Add To Basket: the 411 on emotional spending

4 minute read time

It’s a recognisable pattern which, by now, most of us might be familiar with in Lockdown 3: browsing, finding the product(s) that will lift your spirits/change your life/make homeschooling bearable, the rush after purchase and then inevitable guilt (and dwindling bank balance).

While all spending is emotional in some way, there’s a difference between conscious emotional spending and unconscious emotional spending. If you’re consciously doing it, you are already recognising that you’re doing it either as a coping mechanism or unconsciously to fill a Zoom-shaped void that has left you feeling burnt out and world-weary. Either way, it’s so easy to be drawn into a pattern of emotional spending that you didn’t even know existed. Online shopping, it can be argued, is almost solely created to feed that impulse that tells you the more you buy, the happier you’ll become.

So that we can stop wondering where our money went and align your bank account with the things that truly serve you, we spoke to Clinical Psychologist Dr Jennifer Twyford-Hynes, a Chartered Member of the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) who offered valuable insight.

“Any type of addictive or compulsive behaviour (and often the terms are interchangeable depending on the person), in this case, spending money and accruing items, has an effect on the reward circuitry of the brain similar to an addictive behaviour pattern,” she explains. “And often a person might feel and notice a sense of tension or anxiety that is relieved by purchasing something.” It’s important to stress, she says, that you don’t have to have a preoccupation with shopping to be an emotional spender.

“Emotional spending is a physical thing that may not be noticed in person, and there may or may not be a preoccupation with shopping, it might just be an impulsive behaviour – there doesn’t have to be an obsession with shopping at the forefront.

The trap is easy to get into because of the way online shopping is structured nowadays – everything's more accessible; marketing techniques are hyperstimulating.

Also, one key thing is that there isn't a protective delay, particularly during the pandemic, between deciding you want to buy something and actually purchasing it – that is almost gone completely. Because sometimes, when people feel certain behaviours out of control, they tell you to try and avoid any trigger or to avoid going, for example, physically, to places to shop but it's not really feasible now. Because you're trying to avoid going places.”

Why do we do it?

A few signs point to why we might do it, possibly as a tool to cover certain anxieties we have. “Finances are obviously the first sign there might be a problem. Or, for example, if you're buying a number of things for your children, such as toys, this might be related to a sense of anxiety relating to your parenting or that you can't be enough for them or that you're worried about how they're doing at the moment. It might feel like an interest at the same time, or something you’re doing to help them. Because we can't be everything. And kids and parents aren't designed to be everything for one another. And currently, we aren't able to access the things we also need to help us – a parenting village if you will.”

How to curb the habit?

Awareness and practicality are two things that can help, plus the acknowledgement that spending more during a time of great uncertainty can also be linked to a sense of loss for what we had pre-pandemic. Most of the little things that would have sparked a lot of daily joy for us, we can’t currently access, so it might seem natural to try and fill this gap with spending.

“To acknowledge there is this anxiety is helpful. So to become aware. And then things you can do, from developing a budget and a list of all the things that you need and writing them down and returning to that list. Then there’s deleting various apps, but having them accessible on your actual laptop so that you have to physically go to it to make a purchase.”

“It’s about making spending more intentional; it’s not about abstinence.”

“It’s also about trying to be honest with yourself, are there things you used to be able to do, that gave you joy or satisfaction that you can't do anymore? We know there are and I think people feel like because everybody’s technically in the same boat, it can make people minimise what they have lost or what they can't access. And it’s also about being honest about some sort of sadness or loss for the way they thought their life would be at the moment. And that it’s okay to feel that bad just because other people are saying they feel that way too.”

And what else might influence emotional spending?

There has been no specific research tying emotional spending to other life stage influences, such as menopause for example, but Dr Twyford-Hynes says it’s not uncommon to think there might be a link to emotional spending and any major milestone, “major life events, and any sense of a feeling of imbalance, psychologically and biologically, can make us rely on things in a way that might not be too healthy.”

Good to know.*

*deletes Zara app.

Jennifer McShane, February 2021