If just reading Elizabeth Hartney’s fictional account of “the day to day experience of shopping addiction” on about.com leaves you feeling exhausted, try to imagine what it’s like to really have a shopping problem.

Here’s a sample of what Hartney describes:

Wake up and make yourself two cups of coffee in your expensive new coffee machine.

Go to work.

Lunch break: Head to the mall for some retail therapy.

Slow afternoon: Take a break with your favorite shopping website. Plan for five minutes, but all of a sudden two hours have gone by. Work hard to make up for lost time.

Head home to creditors on the answering machine and past-due bills in the mailbox.

Read the full article here: A Day in the Life of a Shopaholic

Have you ever really looked at the Checkout Girl? Be aware of your surroundings!

One of the simplest, and most difficult, spiritual practices is being consciously aware. To be consciously aware is more than to notice, although that is the first step. Conscious awareness invites us to engage with our surroundings and the people among whom we find ourselves. It is very easy for us, even tempting, to remain unaware. When we are stressed, or hurting, or in a hurry, it is expedient to shut down. When we are shut down, we tend to reduce things, places, and people to objects that we value according to function. We miss so much!

Try being consciously aware of your car. Making the effort to experience the sensation of sitting in your car and of driving, realizing your good fortune in owning a car, and doing your errands on foot are all ways to be consciously aware of what owning a car means beyond its function.

When we are consciously aware of people, we not only see them in context (the checkout girl at the grocery store, your neighbor on the lawn, your boss at the office), we see them more deeply. Notice physical features, stance, expressions, and words. What is going on with them as people? How will your words and attitude affect them?

The next time you go shopping, try this experiment: work to be consciously aware during your shopping trip. (You may be surprised to notice how often you “fall asleep” and stop seeing consciously. If you find yourself “falling asleep” stop and reorient your attention.)

The following suggestions for practicing conscious awareness when shopping are borrowed from the article “Spiritual Practices for Shopping” by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat.

• As you walk into a store, remind yourself to pay attention to the colors, sights, sounds, and textures of the objects and people in the store.
• As you explore the store, practice feeling grateful: e.g., be grateful that there are so many things to choose from; that articles are attractively arranged; that the store is air conditioned or heated; that the sales person is helpful; etc.
• If you feel stressed or hurried, practice breathing in and out slowly with a suitable affirmation, such as “Breathing in, I am calm; breathing out, I am calm.” Repeat until you feel yourself relax. Proceed slowly. If you find yourself speeding up, repeat the exercise.
• Be conscious of quality, beauty, usefulness, need, and price as you examine a potential purchase. Check in with your emotions to see how you are feeling when you contemplate a purchase.
• Finally, try using any time you spend waiting in line, in traffic, or on the escalator or elevator to bring to mind people you have encountered and to pray for or hold good intentions for their welfare. Empathize silently; send them your best wishes for calm, peace, and rest, in prayer or intention.

Becoming consciously aware of and engaging with your surroundings, other people, and your purchases can transform a shopping trip into a spiritually fulfilling adventure. Try this exercise with a friend and compare notes.

Buzz Bizzinger created a lot of it this week with his tell-all story in the April issue of GQ, a confessional about his shopping and sex addictions. A sportswriter who’s best known for his book Friday Night Lights, subsequently made into a film and a TV series, Bissinger grew up financially privileged, but he was haunted from childhood by the fear that he was not who and what he was supposed to be—in his case, “the eternally preppy boy in the button-down shirt.”

It turns out Bissinger came by his clothing fixation honestly. He recalls his father coveting the trademark Gucci loafers and, after much handwringing, buying a pair. His mother sported the brand’s iconic Jackie O shoulder bag. And Bissinger followed suit at thirteen by making his first Gucci purchase, a wallet. Even as a child, Bissinger associated the sensation of sexiness with clothing, but it didn’t come to dominate his life until forty years later, when three losses coalesced; his wife moved away from New York to take an administrative job at NYU Abu Dhabi, his youngest child left home for college, and he couldn’t find the motivation or the words to produce the pieces he’d contracted to write, fearing that nothing would live up to Friday Night Lights.

