I’m bad with money in a very specific, quiet way.

Not reckless. Not irresponsible. I’m not hiding purchases or drowning in debt. What I am is avoidant. I put off looking at accounts. I think in terms of big future moves instead of small present ones. I spend a lot of time thinking about financial security and very little time engaging with the behaviors that actually create it.

That pattern has been with me for as long as I can remember. And for most of my adult life, I assumed it was a personal failure—some mix of poor discipline, immaturity, or lack of willpower.

It turns out it’s something else entirely.

There’s a body of research that fundamentally changed how I understand my relationship with money.

Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at UCLA, studies how people think about their future selves. In one of his most cited experiments, participants were placed in fMRI scanners and asked to think about three things: their current self, their future self (often 10–20 years ahead), and well-known public figures.

What he found was unsettling.

For many people, the neural activity associated with thinking about their future self looked far more like the activity associated with thinking about a stranger than about themselves. On a neurological level, the brain often fails to register “future me” as part of the same identity.

And this disconnect has consequences.

The stronger the separation between present self and future self, the less willing people were to delay gratification. The less they saved. The more they favored immediate rewards over larger future ones. Not because they were lazy or irresponsible—but because their brains didn’t experience the future beneficiary as them.

Why sacrifice for someone your brain doesn’t emotionally recognize?

That research landed hard for me because it explained something I’d never been able to articulate: I wasn’t sabotaging my future. I just wasn’t psychologically connected to it.

That disconnect exists in everyone to some degree. But for those of us who are neurodivergent, it tends to be amplified.

The research on ADHD and financial behavior is consistent and uncomfortable. Adults with ADHD, on average, show lower financial literacy, higher impulsive spending, increased likelihood of exceeding credit limits, lower savings rates, and higher rates of loan default. One large longitudinal study found that by midlife, individuals with ADHD were several times more likely to experience serious financial distress.

This isn’t primarily a character issue. It’s an executive function issue.

Working memory deficits make it harder to track bills and deadlines. Planning challenges make long-term goals feel abstract and overwhelming. Task initiation difficulties turn even simple administrative actions into sources of friction. Add in heightened temporal discounting—the tendency to dramatically favor immediate rewards over delayed ones—and the future starts to feel not just distant, but irrelevant.

For me, this didn’t show up as reckless spending. It showed up as anxiety-driven avoidance.

Thinking about money immediately triggered a cascade of questions: retirement accounts, investment strategies, real estate, opportunity cost. Each decision felt high-stakes and permanent. The mental load escalated fast. So I did what my brain has always done under cognitive overload—I disengaged.

Avoidance became the default. And avoidance came with its own tax: persistent stress, low-grade shame, and the quiet sense that I wasn’t showing up as the adult I wanted to be.

What finally broke the pattern was realizing I’d already learned this lesson elsewhere.

When I first started taking fitness seriously, I made the same mistake most people do: I set grand, vague goals. Lose 30 pounds. Get ripped. Completely transform my body. Those goals didn’t motivate me—they paralyzed me.

What worked instead was shrinking the time horizon.

Three workouts this week. Hit my protein target today. Walk after dinner. The results didn’t come from motivation or intensity. They came from small, repeatable actions that produced immediate feedback. The long-term change emerged as a side effect of consistency.

Somehow, I never applied that logic to money.

I kept approaching financial stability as a future-state problem when what I needed was a present-state system.

The shift for me wasn’t about learning more or trying harder. It was about design.

If your brain struggles with delayed rewards, abstraction, and sustained attention, then financial success cannot rely on willpower. It has to be engineered.

Here are the principles I’m now operating by:

Remove choice.
The more decisions a system requires, the more opportunities there are for avoidance. Money that never hits my decision-making layer is money that actually gets saved.

Increase friction in the wrong direction.
Accessing savings should require effort. Spending should be easy but limited. I now move money automatically out of my primary checking account and into an account at a separate institution—one that requires intention to access.

Shrink the time horizon.
I no longer optimize for returns or future scenarios. I optimize for monthly behavior. The goal is not “retirement readiness.” The goal is “did the transfer happen?”

This approach is not sophisticated. It’s deliberately boring. It borrows heavily from behavioral finance frameworks popularized by people like Ramit Sethi—not because they’re flashy, but because they respect how humans actually behave.

The system runs whether I feel motivated or not. Especially when I don’t.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to accept something simple: my brain is probably never going to feel deeply connected to Future Me.

I’m done waiting for that to change.

The work now is building systems that protect him anyway. Systems that assume distraction, avoidance, and inconsistency—and still function. Systems that don’t require me to become a different person to be effective.

This won’t make me rich overnight. It won’t eliminate all money anxiety. But it has already done something more important: it moved me from endless planning into quiet, repeatable action.

For the first time, I’m not just thinking about taking care of my future.

I’m doing it—whether my brain feels like it or not.

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