Shopaholism. How to overcome the passion for unnecessary purchases?

What causes

Shopping is an opportunity to get rid of boredom.
What reasons influence the development of shopaholism?

1. The desire to always remain in the center of attention, to keep up with fashion trends. This can push a woman to go to expensive boutiques and make expensive purchases that do not correspond to her financial capabilities.
2. A man who had serious financial problems in his family as a child, he was deprived of a lot. When he grows up, he begins to compensate for this by making necessary and unnecessary purchases, because now he has such an opportunity.
3. Growing up in a wealthy family, when the child bought everything on a whim. When a person grows up, he never learns to value money, continues to spend it thoughtlessly and constantly experiences financial problems.
4. Develops in adult women who are wives of wealthy and business people. This is all due to the fact that husbands do not devote enough time to their spouses, sponsor them with money, and women make purchases, trying to compensate for the lack of attention from the men they love.
5. Depression has a beneficial effect on the development of shopaholism. When a person makes purchases, he receives at least some joy in life; he actually exists under the influence of a “drug”, depending on the dose of serotonin. Thus, shopping is a kind of antidepressant that helps you feel better.
6. Low self-esteem. A person cannot pass by a single promotion, discount, or bonus system. If sellers begin to court a person with low self-esteem, saying pleasant and flattering words, creating the illusion that they want to take care of her, then she will not be able to pass by without making a single purchase. That is, a person receives temporary power, respect, and attention is paid to him. It is not surprising that shopaholism develops.
7. Constant stress in the family and at work provokes the development of this addiction. A person is distracted from everyday problems by shopping. After all, only in a store you have the opportunity to feel your freedom and importance; you can choose what the individual likes, and not someone else.

Signs of shopaholism

Experts in the field of psychology have identified a number of characteristic signs that help distinguish a shopaholic from an ordinary buyer:

1. Visiting sales centers is considered by people addicted to shopping as their main hobby and even the meaning of their existence. Walking around shopping pavilions takes up all their free time, while healthy members of society would prefer to devote their leisure hours to reading, walking, watching TV, etc.
2. A person suffering from this type of addictive behavior buys goods without an objective need for them. Find out what pathological hoarding and why it is difficult to part with unnecessary things.
3. An ordinary potential buyer, before purchasing a specific product, carefully studies the offered range, compares prices, and tries to choose the highest quality, durable and functional product. Shopaholism creates in its victim an uncontrollable desire to buy everything in the store.
4. If a person obsessed with the thirst for shopping encounters an obstacle in the form of a lack of money, he undergoes a panic attack, demonstrates aggressiveness, becomes very nervous and begins a frantic search for the missing funds (borrows an amount from friends, takes out a loan at any interest).
5. An unconscious passion for shopping plunges a person into a state of euphoria at the moment of trying on, choosing a product and making a deal, so he uses shopping as a way to relieve stress , while healthy consumers would prefer to get rid of unpleasant experiences by communicating with nature, working out in the gym, watching a movie, visiting an exhibition.

Shopping is not the most important thing in life. Find out how to find happiness and joy in every day here .

Characteristic manifestations

Some people have no idea that they have shopaholism. The following manifestations will indicate this:

• often comes the realization that pointless purchases have been made;
• the desire to go to the store occurs at a time of severe stress or due to loneliness or boredom;
• there is often no money for necessary things, the budget goes to waste;
• shopping is the only way to escape and unwind;
• while in a store, an insane desire to buy something awakens, and there is a loss of control over oneself;
• staying in the store as long as there is money;
• there is a desire to purchase things that a person does not even know about the possibility of using them;
• lengthy discussion of purchases made;
• going to the store just to spend time there;
• a feeling of anger, disappointment after making a purchase that turned out to be unnecessary or too expensive;
• a feeling of depression when there is no opportunity to visit the store and an increase in mood when such an opportunity arises.

A shopaholic, making another purchase, feels a strong surge of energy, and the hormone of happiness - serotonin - is released. All problems and worries immediately fade into the background.

