Hanna Morrell is a holistic financial coach and the founder of Pacific Stoa, an Oregon-based practice. She created the Pacific Stoa Financial Wellness Curriculum, which blends practical money mechanics with the emotional skills people need to manage their finances without shame or restriction. Here, she explains why restriction keeps failing us, and what to reach for instead.
When Trying Harder Isn’t Working
By the time someone comes to me feeling out of control with their money, they’ve almost always tried to fix it on their own. Usually many, many times.
They’ve built a spreadsheet full of backwards-looking numbers, tried to follow some percentage-based rule about what a “good” budget should look like, and promised themselves they’ll track every purchase and stay inside the lines. It holds for about two weeks. Then something slips, and they decide they’ve failed.
If they try again, and over time that gets less and less likely, they tend to reach for the same move: just do it properly this time. Try harder. Cut deeper. Double down on the restriction, the expectations, the sheer force of will.
For couples, there’s often another layer. One partner builds the spreadsheet and then tries to “train” the other on how to use it. It almost never works, because the system was built with only one brain in mind. Resentment grows on both sides. The partner who built it feels like the entire financial life of the household rests on their shoulders. The other feels parented, or quietly told they’re a failure.
The tool they’ve been leaning on this whole time is restriction. And restriction is exactly the problem.
Why We Reach for Restriction
Restriction shows up in lots of forms, but the most common is the old line “spend on your needs, not your wants.”
It’s easy to teach. It’s easy to expect of ourselves. It fits neatly on a t-shirt. But it’s nearly impossible to actually live by, and it will quietly sabotage any real attempt at lasting change.
Here’s the thing we don’t say often enough: just because a tool is easy to teach, just because it’s simple to demand of yourself, does not make it a good tool. Usually it means the opposite. Financial systems that actually work need to be simple, personalised, and able to flex as our lives change. Restriction can’t do any of that. It’s a blunt instrument dressed up as wisdom.
What Restriction Does to Us Over Time
Living in restriction slowly destroys our ability to trust ourselves with money. And trusting yourself and being resilient are, at heart, the same thing.
If your whole approach is to restrict harder and better, there will always come a point where you rebel, or where the system simply breaks down. And almost every time, we read that as a personal failure: proof that we couldn’t stick to an “easy” rule we’ve heard a thousand times.
That constant drumbeat of failure teaches something deeper than we realise. It teaches our nervous system that money is unsafe, that we’re bad with it, and ultimately that there’s something wrong with us. That’s a heavy thing to carry, and it’s manufactured almost entirely by a tool we were told to trust.
It’s the Same Story as Food
People often draw a parallel between restrictive budgeting and restrictive eating, and in my experience it maps almost perfectly. That’s no accident.
Money is our only universal resource. If you want food, a day off, warm socks, or an education, you need money to get there. And food itself is a fundamental resource, right alongside air, shelter, and safety.
Anyone who has ever been starved of oxygen knows we will do absolutely anything to get it back. The same is true of food, and the same is true of money. So when someone “rebels” against financial restriction, it can look like a character flaw, but it’s actually a survival strategy. We are wired to respond badly when resources are taken away from us. No creature on earth does it gracefully.
The Rebound
One of the strangest outcomes of restriction is that it often leads to more spending, not less.
And not just more, but reactive spending. The kind that sounds like “I deserve this.” There’s real nuance underneath that, but at its core it’s a moment of judging ourselves rather than genuinely weighing a choice. When restriction and self-assessment are the only tools we’ve ever been handed, they’re the only ones we can reach for.
So the loop sets in: restrict, rebel, resent ourselves for failing, then restrict even harder. Round and round it goes, tightening each time.
Restriction Versus Expected Spending
I want to be precise about what I mean by restriction, because not every limit is a bad one.
When I talk about restriction, I mean the emotional, reactive, self-judging, fear-driven kind. The kind that operates as a demand. (Worth saying: that’s different from abstinence, which is a tool we sometimes use with shopping or spending addiction, but that’s a conversation for another day.)
The opposite of restriction isn’t mindless, unlimited spending. It’s expected spending. And expected spending behaves much more like a boundary, which can be a deeply healthy thing.
The difference is subtle but it changes everything. Expected spending says, “I expect to spend $85 on groceries.” Restriction says, “I can’t spend more than $85 on groceries.”
Picture walking through the shop with each of those in your head. One is a low hum of “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” The other is calm and open: “I expect to.” The budgets we build with clients are grounded entirely in expected spending, and the words we hear back, again and again, are “freeing” and “full of choice.”
Try This Instead: The Target Spending Game
If not restriction, then what? In practice, I teach clients a game called Target Spending. It’s a playful, low-pressure way to practise expected, intentional spending without piling on any of the usual dread. Think of it as a short experiment where you get to safely try new behaviour, rather than a financial diet.
What It Is
You choose three things:
- One small, flexible slice of spending. Maybe coffee shops, takeaways, or something specific like “groceries while the parents are visiting.”
- A short timeframe. A few days up to two weeks, never a whole month.
- An exact amount. For example, “I expect to spend exactly $45 on coffee this week.”
The aim is to land as close to that bullseye as you can, on purpose. It isn’t about “being good” by underspending. It’s about thoughtfulness, and noticing your options.
How It’s Played
- Pick the wedge. Find one flexible area that feels safe to experiment with. It should matter enough to feel real, but not so much that it’s frightening.
- Set the parameters. Choose your window of time, then choose an exact target that feels both doable and meaningful.
- Spend toward the target. Remember, the goal is intention, not avoidance.
- Track lightly. A note on your phone or a sticky note on the fridge is plenty. We’re after simple awareness here, not perfect bookkeeping.
- Debrief. When the time’s up, look back. Where did you land against the target? Which decisions felt good, and which felt off? What felt like expansion, and what felt like pressure?
Why It Works
It builds the muscle for expected spending. You decide in advance how you want to use your resources, then follow through with flexibility. It’s the direct opposite of the restrictive money diets that always fall apart.
It kicks shame and scarcity in the teeth. Because it’s a game, mistakes simply become data. Overshooting isn’t a moral failure, it’s just something to look at and adjust for next round.
It lets you practise in a small sandbox. You build decision-making skills on a manageable scale, which makes the bigger budgeting work feel far less daunting later.
It bridges the gap to a full budget. We often play this before building a whole system, so people start to see themselves as capable spenders rather than someone who’s “bad with money.”
And it helps couples talk. It gives them a non-blaming structure to discuss trade-offs and preferences, without anyone feeling parented or like they’re the only one who cares.
At its simplest, it’s a focused experiment: pick a slice, set a target, and learn from what happens. That gentle, playful approach is what builds the emotional resilience a lasting system actually needs.
Restriction was never going to get us there. Trust will.
| Want to Go Deeper? If this piece resonated, Hanna writes regularly about managing money without shame, restriction, or scarcity, and what to build in their place. Read more on the Pacific Stoa blog |
About Hanna Morrell
Hanna Morrell is a trauma-informed, holistic financial coach and the founder of Pacific Stoa, based in Eugene, Oregon. She works virtually with individuals and couples, helping people build money systems they can actually trust. To learn more or book a consultation, connect with Hanna through her TeleWellness Hub profile.
