You’re Not Alone–
This Blog Can Help 

To Buy or Not To Buy? – it’s a question we ask and answer almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day. For many people, it doesn’t cause a lot of inner turmoil, but for compulsive buyers, it’s a high stakes question, and an affirmative answer can be devastating. Long trivialized as the “smiled-upon” addiction, thankfully, compulsive buying is coming farther and farther out of the closet, and the release of movies like Confessions of a Shopaholic is bringing the problem into the limelight.

We have reason to believe it’s becoming more prevalent. A study reported in the October 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry suggested that about 5.8% of the U.S. population-more than fifteen million Americans-are compulsive buyers. A more recent study, published in the December, 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the number may be closer to 8.9%, more than 25 million Americans. And now with the economic crisis, compulsive shoppers are feeling squeezed. Some are unable to resist prices which have been slashed to the bone in the hope of luring reluctant consumers. Others, fearing for their long term job stability, are using the recession as the boost they needed to become more mindful about their spending. And between these two poles, there are a multitude of other responses that overshoppers are having to the current economic downturn, ranging from denial to absolute panic.

When we think “addiction,” what first comes to mind is most likely alcohol or drugs or eating disorders. Even though we know that shopping, when done to excess, can spin dangerously out of control, shopping is still seen by many as superficial, light fare. Strongly reinforced by society, shopping has become the classic mixed-message behavior. On the one hand, it’s promoted endlessly (and to the ends of the earth) by those who profit from it. On the other hand, it’s regularly the stuff of jokes. Shoppers are portrayed as self-involved, materialistic, and empty. As a result, compulsive shopping may be an even greater source of guilt and shame than alcoholism or drug abuse, which are seen as bona fide disorders, requiring treatment.

So why the mixed-messages? Given the fact that consumption fuels our economy, in order to promote the ceaseless stoking of economic engines, every one of us is targeted as a consumer. We are pushed, prodded, programmed to purchase. In 2006, 9.2 billion credit card offers went out to America’s three hundred million people-more than thirty offers to every man, woman, and child! Shopping itself has become a leisure and lifestyle activity; malls are the new town centers. We’re immersed, cradle to grave, in “buy messages” that, with greater and greater psychological sophistication, misleadingly associate products we don’t need with feelings we deeply desire.

Just check out the bumper stickers. “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Shopping,” trumpets an SUV in front of me. For those who enjoyed high school Latin, there’s “Veni, Vidi, Visa!” A largely female version is “New Shoes Chase the Blues,” while men weigh in with “He Who Has the Most Toys When He Dies, Wins.”

What I’ve learned from a decade and a half of knowing, studying, working with, and writing about overshoppers-and from having been one myself-is that to change your behavior, you’ve got to change the way you feel about yourself and the way you go about meeting your authentic needs. It’s about understanding who you are, what you want, and what you really need.

In general, having more things means enjoying life less. Acquiring and maintaining objects can so fill up our lives and environment that there’s little time or space to use what’s been acquired. What we consume ends up consuming us.

In this blog, I’ll share what I know about why we overshop, how we can prevent it, and what tools, techniques and strategies are useful for eliminating it. I’ll also keep you updated on current research findings, relevant books, and other timely information for overshoppers and the people who love them.

Warm regards,
April Benson

Decision Fatigue: The more decisions we make, the less sound they are

In a fascinating article in The New York Times (Aug 17, 2011), John Tierney examines the solid experimental work behind the emerging concept of “decision fatigue,” a powerful, demonstrable, and previously unrecognized effect that renders us less and less capable of sensible decisions as we make more and more of them. In essence, self-control turns out to be not a municipal water supply, steady and almost uninterruptable, but a rain-barrel under a roof corner: use it up and it’s gone until the next rain.
Tierney looks at the results of years of work by Roy Baumeister, at Case Western and then at Florida State, and some of his colleagues and former students, but introduces that work with a startling study from Israel. There the decisions of an Israeli parole board were examined for patterns: would Arab Israelis, say, get tougher sentences than Jewish Israelis? No, it turned out. Instead, a different and quite unexpected pattern emerged: cases heard in the first part of the mornings and just after lunch were far more likely to be granted parole than cases heard late mornings or late afternoons: “Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.” The parole board turned out to be a poster case for decision fatigue.
What Baumeister’s experiments with mental discipline had demonstrated was that there’s “a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control”; will-power is “a form of mental energy that [can] be exhausted.” His results were confirmed in an ingenious experiment conducted in German car dealerships. There, customers ordering options for their new sedans turned out to have their choices strongly affected by the order and complexity of the options offered—to the tune of more than 1,500 euros. “Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and [therefore] how much willpower was left in the customer.”
So it was with the Israeli parole board. Granting parole is a decisive action, an uneasy choice that carries risk: the offender may reoffend and again tear at the social fabric. Withholding parole preserves the status quo while keeping the parole option for later. In a way, it’s a decision not to decide. So, while their supply of willpower was good, the board could grapple with parole decisions on their complex individual merits; as they exhausted their supply of mental energy for self-control, they fell back on mental shortcuts, on safety, on putting off more mental struggle.
Just how was it, though, that willpower got resupplied overnight—and at lunchtime? Glucose, Baumeister’s lab was able to demonstrate. Again and again in their experiments, sugary lemonade restored willpower, but a control drink of artificially sweetened lemonade did not. The effect was even confirmed in dogs, in studies done at the University of Kentucky by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall: “After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.”
For overshoppers, the implications of decision fatigue are significant. Baumeister’s studies “show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower . . . Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.” Overshoppers need to husband their self-control by structuring their lives. In “Decision Fatigue: Part 2” we’ll look at some examples of how they might do that.