Correction of addictive manifestations in the behavior model of a shopaholic

Psychologists advise their patients who have recognized an uncontrollable shopping addiction to adhere to the following recommendations:

1. Pay at the checkout only in cash, because... when using virtual funds, the illusion of their inexhaustibility is created.
2. If you do not have the required amount, do not take out loans or credits.
3. Before leaving home, make a list of what you really need; take with you exactly as much money as is required for purchases on this list.
4. Block the desire to go shopping unless absolutely necessary.
5. Ignore information about discounts, sales, and all the marketing tricks of retail outlets.
6. Before making a transaction, compare prices and quality of goods from different stores.
7. Stop reading fashion magazines and browsing online stores.
8. Fill your free time with pleasant and useful activities (reading, learning foreign languages, playing sports, charity work, etc.)

If the causes of shopaholism are associated with hidden depression , then a reasonable solution to the problem would be to make an appointment with a psychiatrist, whose professional help will allow you to change your behavior and restore your zest for life.

Read here : psychology of greed - causes and consequences.

Ways to fight

Group therapy - a method of combating shopaholism

A person must understand that shopaholism is a disease, which means it needs to be fought. Otherwise, you will not get rid of addiction.

1. Autotraining. This method of psychotherapy helps people who have realized their problem and are ready to fight it with all their might. A person is given a list of special instructions that must be strictly followed and strictly followed.
2. Group classes. Today, more and more people are susceptible to this addiction, so it is not difficult to arrange sessions with the presence of not one, but several people at once. This method allows you to see yourself from the outside, to understand the problem of another person and your own. In addition, being in a group of like-minded people makes the healing process much faster.
3. Cognitive behavioral therapy:

• a specialist teaches how to behave in moments of crisis;
• establishes a model of correct behavior;
• explains that all actions must be rational;
• teaches how to react in a given situation;
• discusses possible options for getting rid of addiction.

If shopaholism is not treated, it can lead to serious consequences, financial problems, persistent depression, family destruction, numerous debts, loneliness, and loss of friends.

Shopping is like a drug. How to get rid of a bad habit?

The “discoverer” of this disease is the outstanding German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelino (Emil Kraepelin), who described obsessive addiction back in 1915. He noticed that it was akin to other types of addiction. For example, individuals suffering from shopping addiction experience approximately the same emotions and feelings as people addicted to gambling (gambling addicts), drug addicts, and alcoholics. At first, the habit of shopping simply gives a person pleasure, gives a feeling of power over the environment, superiority. At the next stage, it transforms into an obsession, which is accompanied by satisfaction during the shopping process and deep remorse after. To understand that a bad habit has already developed into a disease, certain “symptoms” characteristic of shopaholism will help:

• depression (even to the point of feeling unwell) due to the inability to visit a retail outlet and an immediate emotional uplift upon entering the store;
• visits to shopping establishments without the intention of purchasing something specific, but only for the purpose of simply passing time;
• an irresistible desire to become the owner of an item without a clear understanding of how this purchase will subsequently be used;
• anger, emotional decline after a purchase that turned out to be unnecessary or too expensive.

The result of compulsive shopping is difficulties with loved ones, illegal actions, financial difficulties and even loss of strength. Subsequently, mental disorders are also possible. Aggression, fear neurosis, persistent sleep disturbances, and depression appear. How to get rid of shopaholism? How to overcome the disease? To effectively combat this addiction, you need to understand the roots of the problem.

Description

They talk about shopaholism when a person cannot control his addiction and constantly buys everything. In this case, the need to visit stores becomes uncontrollable. During shopaholism, the subject cannot say why he needs this or that thing. In addition, a shopaholic does not compare the price and his financial capabilities. Please note that a person goes to the supermarket not because he has an empty refrigerator or no clothes. Just a shopaholic gets satisfaction while shopping.

The thought constantly appears in the patient’s head to be in the supermarket as soon as possible. A person gives up his hobby, various interests. Only after purchasing the goods does he relax, feel happy and peaceful. When choosing a specific product, a person gains a surge of vitality, energy and vigor.

Shopaholism completely changes a person’s behavior and thinking and leads to human degradation. For a shopaholic, shopping is a drug. If a person cannot implement it, he experiences a kind of withdrawal.

Interesting! The latest research data has proven that the number of people suffering from shopaholism has increased by 5% over the past year. But this is an underestimated figure, because many people hide their passion: “I often visit the supermarket, a friend of mine works there,” “I go shopping and compare prices.”

Most often, older women who experience age-related depression suffer from mental disorders. There are also shopaholic men, but quite rarely. With oniomania, there is a constant craving for acquisition. Women cannot resist buying anything at a sale, fair, or at a discount.