Alone, adrift, and repressed, he raged against conformity, boredom, and blandness, and online shopping became the perfect life-raft to keep him from drowning in the day-to-day minutiae he loathed. Coupled with the bricks and mortar of Gucci and The Divine Stylist, his own perfectly attuned personal shopper, “clothing became the stimulation and attention” he desired, the sexual vitality he’d first experienced as a teenager while marching in a Memorial Day in the orange-and-black sculpted jacket and matching tight-fitting pants his father had bought for him. Each new purchase became “an aphrodisiac,” Bissinger writes in GQ, an autoerotic sexual thrill and a diversion from his feelings of unworthiness.

The clothing’s magical effects, however, wore off quickly and necessitated ever-larger and more frequent purchases to maintain his high. Bissinger was convinced that he could stop shopping at anytime he wanted, and even if he couldn’t he rationalized it as a lesser evil; for God’s sake, he thought, it wasn’t mainlining heroin. And besides, he could afford it, he wasn’t hurting anyone, and $638,412.97 was but a small price to pay for what he believed was freedom from the repression of his first fifty-five years. But you can never get enough of what you don’t really need; it’s the emotional baggage that needs unpacking, not the parcels that UPS brings every day.

Buzz’s story came out on the heels of my having seen Harvey Fierstein’s new Broadway play, Kinky Boots, another tell-all story, this one about a family shoe business on the skids that is resurrected when a flamboyant Drag Queen, Lola, whose manliness is never in question, saves the company by taking it in an entirely new direction, designing boots for men with six-inch heels. Seeing these thigh-high boots gushing with all manner of bling, the kinkier, the better, I couldn’t help but compare Bissinger to Lola. Bissinger’s withering negativity, uncertainty about his manhood, and edginess couldn’t be farther removed from Lola’s warm, confident, non-defensive presentation of self.

The GQ story is Bissinger’s attempt to prompt a remission, and perhaps, a transformation to a more confident, Lola-like existence. The more probable outcome is this: by checking himself into a residential treatment center he might, with his drug of choice unavailable, more successfully access the pain of his losses, explore his confusion about his sexual desires, and begin to uncouple the compulsive buying of clothes from the “cinematic excitement of engorging flesh.” It all depends on whether he can give up his self-described “Mr. Big” mentality and find more authentic self-expression, renounce the “futile feeding of the bottomless beast” and trade his sartorial shrink for the psychological kind.

My first conscious awareness of the relationship between eating disorders and compulsive shopping came in the early 90’s at a national conference on eating disorders. Catherine Steiner-Adair, in her keynote address, asked the audience what we thought were the two major ways women had for dealing with the ups and downs of life.

The silence was palpable and ominous. “Dieting and shopping,” she answered.  Her statement was instantly acknowledged throughout the room, first by a saddened hush, and then with murmurs of agreement all around.

Over the next several years, as I was developing an interest in compulsive buying and gathering material for my edited book, I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self, I noticed that some of the very same people that had written self-help books about compulsive buying had also written self-help books about eating disorders. Almost every therapist who works with people with eating disorders can provide anecdotal reports of binge eaters who go on shopping binges, anorexics who shoplift, and bulimics who compulsively buy items they never use or “ingest” and then, just as compulsively, return to “void” themselves.

Was this a coincidence or a reflection of a demonstrated association of the two behaviors?

What do dieting and shopping have in common?

Food and money, nourishment and worth, are inextricably woven into the fabric of love and lack of love. Most problems with food and money are not really about either, but instead expressions of unconscious beliefs, family messages, outdated convictions, current distress and painful memories that we don’t want to look at.

We use both to repair negative moods which are often the result of feeling undesirable and badly about ourselves. Like binge eating, the process of buying temporarily improves a compulsive buyer’s mood, sometimes even to momentary euphoria, only to be followed by shame, guilt, and/or depression, which get dispelled temporarily by starting the cycle all over again.

Put another way, we diet and shop to close the gap between who we are and who we want to be; researchers call this the self-discrepancy gap.  We use both of these mechanisms to move closer to an ideal self-image, in the eyes of others and ourselves.

Physical appearance is of great importance to people with eating disorders and to compulsive buyers, many of whom perceive themselves as fat, fear becoming overweight and are dissatisfied with their body proportions.

Does this describe you?

If you’re like the majority of female compulsive buyers, and many men too, you frequently purchase appearance-related items such as clothing, shoes, jewelry, and cosmetics in the hope that this will enhance your impression of yourself and other peoples’ impressions of you.

