In a world gripped by financial stress, worrying about money has become the new national pastime.

It's no longer the preserve of miserly great-aunts who die with thousands in the bank but nothing in the fridge - financial anxiety is sweeping the population on a wider scale than ever.

GP Eileen Sables says it's the central theme of many of her patient's consultations in the past six months, particularly people worried about the possibility of redundancy.

Figures from the Retirement Commission reflect a surge in people seeking information to plan and manage their personal finances.

Last year more than 1.2 million people visited the commission's website, sorted.org.nz. And visitor numbers so far this year are up 30 per cent.

More than 220,000 Sorted booklets were distributed throughout New Zealand last year, and the number for the first two months of this year is already more than 50 per cent of last year's total.

Retirement commissioner Diana Crossan says website visitors are not just taking a cursory glance - they are formulating budgets and using the site's debt calculators "hugely". Calculations made so far this year are up about 60 per cent.

Although those who are drowning in debt or who have had their life savings gobbled by failed finance companies may have cause to worry about their fiscal security, others fret unnecessarily or disproportionately. These are people who, by comparison, are quite well-off but don't think they are, financial adviser Liz Koh says.

"They're the sort who always see the negatives and never the positives. They worry themselves sick when they should be out there enjoying their lives."

Sable says that the recession time "definitely turned up the heat on those sorts of people". Worrying about finances has been a common theme for those developing a depressive illness, she says.

In the past they may have worried about their children, or socialising.

Sable tries to nut out whether the problem is real or perceived and encourages chronic worriers to see a psychologist.

Koh sees clients who worry about not having enough for retirement when in fact they're "way ahead of the population". In appropriate cases she encourages retired clients to spend some of their capital and "not worry about money as an end in itself".

Times like these exacerbate unjustified financial anxiety, says Canterbury University psychology professor Simon Kemp. Some people react more negatively than others to the same environment.