thebook, publish the book, and it
became really successful.However, I came real real close

(17:20):
to sabotaging it, and along theway there were many ways that I
sabotaged it as well, but in theend, it was a net positive,
right?
It doesn't have to be perfect.And so if we are wanting to
build capacity to hold more,definitely leaning into those
nervous system healing tools,and definitely leaning into safe
community who's also committedto expansion, who's also holding

(17:43):
a higher thermostat level.Because being in community is
one of the most efficient,effective ways for us to expand
our nervous system capacity.Because when we're in community
with a bunch of people playing abigger game, it just kind of
instantly begins to feel safer,which is why we have community

(18:07):
inside of Relax Money, which iswhy we do a live event every
year, Relax Money Live, sopeople can find the people who
are playing a bigger game, notin a competitive way, but in a
collaborative way, in a when Irise, you rise when you rise, I
rise kind of way. And that is anincredibly effective strategy.
Who you spend time with makesall the difference in terms of

(18:31):
your ability to build yourcapacity to make more money
without overspending,sabotaging, etcetera. And then
once you are doing thosepractices, once you know that
you're expanding your capacity,you're you're signaling safety
when you're in contraction,you're signaling safety when
you're expansion. In expansion,you're signaling safety every

(18:53):
day, several times a day withyour tools, then you can begin
to ask yourself a few questions.And they can be helpful to do
that digging deeper, that deeperdigging to unearth some of the
old stories that are not servingyou anymore. I don't recommend
doing the deeper digging tounearth old stories until you

(19:14):
have built some layers ofnervous system resourcing so
that you have the capacity toface and feel some of the
emotions that may come up withthis deeper digging.
But here are some questions thatyou might ask yourself. Number
one, where do I feel tensionwhen money arrives? Where in my

(19:35):
body do I feel tension whenmoney arrives? And then you can
close your eyes and actuallyfeel what it feels like in that
part of your body, and you canask that part of your body what
story it wants to tell. If itneeds to be witnessed in any
way.
If it had an age, what age wouldit be? And just find out what

(19:57):
might be living in your body inthat spot. The second question
is, What story am I holdingabout people who earn what I
earn, or about people who wantto earn what I want to earn?
What story am I holding aboutpeople who earn what I earn, or
who want to earn what I earn?Next question.

(20:20):
Where in my body do I feelunsafe with more? And then that
further question would beclosing your eyes and going into
that part of your body, bringingyour conscious awareness to that
part of your body and findingout what it wants to tell you or
show you, and just being awitness. And then finally, what

(20:40):
would support me in feeling safeand supported right now? And you
can ask your body, What wouldmake you feel safe and supported
right now? What would supportyou in feeling safe and
supported right now?
It is unbelievable the kind ofwisdom that you will receive
when you simply ask thequestion. So in summary, the way

(21:04):
to make more money and be ableto actually expand it and hold
it and grow it withoutsabotaging, without
overspending, without overgiving, is to learn to expand
your capacity to feel safe withmore on a nervous system level.
This is not a strategy gameexclusively. This is not a

(21:26):
thought experiment. This issomething that only can be felt.
And when you practice feelingsafe with more, more becomes
normal. More becomes inevitable.Thank you so much for listening,
and I'll talk to you next time.What if managing money felt

(21:46):
effortless? You've worked sohard to earn money, so why does
it feel stressful?
Well, I wanna introduce you tosomething brand new that I've
created called the money resetbecause abundance starts in your
body, not in your bank account.This free audio experience will
help you rewire your nervoussystem for wealth, stop the

(22:09):
money in money out cycle andcreate a foundation for true
wealth, and relax into a newrelationship with money. Plus,
it comes with the five minutecalm cash flow ritual so you can
have financial clarity andmagnetism anytime you want. All

(22:31):
you need to do to get the freemoney reset is go to
katenorthrop.com/reset.