So to the extent that we believe that a particular body size and shape and a particular dress or pair of shoes, or model and make of car are important routes to success, identity and happiness, we attempt to fashion our bodies into the perfect manikins on which to display our perfect clothing–and our environments to portray an image of wealth and power.  We attempt to become walking advertisements for ourselves – to cultivate desire, as all good advertisements do.

Shopping as we traditionally understand it—shopping for goods, shopping to buy—has been one of the few areas of validation available to women; the handling of food, of course, has been another.

Shopping is an extension of women’s gatherer role in primitive societies. While men went out to hunt, women concentrated on tasks and responsibilities based close to the hearth. Earlier in our history, we bought provisions to satisfy our physical needs and the needs of our families, whether this was in the buying of food or consumer goods.  Consumer behavior was once based on objective need.  Now we buy food and consumer goods to acquire and express a sense of self-identity, regulate emotion or gain social status.

In and of itself, none of this is pathological.  Shopping, preparing food and eating it can each be important sources of self-definition, self-expression, creativity, even healing, but done to excess each activity can spin out of control and erode rather than enhance quality of life.

In preparation for a webinar I gave in January about compulsive buying and eating disorders, I read Geneen Roth’s book, “Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money.” After losing all of her savings in the Madoff Ponzi scheme, Roth began to explore the direct parallels between her relationship with food and money.  She’d once seesawed between episodes of binge eating followed by periods of dietary restriction. It dawned on her, not even so gradually, that she was vacillating between binge shopping and periods of budgetary self-deprivation and was using money, as she once did food, as a substitute for love.

“I felt the same shame about being myself, the same tendency to lie, to stockpile, the same feelings of not having enough while refusing to see how much I actually had on my plate or in my closet.”

Familiar?

Messages she’d inculcated about money and the conclusions she drew were the same as the ones she’d once had about food, i.e. that she wasn’t supposed to have it, wasn’t allowed to take up space, have needs, say what she wanted. Her spoken conviction was that being thin or having money evoked hatred, envy, and backstabbing, so to be accepted and loved, she could lose weight and lose friends or stay fat and be loved, have money and be hated or be poor and be accepted. So she found a third option, losing weight but hiding her body, making money but pretending she didn’t, getting rid of it quickly by overspending or abdicating responsibility for it, first to her husband, then to Madoff.

In my clinical practice, about one-third of the shopaholics I’ve worked with either had a history of an eating disorder or still had one. As Donna was gaining control over her compulsive buying behavior, for two weeks in a row, she came into the office and proudly reported that she had been able to resist going into one of her “high risk” stores and had been able to tell a salesperson that called her about something new that had come into the store, that she didn’t need it.  I noticed, however that her face looked appreciably rounder.  What happened was that she was now eating impulsively instead of buying impulsively.

Norma reported that although she had resisted going on even one shopping excursion that week she found herself bingeing and vomiting, a behavior that she hadn’t engaged in for many months before she came into treatment for her compulsive buying.

It can also work in the other direction.  Manny used some of the skills and tools that he was learning in the group treatment program to keep himself on track when he had the impulse to overeat.  His success in one area of impulsive behavior generalized to success in the other.

Mari, who had just confessed to taking $150,000 from her husband’s family’s business, where she also worked, had been buying clothes compulsively for two years, but the anxiety and depression, which was controlled fairly well by the overshopping, was threatening to break through. Mari began to gain weight, stopped buying clothes, and started buying bigger ticket items. By that time she’d been buying compulsively for four years and gained 30 pounds. During the course of our work, she came to understand that the very premature caregiving role she’d had to take growing up as the oldest of five children–her mother who was addicted to pain medication and her father was alcoholic– figured significantly in both problems. Once she got the help she’d so desperately needed, no longer had to live with an increasingly complex web of lies, and gave herself permission to take care of herself instead of so many others, her compulsive buying totally stopped and she began exercising, eating healthy, and losing weight.

Quite often, as people with eating disorders, alcoholism, or drug addiction develop sobriety, compulsive buying problems surface. In fact, in the 12-step world, Debtors Anonymous, the program that focuses on money problems, is considered the graduate program, the one to work when sobriety has been achieved in other programs.

Kelly, a 20 year old college student, came to me initially because of severe bulimia and alcoholism.  Within a month, it became clear that these addictions were so severe as to require a residential treatment dual diagnosis program, which she attended for three months.  We resumed outpatient treatment and the work of the first post-rehab year was to reinforce the important work that she’d done in rehab and make sure that she was using the skills and strategies she’d learned there to remain clear, sober and binge free.  It was not until she felt totally in control of her impulses to binge, vomit and drink in order to regulate her affect, that cigarette smoking and compulsive buying took center stage as other addictions that needed our attention.

