My guest this week is Dr. Scott Rick, an associate professor of marketing and author of a great book called Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships (affiliate link).

Topics we discussed included:

• Why our relationship with money is often complicated, no matter how much we have
• Where our attitudes toward money and spending come from
• Mental and emotional tendencies that predispose a person to being a tightwad
• The tendency to act more like one’s parents as one moves through adulthood
• My own tightwad tendencies, on the tightwad-spendthrift scale
• The daily suffering that tightwads experience from not spending money
• The lack of distress that spendthrifts feel about spending money
• The tendency to unfairly criticize spendthrifts more than tightwads
• Spendthrifts shopping for things they might need
• The extent to which being a spendthrift or tightwad may be domain specific
• Possible generational or situational effects on spending attitudes and habits
• The experiences that tightwads often miss out on
• Feeling like we have more money when we’re willing to spend it
• The tendency to treat a raise and higher cost of living differently, especially for spendthrifts
• Shopping momentum and what-the-hell behavior among spendthrifts
• Why spendthrifts tend not to learn from their overspending
• Why spending regret tends to be different for material things vs. experiences
• Personality correlates of spendthrifts and tightwads
• Why tightwads and spendthrifts often wind up together in romantic relationships
• Whether it’s better for couples to have joint or separate bank accounts
• The degree of financial transparency that is ideal for couples

Scott Rick, PhD, is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Scott received his PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon in 2007, and he then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Wharton.

His research focuses on understanding the emotional causes and consequences of consumer financial decision-making, with a particular interest in the behavior of tightwads and spendthrifts.

The overarching goal of his work is to understand when and why consumers behave differently than they should behave (defined by an economically rational benchmark, a happiness-maximizing benchmark, or by how people think they should behave), and to develop marketing and policy interventions to improve consumers’ decision making and well-being.

Find Scott online at his website where you can learn more about his work.

My guest this week is philosopher and counselor Dr. Samir Chopra, author of the fascinating new book, Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide (affiliate link).

Topics we discussed included:

• The extent to which we are experiencing unique levels of anxiety in human history
• Philosophical inquiry that springs from anxiety
• The unconscious cognitive work we do to make the world sensible and navigable
• My guest’s loss of both parents fairly early in life and the consequences on his psyche
• Comparing our experienced misfortunes to the visible misfortunes of others
• The fear of not making the best use of our lives
• Being in the moment as an antidote to continual anxiety
• The Buddhist explanation of why anxiety can persist even when all is well
• Freedom from suffering through seeing the persistence of self as an illusion
• Managing and reducing anxiety vs. living with it
• Viewing anxiety as an ever-present entity in one’s life

Samir Chopra, PhD, is a philosophical counselor and professor emeritus of philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

He’s the author and coauthor of many books, including Shyam Benegal, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, and Eye on Cricket.

His essays have appeared in the Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, Psyche, and other publications.

Find Samir online at his website where you can learn more about his work and contact him about counseling sessions.

My guest this week is Dr. Marla Deibler, a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety. We discussed her excellent new book, The BFRB Recovery Workbook (affiliate link). Check out the publisher’s website where you can download many free worksheets and resources.

Topics we discussed included:

• When a body-focused repetitive behavior becomes a diagnosable disorder
• Common physical consequences of BFRBs
• Behaviors associated with the hair-pulling of trichotillomania, a type of BFRB
• The buildup of hair in the digestive system (trichobezoar) from ingesting hair
• What makes BFRBs so hard to stop
• The rewarding feeling that often accompanies BFRBs
• Fixing something with a BFRB that doesn’t feel quite right
• Why willpower alone is usually not enough to stop BFRBs
• Ambivalence in the process of change: wanting to change and not wanting to change
• The importance of a functional analysis to understand what drives behaviors
• Wanting to jump to fixing a problematic behavior before understanding it
• The importance of awareness for treatment
• Practicing incompatible responses to interrupt the habit of BFRBs
• The relation of BFRBs to OCD and other types of compulsive behaviors
• The important role of acceptance and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• The problems of using punishment to shape behavior

Marla W. Deibler, PsyD, ABPP, is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Board-Certified in Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology, and Founder/Executive Director of The Center for Emotional Health of Greater Philadelphia.

Marla serves on the Faculty of the Behavior Therapy Training Institute (BTTI) of the International OCD Foundation.

She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OCD NJ, the NJ affiliate of the IOCDF, Consultant for the New Jersey Center for Tourette Syndrome, Visiting Clinical Supervisor at the Rutgers University Psychological Services Clinic, and Executive Council member of the ACBS OCD SIG.

She is co-author of The BFRB Recovery Workbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Effective Recovery from Hair Pulling, Skin Picking, Nail Biting, and Other Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.

Find Marla online at her website.