And others are born to save.

This is the rough conclusion of Savita Iyer-Ahristani in her overview of a careful study of Swedish twins done by Stephan Siegel, at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, and Henrik Cronkvist, at Claremont McKenna College in California. Specifically, Siegel and Cronkvist conclude that 35% of saving or spending behavior is genetically based; and that this genetic inclination makes up the single greatest determinant of our financial behavior.

How did they tease out this knowledge, intertwined as it must be with parental, cultural, and economic influences? By using sophisticated mathematical techniques developed in quantitative behavioral genetics research and applying these to data from the Swedish Twin Registry (the world’s largest). They built on “an intuitive insight,” Siegel and Conkvist explain: “identical twins share 100 percent of their genes while the average proportion of shared genes is only 50 percent for fraternal twins; so if identical twins have significantly more similar savings behavior than fraternal twins, then there is evidence that the propensity for savings, at least partly, originates from an individual’s genetic composition.”

Siegel and Cronkvist are more measured in their conclusions than Iyer-Ahristani is in her summary of their study. They recognize the importance of parental values and of socio-economic status in the development of an individual’s savings behavior. But their data suggests that there is a strong and previously unidentified genetic component to saving or spending behavior, and they recommend that we use this knowledge to help manage our tendencies.

What does this mean for overshoppers? Probably that two powerful forces are at work in their habit. In the psycho-social sphere, overshopping is generally a doomed attempt to fill an important and underlying psychological need. Now we can add that it’s something of an instinct.

Lest we get too deterministic, however, there are new developments to suggest that we can significantly impact our saving or spending tendencies. At Washington State University, professor Jeff Joireman has shown that financial self-control, like a muscle, can be strengthened through regular exercise. After as little as two weeks of either mental or physical exercise, his subjects showed increased ability to resist impulse buys. A more exotic approach, presently being studied at Columbia and NYU, among other places, uses TMS—transcranial magnetic stimulation—to regulate specific parts of the brain that have now been identified as governing spending or saving behavior. In the lab, anyway—which is as far as this technique has gone—TMS can temporarily transform a spender into a saver (or vice versa).

Where are we then? At a place that gives overshoppers reason to hope. While we now know that there are genetic as well as psychological underpinnings to most compulsive buying, we also know that the behavior is modifiable. In the next few years, as the neuroscience behind spending or saving behavior gets even clearer, we may have powerful new tools for altering spending behavior.

 For many people, the word shopaholic conjures images of a colorfully-dressed, designer bag-laden young woman who is unable to peel her eyes away from the newest pair of Prada shoes.  However, knowing what we now know about the origins and motivators that drive compulsive buying, we must begin to ask: why is this issue considered a women’s addiction?

Over the past few years, men’s spending habits have been investigated, and the results of this research is speaking for itself: not only do men overshop, but they often outspend women in certain commercial domains.  According to an article in Tech News Daily, men outspend women on social game goods and there is evidence from a recent study by PayPal in England, that men are more likely to spend more online than women, come to the internet to shop more than women, and buy things online, for example health and beauty products, that are more traditionally associated with women’s purchasing.  Dr. Barış Önen Ünsalver, a Turkish psychiatrist who specializes in this behavior, has recently published a book in which she characterizes shopaholism through a decidedly ungendered lens.