If shopping problems and eating problems are going hand in hand in your life, take heart. Doing the difficult, but extremely rewarding work to build and strengthen the muscles that help you tolerate distress, regulate your emotions, and cultivate the capacity for joy and gratitude, will pay off in spades and have a positive impact self-defeating eating and shopping behaviors simultaneously.

Eat, Shop and Be Merry (Part I)

Early on in my study of consumer behavior, I attended a national conference on eating disorders. Catherine Steiner-Adair, one of the keynote speakers, asked the audience what we thought were the two major activities traditionally pursued by women to deal with life’s ups and downs. The silence was palpable. She then answered her own question: “Dieting and shopping.” Her statement was instantly acknowledged throughout the room, first by a saddened hush, then with murmurs of agreement all around. That was 1991.  In the intervening twenty years, I’ve witnessed firsthand the intricate and complex relationship between shopping and eating, weight and wealth, being rich and being thin.

Kathleen Kingsbury, in a manuscript not yet in print, is examining that relationship. She looks at the history of women’s complicated connections with food, body image, and finance, and she highlights the nature of their linkages. And Diane Barth explored the some of the same territory in “When Eating and Shopping Are Companion Disorders” (Benson, I Shop, 268-87). There she observes that although “every therapist who works with eating disorders can provide anecdotal reports of binge eaters who binge-shop, anorexics who shoplift, bulimics who compulsively buy items they never use,” less expected combinations are also abundant. One anorexic “may also severely limit herself in regard to all purchases . . . while another shoplifts regularly and . . . a third goes on frequent shopping sprees.” Barth sees shopping and eating as two entirely normal ways to regulate and manage moods and feelings; they can soothe us when we feel “hurt, lonely, angry, or disappointed,” relax us when we feel “tense, overwhelmed, or over-stimulated,” or energize us when we feel sad or tired. They are connected, in other words, by their similar function in coping with affects. When people can’t regulate or tolerate their feelings, however, shopping and/or eating can become “repetitive, compulsive, and undifferentiated responses to a wide variety of emotions and experiences.”

Barth notes that people with shopping and eating disorders often have little sense of their own inner processes, little ability “to conceptualize emotional cause and effect.” They lack, she finds, “the ability to use words symbolically to help metabolize emotions.” So even when they can articulate what are apparently clear symbolic connections between their eating and shopping behaviors and, say, their childhood experiences, their symptoms don’t change.

A case in point: now that Jennifer Hudson’s weight loss has brought her from a size 16 to a 6, the singer admits to being addicted to shopping. Since she began enjoying her new body, Hudson has bought a lot of new clothes. “It got to a point where I could barely get in my bedroom,” she told InStyle magazine. When did she realize she had a problem? “Well, my bed is a canopy. I had nowhere else to throw the clothes. So I threw them on top of the canopy!” Hudson continues to shop whenever she travels. “Each city we go to, my suitcase won’t hold my new clothes, so we have to box them up and ship them home. Then I get back and want to try on everything I bought, so clothes are just everywhere.” Hudson seems at ease with the problem. Her shopping may not stop, she says, but her weight loss will: “you’re never going to see me skinny.”

In a recent piece for American Express Open Forum (http://www.openforum.com/articles/being-rich-and-thin-go-hand-in-hand-1-2/), Jean Chatzky cites research showing that “your health and your wealth are inextricably linked,” including a recent German study demonstrating that “serious debt makes you twice as likely to be overweight or obese.” For people with both shopping and eating problems, she offers this six-step plan:

—Start with one thing first.
It’s not easy to tackle two daunting tasks at once. And dieting—whether with your stomach or your wallet—can be incredibly daunting. So pick either your weight or your money as your first focus.

—Deal with feelings of deprivation.
When you start reining in your spending so you have money to pay down your debt, you might actually gain a few pounds at first. Be on the lookout for your impulses to transfer from shopping to eating. When you’re trimming your spending, if it feels like deprivation, you’re going to try to fill yourself up in another way. Eating is the commonest other way. To minimize the chances of this happening, give yourself small manageable goals. Save $10 to put toward your debt this week, or drink water instead of soda.  Next week, you can aim to save $15 or start taking a walk on your lunch break.  If even that seems like too much, alternate so you focus on your weight one week and your debt the next.

