In an age where buying things has never been easier, Amy Shardlow describes herself as a “shopaholic”.
She says that shopping for new clothes always follows a certain pattern: First, they help her feel safe or forget about the daily stresses in her life. Then the high fades and is replaced by a familiar feeling.
“If I had to buy something right now, I’d be so high… And then tomorrow I’ll be like, ‘Why did you do that? You have to pay these payments,’ and all my money is gone again,” she says.
“Is when [I’m] stressing me out a little bit, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, you know what would make me feel better about myself? I’m going to treat myself.”
And the cycle begins again.
The rise of online shopping means there are fewer obstacles to making a purchase than ever before.
Stores never close, products are cheaper than ever, and can be shipped by air from anywhere in the world.
Buy Now, Pay Later services give buyers the opportunity to take on debt in exchange for immediate gratification.
We can pay for everything with the touch of a single button.
Meanwhile, online retailers have ways of getting us to do things we might otherwise consider irrational: stay up late at night to take advantage of a flash sale, or sign up for countless newsletters for fear of missing out on discounts.
Professor Mike Kyrios, a clinical psychologist at Flinders University, is interested in the ways that shopping shapes us.
“Wherever you go, there is a sale or an opportunity,” says Professor Kyrios.
“Then all of a sudden you have an urge and your whole consciousness revolves around the need to buy.”
In recent years, says Professor Kyrios, there has been a rise in what he believes could be a discreet Disorder: compulsive shopping.
“There’s a group of people, and it’s a growing group of people, who have shopping-related mental health issues… They have little control over their purchases,” he says.
Shopping is a problem?
Over the years, Professor Kyrios has developed a set of diagnostic criteria for compulsive shopping disorder.
It includes difficulty controlling spending on consumer goods, buying unnecessary items in excessive amounts, spending beyond a budget, and buying things that are never used.
A report by the Australian Fashion Council found that Australians buy an average of 56 new items each year, at an average cost of $6.50 each.(ABC News: Hayley Roman)
He says that it is estimated that around 5 per cent of the population, more than a million Australians, have these traits.
“The buzz [they feel] it revolves around the act of buying… the act of finding a bargain,” he says.
“The fact that you have searched for something and found it gives you a feeling of euphoria, a high.”
This cycle of pursuing pleasure is sometimes called the hedonic treadmill.
It’s probably familiar to anyone who shops online, when there’s a double delight: once when making a purchase, and again when the package arrives at the door.
The fashion industry thrives on this buzz. And Australians are the second largest consumers of textiles in the world, buying an average of 27 kilograms of new clothes and other textiles per person each year.
For the average consumer, this equates to more than one item of clothing a week.
Loading Instagram content
But this comes at a huge environmental cost.
In New South Wales, 80 per cent of discarded clothing and textiles end up in landfill.
A third of the 310,000 tonnes of clothing that Australians donate to charity each year ends up being exported to developing countries, where they create an environmental catastrophe.
Professor Kyrios says that the more he has studied compulsive shopping, the more he believes that the cycle of compulsive shopping is indicative of a larger problem, and this may be why compulsive shopping is not universally recognized as a discrete psychiatric disorder.
“Overtime [I’ve] I had to acknowledge that there’s actually a social context to this that is much, much broader, and that the divide between what’s normal and what’s abnormal is sometimes a bit gray,” he says.
the biggest photograph
This year, Australian consumer confidence has plummeted to low levels normally seen during a recession. Yet Australians continue to spend record amounts of money.
Consumption is so central to the functioning of the economy that spending is regularly reported as a key indicator of its health. A drop in the number of people buying things is considered a potential disaster.
For Professor Kyrios, it presents a broader question: how do we separate a potential mental illness from a condition that defines society?
Every year, Australian charities and outlets are overwhelmed by an outpouring of donations from the public.(105.7 ABC Darwin: Emilia Terzon)
“Our whole society revolves around consumerism [and] materialism,” says Professor Kyrios.
“We see a lot of issues around self-identity: ‘I don’t feel safe in the world and I’m trying to hide what’s inside by showing a particular aspect or element of who I am’… and that’s why people have issues. to buy”.
It’s not just a problem for individual buyers.
Waste and excess are built into the fast fashion business model, which requires new product lines to be manufactured in a matter of days to meet rapidly changing trends.
Consumers need to keep buying, as lower-quality products sold at lower prices degrade faster and need to be replaced more often.
It means that huge margins of waste are built into the budget.
In 2018, H&M reported unsold global inventory worth more than $5 billion. Its global profit that year was about 15,000 million dollars.
“We are what we buy,” says Professor Kyrios.
“We focus so much on buying things and showing that we are successful. We have certainly forgotten more fundamental questions about what it means to be human.
“People make up for this gap by buying stuff.”
cut credit card
While much of this is something that people can’t tackle alone, Professor Kyrios encourages anyone concerned about how much they spend on impulse purchases.
His advice is to implement changes that slow down every part of the decision-making process.
One way to reduce online shopping is to delete saved credit card data from your phone.(Flikr: Robbert Noordzij)
“Cut up that credit card,” he says.
“And if there are high-stakes situations, maybe have a conversation with someone about what you can do right now, this very second, to distract them from this momentum.
“Do something to get you out of that mindset…go for a walk, do some exercise, do some mindfulness, do some yoga.”
Professor Kyrios says that interrupting the impulse to buy and putting up barriers can often be enough to interrupt the problem.
“Impulses are like bubbles in a glass of lemonade. If you leave the glass of lemonade on the counter and drink it again the next day, [there are] not as many boosts, not as many bubbles.”
Loading form…
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
Source: news.google.com