Melqart x MassMutual Study: Why a Functional, Whole-System Approach to Finance Matters
For decades, personal finance has been treated as a narrow, mechanical exercise: earn more, save more, invest more. Health, meanwhile, has lived in a separate universe, addressed reactively and often only when something breaks.
But emerging data now confirms what many families already feel intuitively: financial health, physical health, and mental health are not separate systems. They are one interconnected organism.
Recent national research examining health and wealth behaviors provides one of the clearest validations to date of this reality — and it strongly reinforces why we built our work around a functional science approach to family finance.
The Wellness Paradox: Knowing What Works, Unable to Act
The data reveals a striking contradiction.
Most Americans say they make better financial decisions when they are actively investing in their health. At the same time, a large share report sacrificing their health due to financial pressure, while others sacrifice financial stability just to address healthcare needs.
This is not a motivation problem. It is a systems problem.
When cash flow is brittle, liquidity is thin, and risk is poorly buffered, families are forced into impossible trade-offs: skipping dental care, delaying preventive medicine, sacrificing sleep, or relying on short-term fixes that quietly compound long-term damage.
From a functional perspective, these are not isolated decisions. They are downstream symptoms of an unstable financial physiology.
Financial Health as a Leading Indicator of Physical and Mental Health
One of the most important insights from the data is the strength of correlation between perceived financial health and overall wellbeing.
People who rate their financial health as strong are dramatically more likely to rate their physical and mental health as strong as well. They are also far more likely to maintain foundational habits such as regular exercise, adequate sleep, and balanced nutrition.
In functional medicine, these would be called foundational behaviors. In functional finance, they are compounding advantages — but only when the underlying financial structure supports them.
When the system is fragile, even well-intentioned people struggle to sustain healthy habits.
Sleep Debt: The Invisible Financial Toxin
One of the most underappreciated findings relates to sleep.
A meaningful share of Americans report losing sleep due to financial stress, with younger generations affected most severely. Many of those individuals lose multiple hours of sleep per night and report that the sleep loss directly worsens their financial situation.
This creates a self-reinforcing loop:
Financial anxiety leads to poor sleep.
Poor sleep impairs judgment and decision-making.
Impaired decisions worsen financial outcomes.
The cycle repeats.
In biological terms, this resembles chronic stress driving systemic inflammation. In financial terms, it is decision fatigue eroding long-term wealth.
Traditional financial advice has no framework for detecting or addressing this. A functional approach does.
Longevity Without Structure Becomes Fear
Another powerful theme in the research is how Americans think about living longer.
Most people believe that extreme longevity carries hidden financial costs, yet only a small minority have meaningfully planned for that possibility. As a result, many find the idea of living to 100 more frightening than exciting.
That fear is not about life itself. It is about running out of margin:
Running out of money
Losing independence
Becoming a burden on loved ones
Those who view longevity as exciting tend to share a common trait: they have structural financial protections in place. They sleep better, skip fewer health appointments, and maintain healthier routines overall.
Longevity becomes a gift only when the system beneath it is resilient.
What Functional Finance Actually Means
A functional approach does not begin with products, projections, or performance charts. It begins with diagnostics.
Just as functional medicine asks why symptoms exist before prescribing treatment, functional finance asks:
Where is liquidity constrained?
Where is risk improperly concentrated?
Where does stress enter the system?
Which structural gaps force unhealthy trade-offs?
From there, financial architecture is designed to support human behavior, not fight it:
Reliable access to capital during stress
Predictable buffers that reduce anxiety
Long-term protection aligned with longevity
Lower cognitive load during major life transitions
The objective is not optimization on a spreadsheet.
The objective is financial physiology that supports a full, healthy life.
From Fragmentation to Integration
The data confirms what we see repeatedly in practice: fragmented financial advice produces fragile outcomes.
Families do not need more apps, accounts, or disconnected opinions. They need:
One integrated framework
One set of aligned incentives
One system designed around how people actually live, age, sleep, and make decisions
Functional finance is not about doing more.
It is about removing friction so the right behaviors become natural.
When the system is right, health and wealth stop competing — and begin reinforcing one another.
This article draws on findings from the 2025 MassMutual Health & Wealth Habits Report, commissioned by MassMutual and conducted by PSB Insights among 1,000 U.S. adults.