—Once you’re feeling in control, layer.
You’ve dropped a few pounds or paid down a few hundred in debt and now you’re feeling pretty good, right?  In fact, what you’ve learned is impulse control.  You’ve given your willpower a workout.  Now it’s time to add on the second half of the equation.  You’ll see that the challenge you’ve already conquered will help you. When you get a grip on your finances and live in the black instead of in the red, you’ll be less stressed out, which helps reduce stress eating.  In the short term, losing weight increases your self-esteem, which could make you less prone to emotional eating and shopping. However, it could go the other way, like it did for Jennifer Hudson, so be on the lookout for rewarding yourself for losing weight by overshopping.

—Pick a new distraction.
If you substitute eating for shopping, or shopping for eating, you’re right back to where you started.  Instead, try to figure out what will meet your needs and not erode your life in the way that turning to food and to stuff does.  Call up a friend and see if she can get together for coffee, take a long walk, go on a run, or organize a space in your home that has gotten out of control.  All of these things can help quell the feelings that might drive you to shop and eat.

—Reward yourself.
We all need something to look forward to, and often, it’s easier to meet goals if we make them tangible.  Give yourself milestones, and when you reach them, have a mini-celebration: join a friend for a drink, get a manicure, have that cookie (just one) you’ve been wanting.  To keep yourself on track, think about what reaching your goals will mean.  If you pay off debt, you might have an extra $300 to put toward something you want, like the payment on a new car or a trip to the beach next summer. And if you shed the extra weight, you can wear a bikini on that trip with confidence, or play with your kids without getting winded.

—Finally (and this is not so much a step as a long-term change), delve deeper.
Once you’ve seen some early progress, it’s time to figure out why you’re overspending and why you’re overeating.  Often, it’s about loneliness. When you’re at the mall, you’re surrounded by people, and the sales clerks all want to make you happy. Another common root is low self-esteem.  You already feel bad about how you look, so you figure one donut won’t make a difference.  You need a boost, so you head to your favorite store, where you can try on a new outfit and everyone will tell you how amazing it looks on you.  Or maybe it’s plain old boredom.  You have too much downtime, at work or at home, so you’re constantly snacking and shopping online.  Whether you’re shopping or staring into the fridge, ask yourself a few simple questions:  Why are you here?  How do you feel?  Do you need this?  Keep in mind this mantra for overshoppers and overeaters: “you can never get enough of what you don’t  really need.”  Eating and shopping often spiral out of control because we’re trying to fill a void, but going about it in the wrong way.  Once you’ve pinpointed what really drives you to the store and the fridge—and often, it’s the same thing—you can start dealing with it in a constructive, lasting way.

Today I’d like to focus on a topic that can cause real anxiety in people who are addicted to shopping: what to do when you stop.

If you shop to ease anxiety or soothe grief, what will you do when you feel down if that outlet is no longer available to you? If you shop because it’s fun and you’re bored when you aren’t at the mall, how will you cope if you’ve renounced your principal source of interest? If you shop because you want to have the best, look the best, and own the most, what will define you if you put your credit cards in a drawer and quit spending?

None of us shops to excess for no reason. None of us overspends because we are simply careless in our habits. We need to shop, for whatever reason. Awareness of a problem is the first step toward finding a better way to live. The second step is to figure out what needs overshopping fills. The third step is to try other activities, mindsets, and connections that will fill those needs on for size.

What sorts of activities, mindsets, and connections can take the place of shopping? In his widely read and respected article “Spent”, published in The New Republic in 2009, Professor Amitai Etzioni suggests starting with, depending upon your personality and preferences, “communitarian activities” and/or “transcendental activities.”

Communitarian activities are those that establish connections with other people and the community. Volunteering, connecting with neighbors and friends, working with others to promote an idea, cause, or political candidate, or leading a Scout troop are all examples. The important components of communitarian activities are: 1) interacting with others in real time; 2) pursuing a common goal or good; and 3) being regularly engaged in the activity.

Transcendental activities are those that are spiritual, artistic, or contemplative. These activities are more focused on the self, on transformation and/or self-expression. Examples of transcendental activities are meditation, prayer, painting, yoga, reading, poetry, writing, philosophy, and even walking. These pursuits can be followed alone or with others. For example, although writing is a solitary activity, it can become a communitarian activity if you belong to a writers’ group, in which members share their work, socialize, and support one another. If you practice yoga and meditation, you are likely to practice on your own as well as attend classes or sittings. If you walk, you can walk alone or with friends.

