Train your brain to stop impulse shopping and overspending | Blog

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A Canadian man who went to the store to buy just one thing, sits in a grocery cart filled with on-sale soup boxes. He's wondering about his impulse buys.

The Get

How to train your brain to stop overspending

For this week’s top story, we’re getting expert insights on how to stop overspending.

By Wing Sze Tang

Your inbox is bursting with sales alerts from every store you’ve ever shopped. Your social media feed is an infinite scroll of shiny new products, tailored to your interests. You walk into a big-box store for one or two routine groceries and, oops, leave with a cart full of impulse decisions. As the meme goes, just leaving your house costs $100.

Sound familiar? Welcome to the world of modern shopping, where we’re all bombarded by messages to buy now, buy more, buy anytime. To help us through the thick of the busiest shopping season—the annual holiday spree—we asked three experts for tips on practicing retail restraint.

Think of buying as your last resort

In the early days of online shopping, environmental sustainability expert Sarah Lazarovic found herself clicking “add to cart” too often. So the creative strategist designed her own chart, called “The Buyerarchy of Needs,” and placed it on her desk as a reminder.

It’s a colourful pyramid that ranks a bunch of purchase-decision options, in Lazarovic’s order of priority:

Use what you have.
Borrow.
Swap.
Thrift.
Make.
Finally, once you’ve considered everything else, your last option is to buy.

Her chart has gone viral (shared on pages like the Subreddit r/Frugal), and you’re welcome to print her design as your own reminder, too.

For Lazarovic, this restrained shopping strategy works because it switches the mind from what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls system one (“our impulsive nature, which usually takes over when we’re shopping”) to system two (our logical decision-making side).

“In order to be more rational, we need to impose a barrier, a pause, a timeout,” explains Lazarovic. That’s when you might remember, hey, you already have something similar, or you can borrow from a friend, or you can refashion an item you already have.

Avoid the temptation to impulse shop

“If I go into a local designer’s shop, I’m going to like lots of things,” says Lazarovic. The obvious solution, if you don’t want to shop, is just don’t go in. Likewise, “if you subscribe to a newsletter from your favourite store and they send you sale items, you’re gonna want to buy them.”

Solution: Hit unsubscribe.

As Lazarovic explains, people aren’t overconsuming due to personal weakness—we just exist in a system that barrages us with beautiful stuff all the time, making it normal to want those things. Limit your exposure to all that temptation if you’re trying to keep your shopping in check.

Develop a shopping “system”

Shopping can be entertaining, so it’s easy to get sucked into a spontaneous treat-yourself mindset and the emotional rewards that come with buying. If you’re trying to practice restraint, however, make shopping boring and methodical.

Put a system into place. For example, “when you go to the grocery store, have a list with you, and stick to the list,” says Mark Kalinowski, a Calgary-based financial educator with the non-profit Credit Counselling Society (the organization offers more shopping tips on mymoneycoach.ca). Don’t wander around, getting distracted by whatever catches your fancy. “Go with a set budget and a calculator.” Bring cash only. It makes spending feel more immediate and real. Plus, “you only have what’s in your pocket.”

Avoid huge stores with an abundance of choice—these are like buffets that entice you to keep eating even after you’re full. If you just need to fill a prescription, for instance, head to the small pharmacy that mainly stocks medication, and skip the drugstore that also has aisles full of luxury makeup and fragrances. “You’ll have fewer options to impulse buy,” says Kalinowski.

Slow down the shopping process

Online shopping has made it too easy to buy something in mere seconds, especially if your credit card details are already stored in your device. So, make things less convenient for yourself: “I’ve deleted all my personal information, such as my address or credit card,” says Sunghwan Yi, a professor of marketing and consumer studies at the University of Guelph who studies compulsive and impulsive shopping.

On some sites, you can check out as a guest, without having to create an account. “When I really feel compelled to buy things, I have to enter all my information. That gives me one or two minutes of thinking it over: ‘Do I really want to buy this now?’” Yi’s strategy echoes the ones that Lazarovic recommends: Give yourself a pause in the process, so your more logical brain kicks in.

Figure out your feelings when you shop

If you’re shopping beyond your budget, even when you have no need for anything, take the time to contemplate your motivations. Are you bored, stressed or depressed, looking for comfort or distraction? “Many people use buying things as a way of escaping negative feelings about themselves,” says Yi. And impulse buying can seem like “safe fun.” Compared to other vices, like gambling, it’s more socially acceptable.

Know that the happiness you get from shopping is fleeting. “It tends to go away within half a day, or in maybe one or two days with very substantial products. Then we always go back to our normal feelings,” says Yi. “It’s very important to remember that.” Find other sources of enjoyment, which can be as simple as spending quality time with a friend.

Practising restraint when shopping doesn’t mean giving up all the fun. It just means taking back some control and being more mindful in your decision-making. Instead of falling for the constant temptation to buy more (more! more!), you’re the one who decides what’s truly a must-have.

Wing Sze Tang is an award-winning journalist based in Toronto. She is the founder of Wayword Media Inc.