Irregular income and anxiety: living between projects

Seven in the morning, before coffee. Your thumb finds the banking app on its own. The balance is the same as last night — of course it is, nobody pays invoices at night. The invoice for that brand identity, sent two months ago, still hasn’t been paid. The next project has been “almost confirmed” for three weeks. And in your head a sentence that almost everyone who lives from creative work knows: “Once this project comes through, I’ll finally be able to relax.”

Then the project comes through. And the relaxation lasts about two days.

Musicians, designers, writers, actors, camera operators, illustrators — many people in the creative industries live from project to project, from fee to fee, from funding call to funding call. Even when things are going well, when they have a name, awards and full calendars, the income doesn’t arrive evenly. It comes in waves. And between the waves there is a silence in which anxiety is very fond of talking.

In this post I won’t be giving financial advice — that’s what accountants and financial professionals are for. What I would like to look at is what income uncertainty does to the mind and body, why creative people often experience it in a particularly personal way, and how you can stay calm enough alongside it to be able to think at all.

Uncertainty is sometimes worse than bad news

Plenty of people who live with irregular income say something like: “If I at least knew it was going to be bad, I could prepare. But I don’t know.” That isn’t just a feeling. In 2016, researchers at University College London published an experiment in which participants played a simple computer game: they turned over rocks, and under some of them was a snake that meant a mild electric shock. The probability of finding a snake under a rock changed during the game. Stress — measured through skin sweating, pupil dilation and participants’ own ratings — was highest when uncertainty was greatest, that is, when the chance of a snake was around 50 per cent. Not when the shock was almost certain.

This finding explains a lot about life between projects. The worst moment isn’t necessarily the one when the money really runs out. The worst is often the “maybe” stretch: maybe they’ll pay this month, maybe the funding application will succeed, maybe they’ll call back. During this stretch the nervous system doesn’t know whether to prepare for danger or relax, so it stays on standby. For a long time. Out of this comes that familiar state of being tired but unable to fall asleep, and being woken by every email.

Psychologists call this intolerance of uncertainty: a tendency to experience uncertainty as unbearable and to try to eliminate it at any cost — by checking, by mulling things over, by making plans for every possible outcome. The researchers who first described it showed that it is closely linked to how much a person worries. Someone who finds uncertainty hard to bear almost always worries more, too.

What scarcity does to the mind

In their book on scarcity, the economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the psychologist Eldar Shafir described what happens when something — money, time — is running short. Attention narrows onto whatever is lacking. This “tunnel” has a short-term advantage: you become very focused on what is urgent. But everything outside the tunnel — relationships, health, long-term plans, creativity itself — begins to fade.

In one of their well-known studies, sugarcane farmers in India scored better on tests of attention and reasoning after the harvest, when they had money, than before it, when money was running out. These were the same people. Only their circumstances had changed. The researchers concluded that worrying about money takes up part of our mental capacity, which is then missing for everything else.

For a creative person this is especially painful, because the very thing scarcity takes away — an open, playful, curious mind — is also the thing they live from. Anxiety about money isn’t just unpleasant; it can directly make it harder to do the work that would bring money in. If it has ever occurred to you that you can’t create because you’re worried about money, and you can’t earn because you can’t create, you are not imagining it. It is a real loop.

Why creative people feel it differently

Other freelance professions live with uncertain income too. For creative people, though, it often becomes entangled with something else: worth. When a commission doesn’t come, it isn’t just a financial gap. It quickly turns into a question: “Am I still any good? Has the market forgotten me? Was the whole thing a mistake?” Silence in the inbox reads like a verdict.

That is why many creative people get caught in a rhythm known in English as feast or famine. In Slovenia it is well known among independent creatives, including those with the status of self-employed in culture.

The cycle goes roughly like this. When a project arrives, relief arrives with it, but so does the fear that this is the last one, so you say yes to two more. Then comes a period of working nights and weekends. When the projects end, the body is exhausted — many people fall ill exactly when they could finally catch their breath. Then silence, which quickly turns into panic, and in panic you again agree to everything, including terms you shouldn’t accept. And the cycle repeats.

In the long run, this rhythm leads straight to exhaustion. If you recognise yourself in it, have a look at Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break. And if it seems to you that your work isn’t just work but the answer to the question of who you are, there’s a post on that theme: Who are you when you’re not creating: an identity that is work.

Control: what is yours and what isn’t

When uncertainty is high, anxiety tries to save itself through control. You check your balance five times a day. You refresh your inbox. In your head you run through every possible scenario: what if they don’t pay, what if the funding falls through, what if there’s less work next year. Each check soothes you for a moment, and then the worry grows back, a little bigger. I wrote about why the brain would rather predict a hundred disasters than one calm day in “What if …”: why the brain would rather predict a hundred disasters than one calm day.

This kind of control is illusory, because it deals with things you can’t influence. It helps to draw a line. The knowledge base has a tool for this, the Circle of control, which you can fill in on your own. With irregular income, it might look something like this:

The left-hand column isn’t a to-do list for banishing uncertainty. It’s a list of places where your energy changes something. The right-hand column is a list of things you can only notice and let be. When you catch yourself thinking about something from the right-hand column for half an hour, that’s a sign anxiety has dressed itself up as problem-solving.

A plan that calms the nervous system

I often hear — from people in other professions too — that having a plan would calm them down. That’s true, but not in the way we usually imagine. A plan doesn’t calm you because it removes uncertainty. It calms you because it tells your nervous system that it isn’t responsible for everything all the time.

