A reader wrote to me recently after one of my emails about inherited money patterns. She'd sat with the question I'd asked — what have you inherited around money that you'd like to give back? — and she came up with her answer. Shame. She was going to give back shame.

But then she said something that stopped me in my tracks.

She'd also realised she had the same inherited relationship with wine.

"If I take the understanding that it is something I inherited rather than chose," she wrote, "then I can relate to it differently."

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since.

Because she's right. And the parallel is closer than most of us would care to admit.

Sixteen months ago, I stopped drinking. Not because I had a problem in the way people usually mean when they say that. I stopped because wine was taking up too much of my mind. That's the honest version. It wasn't that I wanted the blur — it was that the thought of it was running in the background all day long. In the morning, a quiet calculation of how much I'd had the night before. By lunchtime, the little negotiation starting up again — will I tonight, won't I, probably just a glass. And by six o'clock I'd find myself half-hoping my partner Neil would come home with news of a difficult day. Because then there would be a reason to open a bottle, and the decision would be made for us.

Here is what struck me once I could see it clearly: that is exactly how financial anxiety works.

Not just for people who are struggling. For people with good incomes, comfortable lives, savings even. The low-level hum is still there. Not loud enough to demand attention. Just persistent enough to drain it. A background noise that runs from morning to evening, surfacing at two in the morning, sitting just beneath the surface of a pleasant weekend, making the whole thing slightly less free than it should be.

I was lucky. For me, the wine was blotting out other thoughts I wanted to escape — not money. But I know for many people it is exactly that. The glass at the end of the day that blurs the edges of the financial anxiety they haven't yet looked at directly. The spending that soothes the same unease it slowly creates.

Wine works exactly the same way as money in another sense too. We don't choose our relationship with it. We inherit it.

I watched how my mother unwound at the end of the day. I absorbed it — not consciously, not with any intention — the way children absorb everything that surrounds them. Nobody sat me down and told me this was what you did when the day was long. It was just the water I swam in.

Money is the same. You inherit the silence around it, or the anxiety, or the ease, or the shame. You inherit the belief that people like you don't talk about money, or that it will always be tight, or that spending on yourself is fine while saving feels dull and pointless. You absorb the rules without anyone ever stating them.

Then there's what your social world adds on top. I was criticised once for not being interested in expensive clothes and fashion. For not caring about labels. I took it personally at the time — as if there was something wrong with me, something that needed correcting. I understand now that what was really happening was simpler: certain kinds of spending were the entrance fee for belonging in that world, and I wasn't paying it. I don't care about it now at all. But I notice how long it took me to stop caring. How deep that kind of social inheritance goes.

The important thing — and this is where I want people to sit for a moment — is that inherited patterns don't stay inherited forever. We take them on, and then we practice them. And the more we practice them, the more they become ours. That is not something to feel guilty about. It is simply how the brain works. We wire ourselves, over and over, into habitual ways of thinking, feeling and behaving around money. And because we did the wiring, we can also do the rewiring. Not through willpower or self-punishment. Through intention and attention. Gentle, consistent, honest attention.

The people I most admire with money — and I don't mean the wealthiest, I mean the ones who are genuinely at ease with it, the real magicians — they have done this work. They are conscious, aware, and open to flow. They trust their own decisions. They are generous without fear and careful without anxiety. They are not performing financial competence. They have simply looked at what they inherited, decided what to keep, and quietly let the rest go.

That is available to anyone. It starts not with a budget or a savings app, but with one honest question.

What did I inherit here? And is it actually mine to keep?