When money troubles reach crisis points, I am apt to get frantic and impulsive, which is not good for the situation at all, and I have to use many tricks to calm down.
One silly thing I started doing is to write phrases in my mother's handwriting. She taught grade school and had beautiful penmanship, Petersen system, which she had to teach too. So when I write like that it looks almost exactly like hers.
It takes much longer, and the words are broad and spread out. It's rhythmic and steady, writing like that. My own hand is terrible, mostly because I'm in a hurry and don't care to make things very legible. I try to blame my messy writing on my arthritis, but that's not really the reason.
So I wrote a phrase I ran across in FlyLady, which expressed the same sort of methodical, steady mindset I need:
"... the daily pleasure of tidy surroundings."
My mother wouldn't have occasion to write such a thing since she didn't care much about housework, but it's the same kind of nice, conventional, unhurried sort of thought I need to cultivate. A bit hypnotic. I could probably find some adages or phrases from samplers women used to make in times long ago, that would also work. Both the thought and the action of doing it are calming.