With case-study after case-study appearing in our media (see The Sun’s article: Confessions of a Male Shopaholic), the cat is finally creeping out of the bag.  Compulsive spending is no more specific to women than it is to handbags or bracelets.  In a world of highly sophisticated advertising and a deeply powerful consumer culture, it comes as no surprise that both men and women are overspending in the hope that they are purchasing what they really need: be it an improved self-image, a more luxurious lifestyle, or even simply the ability to keep up with the spending that the see going on around them.

In The Sun article, the stories of Huw, Ollie and Chris show us something a little different about the way men spend.  While female shopaholism is characterized as the “smiled upon” addiction (picture a woman with her nose pressed to a store window – not hard to do, is it?), a growing body of literature on male shopping behavior shows that men spend in more covert ways.  From online spending to sneaking out of the house to snap up a new pair of jeans, men’s overspending habits seem to be skulking under the stigma that this “Shopaholic club” is girls-only.

Hopefully, with greater and greater numbers of men coming out of the shopping closet to talk about their spending, this stigma will start to fall away, giving both men and women the opportunity to see that they are not alone, and that their overshopping habits are a misguided attempt to close the gap between their real and their ideal selves rather than their gender.

“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness, just didn’t know where to shop,” my post-it intones. Without shying away from the unpopular truth about overconsumption and happiness being like oil and water, James Roberts encourages us to step back, notice, and yes, even laugh at our obsession with shiny objects. He helps us see how we got here and then takes us on a fascinating tour of the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold-department. Pointing to important research findings and offering practical exercises helps us embrace our goals and values and develop the self-control we need to understand that we can never get enough of what we don’t really need.

Well, we’ve just passed the autumnal equinox; summer’s given way to fall. This means we can begin to hope for some relief from the heat. It also means that shopping season is almost upon us. As we approach the season, I’d like to briefly explore a not-so-well-known liaison, the unsavory pairing up of drinking and shopping. It’s a phenomenon we call BUI, or buying under the influence.

It doesn’t take much imagination to read this handwriting on the wall. If you’re a shopper, if you even lean toward overshopping, BUI is something to stay away from. Let’s acknowledge the temptation, whether we’re taking bricks-and-mortar or, especially, the Internet. The “All the Rage” column of the L.A. Times puts it colorfully, noting that Shopbop, the online boutique, “knows all about consumers who click on a Marc Jacobs dress and slur, Hey there, frock. I want to take you home tonight.” The boutique doesn’t, of course, have breathalyzer data—but they know. “People definitely do it all the time, says Shopbop spokeswoman Alle Fister. It’s click, click, click after a few cocktails.” And while most online retailers accept returns, admittedly a less painful way of dealing with morning-after remorse, returns cost time as well as money.

That same column nails it. “The appeal of the BUI is as clear as a shot of Stoli. With every glass, inhibitions and judgment soften. Much like drunk-dialing an ex, the impulse to buy becomes an urge that quickly blurs into a must. Suddenly, that $850 David Yurman amethyst and 18K gold ring doesn’t seem like a silly splurge. It’s a reward.”

Recently, the New York Post ran a story about a city pet store that had to ban drunken puppy-buying. “Customers tend to stumble in after happy hour and purchase a dog without thinking,” the owner of Le Petite Puppy said. She now forbids the inebriated even to hold her puppies, and instructs the more insistent to come back next day.

Joanna Douglas, writing in Shine, offers these sensible caveats.

1. Don’t drink near your favorite shops.
2. Don’t day drink.
3. Avoid late-night infomercials.
4. Restrict your online use after drinking.
5. Have a support system.

The bottom line is, drinking and shopping don’t mix, just as drinking and driving don’t. Mindful shopping—the only kind that makes sense—is a way we search for ourselves and our place in the world. It requires judgment, the fine balancing of resources, identity, and need. Drinking clouds all that, leaving us prey to unmediated impulses and unacknowledged needs. Particularly as we head into shopping season, firmly resolve to take good care of yourself this year. When you drink, don’t shop.

Can you relate?

Every day, closet doors open on rooms full of nostalgia and dream sizes, garments we convince ourselves we’ll one day wear again. These are the “skins”  for who we are—at work, at home, when nobody’s around, on a first date, for our partners, while out shopping, in the park, when we want to be noticed, when we want to hide. These are our psyches, exposed!

We identify with our clothes, and we want our clothes to identify with us.  The relationship you have to your closet can tell you a lot about your shopping habits: are you proud of it, or do you constantly feel betrayed or disappointed by what it offers you?