Communitarian and transcendental activities often are more expenditures of time and energy than money. As Professor Etzioni suggests, you don’t need a $90 leather-covered Bible to pursue Bible study, designer workout clothes to take yoga, or $200 shoes to hike the neighborhood. While you are saving money, you are also making worthwhile connections with yourself and others, and maybe even doing something that safeguards the planet and its resources.

There are many answers to the question of whether or not to comingle finances. Surprisingly, some couples actually merge their finances as they are divorcing. Some maintain separate accounts their entire relationship. Some comingle monies when they have a child or when they get married. Every situation is different and, according to the author of this post, “It’s all about getting on the same team in your relationship, and discovering what is the best move for you as a couple, to bring intimacy, clarity, boundaries, and healing.” In other words, find out which approach is most comfortable for your personal situation, and follow your heart on the matter.

Read the entire article here: Should You and Your Honey Merge Your Money? Or Not…?

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Diane Rehm show about shopping addiction, along with a 25 year veteran of Debtors Anonymous and the President of the Financial Therapy Association. I figured we’d be

reaching a typical audience of female compulsive buyers that were overspending on clothing, shoes, jewelry, accessories, and personal services and men who were overspending on electronics, sports equipment, clothing, cars and anything else they “collected.” Little did I know that one of Diane’s listeners was a model train enthusiast and collector who was motivated to start a very lively thread on an online forum for model train collectors about shopping addiction and trains.

 

Black, a Brakeman (his nickname on the forum) explained that the show was well timed, since he’d just been given a lecture on overshopping by his wife and realized he needed to let some of his impulses to buy go by. 

He reminded his fellow train collectors that while overshopping affects both men and women, men can more stealthily slide under the overshopping radar, by employing the tactic of using smiled-upon labels such as “hobbies” or “collections”. Though they may be camouflaged as healthy behaviors, these pastimes can have equally serious consequences on personal finances and, as the forum creator warned his fellow collectors, on relationships.

While many on the forum admitted to some level of shopping compulsion, the idea seemed to be a running joke bandied about by others.  For instance, one collector claimed, “Collecting model trains has ruined my life……..  (but) at least I made a lot of great friends along the way.”   Though collecting may grease the wheels of companionship, it may also burn bridges between loved ones when spending begins to fly off the rails.

Another man had to have a talk with The Guy in the Mirror in order to confront his collecting addiction. Not only were his storage areas maxed out, fully half of the stuff in the boxes has never seen the light of day. ”Self,” he said “What in the wide, wide world of trains are you doing?” “Can’t say I had any rock solid good answers for the …uh…abundance.” He described his figurative “reflection” as “cold, tough, and unwilling to put up with any malarkey”:

Many of the responses were humorous, as if a light-hearted approach was necessary in order to delve deeper. Clearly, there was a lot of acknowledgment and relief that compulsive shopping was finally emerging from a dark tunnel. One collector said the only thing more challenging than giving up cigarettes was giving up trains.

The holiday season is upon us, and for the millions of us who have trouble limiting our spending, this time of year can be especially difficult. Seems like everyone is going shopping: on lunch breaks, after work, over the weekend. It can be a lot of fun, especially if you are out with friends, but it can also lead to a whopping post-holiday hangover. 

How can you participate without going overboard? It’s hard to limit yourself when you want to get everyone something really nice, but if you can’t afford the gifts you buy, you could end up looking at a bleak stack of New Year’s bills you can’t pay and that’s anything but a gift to yourself.

A couple of traps result from not planning your holiday shopping. Without a plan, you can end up with a dozen purchases for one person or with a desperation purchase that’s far too extravagant. You can also get caught up in the whirlwind of shopping and buy too many sale items or buy something you really can’t afford just because the bargain price is so much lower than the originally-listed  sales price.

Take heart! Avoiding overspending doesn’t have to be grim.

A basic and extremely helpful tool that’s often overlooked is a basic shopping list/spending plan. Create your list at home, far away from the sparkle and glitter of store decorations, the lure of an almost overwhelming number of product choices, and the maddening crowds. Note who you are buying for, what you want to get, how much you can comfortably afford, and how much time you want to spend looking. Be sure to add up the cost column to see if you are committing to more than you really want to spend. If you are, make the necessary changes before leaving home.  With a list and a spending plan, overspending can be nipped in the bud.  Make sure you carry it with you…and that you keep referring to it while you’re shopping!

