Most financial conversations stop at the numbers. This Mental Health Awareness Month, Katey Davern, VP of Marketing Communications at World Investment Advisors, shares what she's learned about the emotional side of money and what it means to lead with that in mind.
As a late-diagnosed ADHDer, Brain Coach, and wealth management marketer, her perspective on the connection between mental health and financial wellbeing is both professional and deeply personal.
Q: What do you wish more people felt comfortable saying out loud about money and mental health?
I wish people felt safe saying: "I know what I should do and I still can't make myself do it." That gap isn't a personal failing, it's just how our brains work under stress.
I've spent 25 years in marketing and 15 of those specifically in wealth management. I understand behavioral finance. I've literally taught a class in buyer's remorse - and yet I’ve absolutely made impulse purchases I couldn't afford, avoided opening my credit card statements until after the due date, and felt crushing shame about debt I didn't fully understand how I got into.
What I know now is: the shame spiral lives on both ends of the money spectrum. I've lived with people who couldn't spend anything; not because they didn't have it, but because they were terrified of buyer's remorse, convinced they didn't really need it, squirreling away every cent for a rainy day but forgetting (or struggling) to actually live on the sunny days. That's a money shame story too. It just looks different.
The most powerful sentence I ever said out loud was “I’m not bad at money stuff. I have nuances in my brain that – when I don’t pay attention to them – make it look like I’m bad at the money stuff.” Once I understood my brain, I could actually start building systems that worked for brain, so my brain worked for me. That's the conversation I wish we normalized a lot sooner in lives - for all of us. My kids hear this from me all the time.
Q: The financial services industry talks a lot about literacy and access, but rarely about the emotional weight of money. Why do you think that is, and is it changing?
Honestly? Because the industry was built to reward us for being rational & logical about money - and it assumed everyone else could be too, if they just had the right information. The problem is humans aren’t rational & logical until they process through their emotions first – that’s neuroscience basics: we react first, then we emote, and then we can think clearly. It happens in seconds, but that’s the order. Every time. In every brain. So, financial literacy is a knowledge problem – access & information. Emotional weight is a shame problem. And shame doesn't respond to a pie chart.
What we don't talk about enough is how much of our relationship with money was formed before we had any agency over it. I grew up hearing certain things about money: “save half your money,” “I can’t believe they spent money on that,” “write down everything you purchase,” “balance your checkbook every week.” Those messages started innocently enough, but I eventually internalized them: if I didn’t save literally half my money, then I thought I was bad at the money stuff and I wouldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to feel like I didn’t live up to those expectations. Those messages don't disappear when you open a 401(k). They live in your body. They show up in whether you open your mail, whether you feel like you deserve a financial plan, or whether you trust yourself in a room with a financial advisor.
Is it changing? I think so, but slowly. The mental health conversation has cracked some doors open. What SmartMAP is doing - putting a human being on the other end of the financial education experience, someone who meets you where you are - that's the kind of change that actually moves the needle. Because the data doesn't change behavior. Feeling safe enough to be honest about where you actually are? That does.
Q: Has navigating your own relationship with mental health changed how you think about financial stress and the people our company serves?
Completely. And I'd say it's made me a more useful human being in this industry, not a less credible one, even though it took me a long time to feel OK about that.
When I was diagnosed with ADHD in my early forties, a lot of things clicked into place. The impulsive spending. The avoidance. The shame spiral that would follow was its own form of cognitive paralysis. Shame doesn't motivate action. It freezes it.
Understanding that from the inside completely changed how I look at a plan participant who hasn't logged in to their 401(k) account, who hasn't increased their contribution, who signed up for a meeting and didn't show up. I don't see disengagement anymore. I get curious. I see someone whose brain might be telling them this is too hard, too scary, or not for them.
One of the frameworks I use in my coaching and content work is called the Proof Loop: self-awareness leads to understanding, understanding leads to action, action creates evidence, and evidence builds self-trust. Financial wellness follows the exact same path. You can't skip to the action step. You have to start with where someone actually is emotionally, neurologically, experientially, and build from there.
Q: What does it look like to lead with mental health in mind in the financial services environment — and where are the best opportunities for improvement?
It starts with language. I joke I should get “WORDS MATTER” tattooed on my forearm. “You should be saving more” is a shame sentence. “Let's figure out what's getting in the way” is a meeting sentence. The first one closes a door. The second one opens one.
Leading with mental health in mind means understanding something I think gets missed in these conversations: every single person has what neuroscience calls the seven Executive Functions. All of us. These are the cognitive skills our brains use to plan, prioritize, manage time, regulate emotion, and follow through: working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, planning and organization, self-monitoring, and task initiation. A clinical diagnosis happens when your unique blend of how those seven operate is significantly impacting your daily life with how often, and to what degree of severity. That's it. It's not a different category of human. It's a description of how your brain is running its software.
This is why I use the term “neuro-curious” to describe how I want people to approach this. You don't need a diagnosis to benefit from understanding your own executive function profile. When any of those seven are compromised (by stress, by trauma history, by sleep deprivation, by anxiety, by grief, by a nervous system that learned money was dangerous) you can't just make a budget and expect that to fix it. An executive function difficulty can lead to anxiety. Anxiety can lead to avoidance. Avoidance can lead to shame. And shame has a way of sending us straight to our coping mechanisms which, for a lot of us, includes spending money we don't have on things we do or don't actually need, or alternatively, gripping so tightly to every dollar that we can't enjoy what we've earned.
The biggest opportunity? Stop tracking spending and start tracking “spending mood”. I've built this into my own practice - the idea that how you felt when you spent money is far more useful data than what you spent it on. Were you bored? Anxious? Trying to reward yourself after a hard week? Numb? That data tells you where your real interventions need to happen. A budget can't fix a feeling. But understanding the feeling can change the behavior.
The other big opportunity is representation. People need to see someone like them. Someone who has struggled, who’s been in the shame spiral, and who gets it to tell them it's possible to build a different relationship with money. I look for financial professionals who talk about you as a whole person vs. just a portfolio, and what SMARTMap is doing is bringing that gap in the industry…just waiting for everyone else to catch up!
Tips & Tools to Try from Katey:
- Track your spending mood, not just your spending. Before or after a purchase, note one word: bored, anxious, celebratory, numb. Set a reminder to do this at 9pm every night for 30 days, keep it in a note on your phone, and the pattern will tell you everything your budget never could.
- The 24-hour cart rule. Put it in the cart. Walk away. If you still want it tomorrow, you can decide then. You will be shocked how often you don't. Pro Shopping Tip & Marketing Secret: there’s something called “Cart Abandonment” - Marketers set up workflows to recognize if you “left something in your cart” they’ll ping you 24-48 hours later and might even send you a coupon.
- Replace “I'm bad with money” with “My brain learned some unhelpful things about money.” One is an identity. One is a starting point.
- Get curious about your own executive function profile — not to diagnose yourself, but to understand yourself. Where do you get stuck with money? Is it starting? Following through? Managing the emotion of it? That's your data. Work with it.
- Use a financial advocate like the ones on the SMARTMap team. Not to be judged, but to be seen. There's a difference between a financial plan that tells you what to do and a human who helps you figure out why you're not doing it yet.
