Are You Investing in Disease? The Hidden Cost of Saving for a Rainy Day

In my previous blog, I touched on anxiety, specifically chronic anxiety, not as a disease but as a neural circuit that enslaves us for its own survival.

If I am suffering from anxiety, that means I am anxious. I am the one doing the anxious feeling. But here is the thing about chronic anxiety, the kind that lingers and poisons everything. You are not actually anxious. Not really. What happens is that anxiety descends on you like a fog rolling in. And as it settles, different thoughts emerge. Old memories surface. Regrets you thought you had buried come back to life. And they all start troubling you.

Once you realize that anxiety has its own life, everything changes. Anxiety is accessing your memories. It is using those memories against you. Why? Because anxiety is a circuit. It is a neural pathway in your brain. It has been carved out by repetition and reinforced by stress. And like any circuit in the brain, it follows a simple rule. Use it or lose it.

If you stop feeding that circuit, if you stop giving it reasons to fire, it will gradually weaken and disappear. The brain prunes away what is not used. So if you do not use anxiety, you lose it. That is the science of neuroplasticity working in your favor.

Now here is where things get interesting. The exact same principle applies to our fears about the future. And nowhere is this more visible than in how we approach saving and investing.

Consider this. You invest money today so that you can address a disease thirty years from now. Cancer, perhaps. Or heart disease. Or any of the chronic illnesses that plague old age. You work hard, you save diligently, you compare insurance policies, you worry about market fluctuations, you stress about inflation eating away your returns. You do all of this so that when the disease comes, you will be prepared financially.

But here is a question worth sitting with. How do we know that by spending so much energy investing for the disease, we are not actually inviting it? How do we know that the disease does not look at all our preparations and say, oh, thank you for the invitation, here I come?

There are two ways to look at this. One is what people might call superstitious. The idea that by investing in the disease, by focusing on it, by giving it your attention and your money, you are somehow manifesting it. You are creating a justification for all your preparations. The disease arrives to prove that you were right to worry.

But there is a second way to look at it, and this one is far more scientific. When you spend your life planning for disease, you are actually increasing your stress load significantly. Apart from all the normal lifestyle stress you already carry, you add the burden of financial anxiety. You need to focus on earning more. You need to save more. You need to track your investments. You need to compare insurance policies. You need to watch the markets. You need to worry about real estate values and interest rates and mutual fund performance.

In an earlier time, when people lived in joint families with forty or fifty members under one roof, one person might handle all of finance, another managed the kitchen, a third looked after the children, and they lived by adjusting, adapting, caring, sharing, and nurturing this unit that was their family. The burden was shared and the stress on any one individual was minimized. Just as a big generator is far more efficient than a small portable one, so also this big family machine was much more resilient and protected from unnecessary stress.

But today we live in nuclear families. Me, my wife, my two children. That is it. Now I have to do everything myself. My wife has to do everything herself. We are each on our own little islands.

And slowly, steadily, day by day, we are investing in disease. Every day the stress builds up. Every day that stress hits your immune response. It pounds on your glands. Your adrenals, your thyroid, your pituitary. These delicate endocrine organs take the hit day after day. You are not at ease. You are constantly thinking about money, about the future, about what might go wrong.

So here is the irony. You are investing in disease on a daily basis so that you can afford to pay for it thirty years from now. Alongside the money you are saving, you are also saving up disease. You are increasing the disease load in your body as you increase the money in your bank account. And then when the illness finally appears, you can say, see, I was prepared. But the truth is that you prepared yourself for the disease. You created a fertile soil for it. You ensured that it could take root and grow.

What if there was another way?

Imagine leading a life where you have enough. Not a life of frugality and deprivation, but a life where you know what you have and you focus on being happy with it. You do not obsess about medical care and insurance and all the things that might go wrong. You leave some of that to the community around you. You leverage the power of modern technology to create a family that transcends bloodlines and family trees, a family united by resonant thoughts, ideas, and ideals.

When you are good to your e-family, when you contribute to society, when you help others without expecting anything in return, something remarkable happens. People naturally want to help you. Being a part of the community and contributing selflessly actually protects you more than money in the bank ever could. It is a different kind of insurance, and the premiums are paid in kindness and connection rather than stress and worry.

Now consider the alternative. When you lead a fulfilling life, you are happy. Your family is happy. You are content. You spend the money you have wisely, on good food, on relaxation, on experiences that bring joy. You sleep on time and wake up on time. You do all the good things that you are supposed to do for your body and mind.

What happens then? Thirty years later, you will not need money to pay for that disease. Because you never invested in it in the first place. You addressed the root cause rather than saving for the symptom.

This is not about superstition. It is about understanding the indirect but very real correlation between the way we save and the way we live. When you start to save with anxiety, you start to carry a load. Saving is not just putting money away and forgetting about it. People do not do that. They compare. Is this fixed deposit better than that one? Is this mutual fund performing better than that one? Should I put money in the stock market? Should I buy real estate? Oh no, there was an earthquake there, what happened to my building?

We do not invest and forget until we are eighty. We invest and then we want to manage it. We want it to grow. Then we notice inflation and we want to fight it. All of these concerns come bundled with the simple act of investing. If investing were truly as simple as putting money away and forgetting it for forty years, it might be different. But that is not what people do. The anxiety circuit keeps firing. The stress keeps building. And the disease keeps getting its invitation.

The same neural principle applies to our financial fears as applies to our anxiety. If you keep feeding the fear circuit, it will grow stronger. If you keep worrying about future illness, you will keep your body in a state of chronic stress. And chronic stress is one of the most reliable paths to actual illness.

So perhaps the question is not how much you are saving. Perhaps the question is whether you are saving in a way that allows you to live peacefully today. Whether your preparations for tomorrow are poisoning your today. Whether the anxiety about what might happen is actually making it more likely to happen.

The most powerful investment you can make might not be in mutual funds or insurance policies. It might be in your own peace of mind. In the community around you. In the daily practices that keep your body free from inflammation and your mind free from stress. In the simple decision to stop feeding the anxiety circuit and let it wither from neglect.

Because when you stop investing in disease, you start investing in life. And that is the only investment that truly pays dividends.