In the last ten months, I’ve learned about two women who swore off any clothing purchases for an entire year, choosing instead to shop their own closets. One has even developed a program to teach others to do the same.  It seems as though everywhere I turn in my work life, people are coming out of their closets to talk about what’s in them.

 They’re doing this to feel balanced and reasonable, or simply to stop shopping. I began wondering what would happen if I tried to treat my own closet like a clothing boutique.  Maybe I would find some items I really loved, and get rid of some of the clutter.

I’d been meaning to do some reconnaissance in my closet for a number of years—yet was never quite able to get around to it. Then I read an article in a local paper this April about a warm, creative, and competent woman named Eve Cantor, who had recently begun a business helping women explore their closets.  AI decided it was time for that long-postponed spring cleaning of mine.

I knew that part of what had kept me from overhauling my own closets was inertia, but a larger part was not wanting to go it alone.  What Eve offers— impeccable taste and the capacity to size up clients(forgive the pun!) and help them put together versatile, reliable, and flattering wardrobes that express their personalities and lifestyles—was exactly what I needed. We decided that she would come over, work on my closet with me, and then we’d each write about the experience. Maybe the experience would be positive enough to motivate overshoppers, with or without a closet support buddy, to do the same.

As the day approached, I noticed a few anxious thoughts: “I don’t shop at Barney’s; I almost never spend that kind of money on my clothes. What’s she going to think of my wardrobe?” or “I haven’t tried on some of this stuff in years; what if it doesn’t even fit anymore?” or “There’s so much in these closets; where are we going to begin and how much can we get to? If we don’t finish, am I going to continue myself or just let the rest go?”

The day of our appointment was perfect for the task at hand. A gentle rain fell on New York, making our indoor transformation seem like an ideal activity – both fun and cozy. Eve began by asking me to set aside the “no-brainers,” those items that I definitely wanted to keep; I’d say that constituted about half my wardrobe. As I tried on the rest of the garments, one by one, Eve showed me how some items could be altered to fit better. For example, one of my favorite jackets has gotten a little snug. Eve suggested this out-of-the box solution: have the zipper removed and replaced with a hook-and-eye closure, and maybe even wear the jacket with a skinny brown belt.

She also demonstrated how I could accessorize some things differently to look better and wear more, like a pair of beige suede slacks that I bought eight  years ago and wore once.  I could never figure out what to wear them with, though I had countless shirts and many belts in my closet as well!

Eve suggested restyling a skirt and two dresses to give them each a new lease on life.  Some items, she thought, had seen better days and were ready to be recycled.  I was delighted to be letting go of them; her encouragement made it painless.

Here’s what Eve had to say when we were done.

—————————-

Hi April,

I enjoyed spending time with you and I hope behind those closet doors you now feel a little lighter and have a better understanding of what you own.

Below is my experience of our work together.

I had the pleasure of joining April Benson in her closet.  She contacted me based on an article recently released about “Shopping Your Closet” in the Bergen Herald. As I arrived in her lovely home I felt like I was floating on a gondola in Venice with the murals of Italian waterways on the walls. This women clearly has style. I knew in this moment I was going to love her closet. We immediately got to work.

I normally do a Spring/Summer or Winter/Fall wardrobe in 3 hours, and once we got into our work we decided to continue the momentum of productivity and completed her entire closet (all seasons) in 5 hours. During this time:

• April tried on nearly every piece of clothing
• We discussed openly the positives, negatives, vulnerabilities, missing pieces and accessories, etc. of her wardrobe
  
• We envisioned the events where she will maximize all the pieces to give appropriateness to each outfit
  
• We donated 30+ pieces that don’t fit the wardrobe anymore to Shelter Our Sisters, a non-profit organization that assists women and children victims of domestic violence
  
• We created new, refreshing, stylish outfits with already existing pieces and discussed new ways of wearing them
  
• We made many alteration decisions
  
• We put together a list of a few accessories and separates that she might want to purchase to maximize the look of existing pieces
• We swapped out her wire and plastic hangers for new thinner no slip velvet hangers for a cleaner closet look 

I love April’s closet! Every piece is unique and yet they all belong in the same place, with April Benson. Many women like a look and buy that look with small nuances of distinction. This closet is a wardrobe of concise choosing. April is an expert shopper. She hunts for detail and color and has a natural gravitation to classic silhouettes. Her pieces can be worn forever.

While April needed no help in the style category, she seemed to light up with the validation of her wardrobe.  She was thrilled to have a partner to try on clothing with. I felt energized and admired April, appreciated the openness of communication between us, and completely enjoyed the exchange of creative energy that flowed during our time together.

Nice to know you April!