Concrete financial questions — how much to set aside, how to handle tax and contributions, how to plan income — belong with an accountant or a financial professional. Many creative people avoid these conversations out of shame or fear of hearing something bad, which only prolongs the “maybe” stretch. Simply booking such a conversation is often a bigger psychological step than anything else.

The psychological part of the plan is something different. It isn’t about figures, but about when and how you deal with money. Researchers who developed the worry postponement technique showed that people who give their worries a set time and place in the day also worry less outside that time. You can apply the same principle to money: instead of carrying it around with you all week, you give it its own appointment. The exercise below is built on exactly that.

What happens in a couple and a family

Uncertain income rarely lives in just one person. If you live with a partner who has a regular job, each of you may experience uncertainty completely differently. One sees it as part of the profession, the other as a threat. And conversations about money can quickly turn into conversations about whether creative work is even a “proper” job. Such a conversation might sound like this (composed, not a real person):

“I only asked when the payment’s coming.”
“I know you only asked. But what I hear is that I should have got a normal job ages ago.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“My dad said it every month when Mum bought a pair of shoes.”
“So we’re not only talking about the invoice.”

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often see that we carry our relationship to money from the family we come from. If money at home was a source of rows, shame or silence, uncertain income in adulthood will hit exactly there. It’s no coincidence that an empty account makes some people angry, others ashamed and others guilty. I’ll look at how income uncertainty intertwines with a relationship when both partners are creatives in the post on creative couples, Creative couples: when you’re both artists.

Exercise: the money hour

This exercise won’t fix your finances. But it can give you back part of your attention and your nights. Do it once a week, always at the same time.

1. Choose a slot. For example, Monday at ten, one hour. This is the only time in the week when you deal with money: bills, invoices you’ve sent, reminders, a look at your balance. Put it in your calendar as a meeting.
2. Outside the slot — set it aside. When a money worry comes up during the week, write it on a note headed “for Monday” and go back to what you were doing. Don’t check your account. It will be hard at first; that’s expected.
3. In the slot, separate the columns. Take your notes and sort each worry: can I influence this or not? For what you can influence, write one concrete step for this week. For the rest, write only: “This is not mine to decide.”
4. Write the worst-case scenario to the end. Anxiety likes to leave it unfinished. Write: “If the payment hasn’t come by the end of the month, I will …” and keep going until you reach a step you can actually take. It often turns out that the worst case is unpleasant, but not without a way out.
5. Finish with your body. When the hour is up, stand up, go outside, lengthen your out-breath. Show your body that this was a meeting, not a danger, and that it’s now over.

The exercise is an adapted version of a technique you’ll find in the knowledge base as Worry postponement. If your thoughts still keep slipping back into the loop, also read Worries you have no control over: an exercise that helps you set them down.

Where this approach isn’t enough

I want to be clear: I don’t believe that all distress about money is a psychological problem. When there genuinely isn’t enough money for rent, food or bills, that isn’t intolerance of uncertainty but real material hardship. Breathing exercises won’t help then, and nobody should tell you it’s all in your head. What you need then is concrete help — from people close to you, from professional associations, from the local social work centre. Seeking that help is not a defeat.

Second, sometimes income uncertainty isn’t the cause of anxiety, just its current name. If you notice that the worries don’t go away even in months when there’s enough money — that they simply move on to your health, your children, your relationship — it may not be about money but about a more general pattern. The knowledge base entry Generalised anxiety describes this. Then it’s worth seeking professional help, whatever your bank balance.

Third, anxiety can escalate into panic attacks — a racing heart, a sense of suffocating, a fear that something is about to happen. Interestingly, they often strike precisely the people who have been holding everything together for a long time; I wrote about this in Panic and control: why it strikes the person who holds it all together. With physical symptoms like these, see your GP first. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, call the mental health crisis line in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans confidential line in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

Living with the waves, not against them

Creative careers rarely become fully predictable. Even people who are doing very well often say the uncertainty never quite goes away — they just learn to live with it differently. The point isn’t to defeat uncertainty, but not to let it take everything else from you: your sleep, your relationships, your joy in the work.

It helps not to see lean spells only as a threat. They are often also the only time you can return to your own projects, learn something new or simply recover from the last flood. That doesn’t mean you have to romanticise them — only that they aren’t necessarily proof that something has gone wrong. It also helps to learn to recognise spiralling thoughts before they carry you away. Overthinking: why thoughts go round in circles and how to step out offers a few ways to do that.

If you’d like to look at this together, you’re welcome to come to a session in Ljubljana. I work as a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy under supervision, so together we look not only at the anxiety, but also at where your relationship to money and security comes from. I also work with English-speaking clients. If you want to look at that history more closely, you can choose a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, where we draw your family tree and look at how the people before you talked about money and work.

What to remember

• For the nervous system, uncertainty is often worse than bad news — stress peaks when you don’t know what’s coming.
• Worrying about money takes up part of your mental capacity, so creating becomes harder. That isn’t laziness, it’s a real loop.
• For creative people, uncertain income quickly turns into a question of worth — silence in the inbox is not a verdict on you.
• Separate what you can influence from what you can’t, and give money its own slot in the week instead of carrying it with you all the time.
• When there is real material hardship, or anxiety that doesn’t lift even in good months, seek concrete or professional help.