Some people buy all sorts of junk at a second-hand store because it’s a “bargain price.” Teenagers and men are obsessed with buying the latest gadgets - laptops, tablets, smartphones. And richer men constantly change their car, buying a new one.

Methods for overcoming shopaholism

It is impossible to get rid of shopaholism by methods of persuasion, restriction and prohibition, since the forced isolation of an individual from the object of his addiction is fraught with the development of more dangerous conditions. The oppressive feeling of dissatisfaction from the inability to do shopping leads to severe forms of depression with frequent suicidal attempts. If a shopaholic is “excommunicated” from shopping, a person may go to other destructive extremes. In an effort to feel euphoria, the subject may become addicted to alcoholic beverages, drugs, and psychotropic drugs. (! About drug addiction treatment in a rehabilitation center.)

Today, the only effective option for overcoming shopaholism is a combination of psychotherapeutic measures and hypnosis techniques. Psychotherapy allows a shopaholic to look at his addiction from a different point of view, to recognize the abnormality and danger of the addiction that has arisen. The client learns correct psychological knowledge and masters constructive ways to overcome traumatic situations. The therapist helps the addicted person develop a healthy self-image and guides the patient to find healthy options to meet their needs.

However, psychotherapy methods are unable to directly influence the cause of shopaholism, since a person cannot extract information from the sphere of the subconscious through volitional efforts. No matter how hard an individual tries, he cannot, while awake,

gain unhindered access to the deep memory region in which traces of a traumatic event are recorded. To work with the subconscious, it is necessary to eliminate the control of consciousness, which is only possible by immersing the patient in an artificial trance.

A hypnotic trance, a state similar to ordinary sleep, allows you to obtain information from that period of the past when some kind of crisis occurred in a person’s life, which provoked the start of shopaholism. Having accurately identified the initiators of addiction, the client, in a state of hypnosis, re-encounters these stressors. However, the repeated “meeting” takes place in an altered state of consciousness, which ensures complete comfort for the patient and the absence of new mental trauma.

The hypnologist directs the shopaholic to change individual destructive components in the life scenario, due to which the person’s obsessive need for acquisitions disappears. Without violence or pressure, a specialist forms the basis in the client’s subconscious for the emergence of a new worldview and the creation of a constructive model of behavior. After hypnosis sessions, the subject is not only freed once and for all from psychological dependence on shopping: his irrational fears disappear, his psycho-emotional state stabilizes, and his mood improves.

A course of hypnosis is an unobtrusive impetus for making changes in life, an incentive for the development of your personality, a motivator for discovering hidden potential. Hypnosis techniques help create such an internal state when a “taste” for life opens and a desire arises to embrace all the possibilities, beauty and harmony of the surrounding world.

❂ Review of the treatment of cynophobia (fear of dogs) with hypnosis.❂ Review of the treatment of skin diseases (lichen ruber) with hypnosis. ❂ Review of the treatment of fear of the dark (nyctophobia). ❂ Review of the treatment of panic attacks in hypnosis. ❂ Why it is effective to work with memory in hypnosis ❂ Review of the treatment of arachnophobia (fear of spiders). ❂ Review of the treatment of tachophobia (fear of speed). ❂ Review of the treatment of fear of public speaking. ❂ Review of the treatment of ophidiophobia (fear of snakes). ❂ Review of the treatment of social phobia in hypnosis. ❂ Review of the treatment of acrophobia (fear of heights) and social phobia in hypnosis. ❂ Review of hypnosis treatment for social phobia (fear of judgment).❂ Tattoo under hypnosis. Training in self-hypnosis.❂ Treatment of deep caries under hypnosis.

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Causes of the disease

It is very difficult to identify a specific factor that caused the development of pathology. Most often this is heredity. Manic desire to buy is a consequence of a mental disorder, neurosis. Psychotherapists have noticed that shopaholics are people who have low self-esteem and suffer from attention deficit and lack of love. A shopaholic's marriage partner may be a drug addict, alcoholic, or a sick person who needs to be constantly looked after.

The individual was unable to achieve success in the profession and was not self-fulfilled in life. Often a shopaholic is an overbearing, self-centered person who loves himself too much, his parents are very protective of him, he does not know the word “no”.

There are situations where a shopaholic grew up in a poor family, did not receive due attention, dreamed of something, but he did not have it all. Then the shopaholic began to live in abundance and buy everything in sight, compensating for the lack of attention.

