Rising bills for food, energy, and housing have left many households worrying about money, and that worry is often assumed to feed straight into anxiety and low mood. A new analysis of adults in the UK and France suggests the month-to-month picture is less direct, with worry and low mood tending to keep themselves going.
Researchers at Wenzhou Seventh People’s Hospital and Wenzhou Medical University in China reanalysed 12 monthly waves of the Changing Cost of Living Study, collected from September 2022 to August 2023. The findings appear in Frontiers in Psychiatry, published on 19 August 2026. The analysis included 471 adults, 242 in the UK and 229 in France, who provided 4,085 pairs of consecutive monthly records.
Each month, participants completed standard questionnaires covering eight symptoms of depression and seven symptoms of anxiety. They also answered questions on five economic pressures: food insecurity, risk of poverty, housing risk, employment risk, and difficulty managing finances. Their average age was about 42, and symptom levels were mild to moderate on average.
The team used cross-lagged network analysis, which tests whether a particular pressure or symptom in one month predicts another pressure or symptom in the following month. Food insecurity refers to not having reliable access to enough food. The results describe patterns across the whole group rather than changes within any one person.
Economic pressures were highly persistent. People facing housing risk, employment risk, or food insecurity in one month were likely to face it the next, and higher housing risk predicted greater poverty risk a month later.
Symptoms also fed one another. Depressed mood and loss of interest predicted each other from month to month, as did uncontrollable worry and excessive worry. Restlessness and slowed or fidgety movement showed a similar two-way link, although those questionnaire items overlap in content.
Links running from money pressures to later symptoms were small. Housing risk, employment risk, and food insecurity showed weak associations with later problems such as poor concentration, nervousness, and restlessness, but none of these paths survived a stricter version of the model. A few small links ran the other way, from symptoms to later economic pressure.
The study has clear limits. It is an observational secondary analysis, so it cannot show cause and effect. Participants with incomplete records were left out, the sample was modest for two countries, and pressures such as debt and energy poverty were not fully covered.
The original Changing Cost of Living Study reported that monthly changes in people’s finances were closely tied to changes in anxiety and depression, so the new analysis does not suggest money worries are harmless. Instead, it points to worry and low mood becoming self-sustaining once they take hold, which may be relevant to anyone dealing with inflation anxiety.
Psychreg has previously reported that financial stress and mental health have become increasingly interlinked during the cost-of-living crisis, and that food insecurity raises anxiety. The new findings add that, from one month to the next, it is the worries themselves that tend to persist most strongly.