The new shopping apps available for smart phones can help you with your list and your budget. These apps let you “shop” from home, comparing prices all over town. One new app lets you shop for all sorts of items (clothing to electronics) using your phone, sorting the information by price and location and highlighting nearby sales. Another app lets you enter a particular item you especially want to buy and tracks that item until a sale drops the price into your range. Other apps let you accumulate shopping points you can redeem. Still others text you coupons. If you use these apps wisely, not to justify purchases you can’t afford, they can help you stay within your spending plan and save time as well.  We’ve created a post that describes some of the most popular shopping apps and lays out the pros and the cons of each, as we see them, including the relative riskiness of each for someone with overspending tendencies. To read that,  click here  .
To keep you on track, why not team up with a friend? Each of you can serve as the other’s shopping support buddy. For more on shopping support buddies, look at the Friends and Family section of this blog. Make out your lists together, enjoying a couple of evenings at home using your apps to find the items on your list. Then head out to the stores, making a game out of seeing how little you can spend and still give to everyone on your list. The winner treats her buddy to a movie—research shows that the money you spend on experiences is much more satisfying–both of you enjoy a conscious treasure hunt, and both of you go home satisfied.

Shopping with a carefully thought out plan, using shopping apps that will help you adhere to that plan, and teaming up with a shopping support buddy; employ these three strategies and enjoy the holiday with no threat of a money hangover.

In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve divided some of the most popular apps into three color-coded categories: green, for those which appear to be useful, direct, accessible tools for locating products and sales, comparing prices, conserving resources, saving money, and streamlining the entire shopping process, red, for those we found too recreational, time consuming, or too likely to reinforce compulsive buying, and orange, for those which may be ideal for certain users, but could potentially present unwanted distractions, obstacles, or reinforce overshopping tendencies in others.

Hukkster

We’re all familiar with catchy T-shirt slogans and jokes about women and shopping.

Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping. ~ Bo Derek
I like my money right where I can see it – hanging in my closet. ~ Sex and the City

For millions of women (and quite a few men) overshopping is no joke. A few weeks ago, Dr. David Tolin, Ms. Jill Chivers, and I were interviewed by Bridgette Raes on BlogTalkRadio, about shopping addiction and about a new show being aired on the Oxygen network that aims to explore the world of the overshopper. “My Shopping Addiction” features Dr. Tolin and another psychologist interacting with women who suffer from compulsive buying disorder, an addiction every bit as serious as alcoholism or a drug habit.

Dr. Tolin and I shared our perspectives as doctors who treat this condition, and Ms. Chivers shared her experiences as a former shopaholic.The notion of a shopping addiction is minimized and even glamorized in our consumer society. After all, it’s a pleasurable activity and it’s good for the economy. It’s often called “the smiled-upon addiction.”
Bridgette Raes and Dr. Tolin discussed the first episode of “My Shopping Addiction,” which highlighted the fact that a shopping compulsion has nothing to do with the amount of money spent. The negative consequences in the lives of both women interviewed were strikingly similar, even though they came from vastly different economic backgrounds (one shopping at the 99 cent store and the other paying $16,000 for a single handbag). Both women had lost all perspective around buying, were causing themselves financial harm, isolating themselves from productive pursuits, and were vehemently denying those facts.

Ms. Raes and I talked about the fact that underneath the compulsion to shop, there is always an unmet need, such as the desire for love, or acceptance, or self-esteem, or autonomy. These are all legitimate needs: they must be met, but shopping doesn’t do the job. Overshopping not only buries, sidelines, and ignores those real needs; it also erodes the life of the compulsive shopper. Someone caught in the web of a shopping addiction spends so much time, energy, and money on shopping, that there is no room left for the things that would really bring joy, such as hobbies, friends, taking courses, using talents, traveling, or being a part of community groups.

The first step in facing any problem is cultivating an awareness that the problem exists. Ms. Chivers described the moment when she first realized she had a problem and then told her listeners about the actions she took to wrest her life back from the cash register. Once she moved past her compulsive behavior, “It was like a heavy burden was lifted from my shoulders.” To listen to the interview, click here. If you think you may have a shopping addiction, take the confidential self assessment found on the homepage of this site. The homepage also features self-help resources and referrals to professional help.