Shopaholism is often a consequence of an unresolved psychological problem. By making a lot of purchases, a person creates an illusory comfortable world for himself.

What are the signs of a shopaholic?

To distinguish an ordinary love of shopping from a dangerous mania, it is worth knowing 9 signs of a shopaholic.

These include:

1. “Treating” stress with shopping. If in a bad mood a person first of all thinks about going to the store in order to “unwind”, then this is a very bad sign. Stressful situations need to be handled differently. Yes, positive emotions are ideal for treating stress. But if the main source of positivity is shopping, this is very, very bad. The most dangerous thing about this is that the more often a person gets rid of stress through shopping, the faster he forms a bad habit. Ultimately, shopping will become the only source of joy in his life, displacing family, friends and hobbies.

2. Multiple excess costs. The average salary in Russia is 35,000 rubles. This is not enough to satisfy the needs of a shopaholic. Therefore, money is borrowed for unnecessary purchases. Gradually, the amount of debts grows, interest on credit cards and overpayments on microloans increase. Statistics show that in the last two years alone, the number of Russians declaring themselves bankrupt has doubled. Just think: some of them declared themselves bankrupt due to debt in the amount of 350-500 thousand rubles. All this is a consequence of unreasonable spending, made impulsively and unnecessarily.

3. Unhealthy pleasure from shopping. The difference between a shopaholic and a healthy person is that he is interested in the moment of purchase itself, and not in the desire to possess the item he is purchasing. This is easiest to explain with an example. If a woman buys a new frying pan because the old one is already out of order, and then actively uses it and is happy about it, then such a reaction to the purchase is quite natural. If she buys a frying pan and cooks in a slow cooker or even eats food from delivery, then she is a shopaholic. The key point here is the use of purchased items. A shopaholic's home is a warehouse of new, almost never used items.

4. Buying unnecessary goods. Shopaholics tend to buy things that they absolutely do not need. In this case, we are talking not only about some things that he does not use at all, but also about an unnecessary variety of identical objects. Returning, for example, with frying pans, this means buying not just one frying pan, but a whole set, from which only one item will be used. Typically, shopaholics simply go to all the stores along the way and buy the products they like without understanding where and how they will use them.

5. Justification of expenses. Shopaholics explain their exorbitant expenses with thousands of reasons. Discounts, promotions, the need to take something “in reserve”, other excuses - all this is just an attempt to hide your bad habit from others and yourself.

6. Viewing products without purpose or necessity. The Internet era has contributed to the development of oniomania on an incredible scale. Millions of people around the world scroll through thousands of pages every day on Aliexpress and other online platforms in search of something unusual. They order unnecessary goods in bulk, giving in to the impulse to make a purchase. In stores, they behave in exactly the same way - they walk along the rows and shelves, look at everything, buy the first things they come across without much need.

7. Depression from lack of shopping. In 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, many people were forced to stay at home, going out for shopping only when absolutely necessary. In this situation, shopaholics naturally fell into a state of apathy without the usual trips to the store. Therefore, if several days without shopping cause sadness and a feeling as if something is missing, then this is a very alarming sign.

8. The desire to comply with fashion trends. Queues for many kilometers for a new iPhone, constant viewing of fashion magazines and fashion blogs, discussions of new fashion trends - all this is a reflection of the consumer culture, of which shopaholics are victims. Fashionable things are not always vital. Understanding this is the first step to getting rid of the disease.

9. Shopping tourism. Perhaps the extreme degree of shopaholism is traveling to other cities or countries to make purchases. Just think: while ordinary people fly to Italy to enjoy fine cuisine, fine art and architecture, shopaholics spend all their time in fashion boutiques. Is it worth it? And will there be vivid memories of such a “vacation”?

Consequences of shopaholism

• Significant financial expenses, possibly even the appearance of debt. Some shopaholics live from paycheck to paycheck: after all, it is on this day that they can afford maximum spending and can pamper themselves with all sorts of purchases.
• Conflicts in the family - a lot of unnecessary things and wasted money - are quite an objective reason for a scandal. If the financial situation in the family leaves much to be desired, then aimless shopping means that something truly useful and necessary simply will not be purchased.
• A kind of abstinence – popularly called “withdrawal”. It occurs when there is no money, and therefore it is impossible to purchase another thing. At the same time, symptoms of depression appear, and a feeling of inferiority arises.

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