—————————-

And my thoughts on the experience?

I’ve noticed that:

• I really like seeing some empty spaces in my shoe racks.
• I don’t miss anything I’ve let go of.
• I could imagine letting go of a few more things if I don’t wear them within the next year.
  
• Now I have a desire to go through all the t-shirts, shells, camisoles, and sweaters, and pare those down too.
  
• Even though they don’t take up that much physical space, the more belts, scarves, stockings, lingerie, and jewelry stuff I have, the more brain space it takes.
  
• I’m delighted to know that things now sitting undisturbed in my closet will lead an active, healthy life with somebody else.
  
• I do feel lighter and want to keep it that way.
  
• Altering things I already own to make them feel modern and comfortable makes my closet a much happier place! 

Mission accomplished!

To make an appointment with Eve, you can visit her website: www.ShopYourClosetNow.com, or call her at 646-584-7540. 

For more information about the work that Eve has done, click here.

To set the stage, we hear a dizzying staccato recitation by Juliet Shor, author of Born to Buy—all the objects in a typical middle class home—as we kaleidoscope through stuff.

The first half of the film focuses on the psychological impacts of consumerism: how the media and advertisers bombard us and how their techniques manipulate our desires, making us believe that we need much more than we actually do.

If you play soft music to cows, they give more milk. If you play music to shoppers, they buy more stuff. The many talking heads in the film— professors, authors, mental health professionals, and leaders of the Voluntary Simplicity movement—suggest that we need to step out of the Matrix and learn to make choices for ourselves. Otherwise, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

Once upon a time, we consumed conspicuously because we wanted our neighbors to see what we had; the paradigm was local social comparison. Today, the reference frame has expanded. It’s moved from the roughly egalitarian neighborhood of the folks on your block to the national “neighborhood” of televised affluence. There’s rising anxiety in our culture as people continuously compete to live like the wealthy.

The second half of the film swings to a more ecological perspective, straightforwardly addressing the issue of how the consumerist drive of developed nations is using up or harming–even destroying–our most precious resources. In the process, we may well be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

Shop ‘Til You Drop is more than a useful tool for the overshopper; it’s a much-needed wake-up call for all of us. The film encourages us to see that the habit of “keeping up with the Joneses”—whether they live next door or in the fantasy world of television and other media—misuses our lives and our planet. It offers us some perspective and invites us to step back and reassess our values and goals.

Back in 2008, April blogged about Swap-O-Rama-Rama, an anti-consumerist clothing swap with do-it-yourself workshops that aims to recycle used clothing.  Now, the website (and iPhone app) Swap.com takes a more mainstream commercial approach to the concept of commodity swapping.  It serves as the middleman for people who’d like either to get rid of or obtain books, movies, CDs, or video games.  The layout resembles a cross between an online retailer and a social networking site: users create profiles and indicate any number of items that they have as well as any number of items they’d like to obtain.  Based on what you put on your “Have List,” the website will tell you what you can receive in trade for your possessions.  Alternately,  you can search for something you want and add it to your “Want List,” and the website will notify you if anything you currently own can be traded for that item.

If, for example, I decide that I’m ready to part with my Pink Floyd album The Wall, the site instantly tells me that I can trade this CD for one of 78,385 possible items, ranging from a Harry Potter book to a Wall-E DVD to a football game for Xbox.  However, if what I really want is the Beatles’ White Album, I can add this to my want list, and, if anything on my “Have List” corresponds with someone’s “Want List” who is looking to trade in The White Album, the site will inform me immediately.

Is Swap.com the answer to compulsive shopping? No. While it can fill some of the needs filled by overshopping and assuage some of the negative consequences of that behavior, it doesn’t get to the heart of the compulsion.  It is also limited to relatively inexpensive electronic items, and therefore fails to provide many of the most common targets of overshopping: clothes, shoes, sports equipment, even cars.  Nonetheless, a site like Swap.com can be a first step in the right direction—away from the danger of ever-growing, compulsive-buying-driven debt.

David Eisenach, Research Assistant

The first page greets you with a video clip of a contest the website is running called the Reality Check Challenge.  Contestants post video clips of what they have wasted money on, with the winner getting $1,000.  Visitors to the site vote on their favorites, which encourages contestants to get the word out about the website.  It’s a great way to really SEE what you spend money on.  Looking at spreadsheets of expenditures is useful, but it is much more visually striking to see the objects themselves.

The various tabs at the top of the homepage give links to online discussions, useful documents about the “real” value of what you’re spending money on and software to track your expenses and help you to become more financially savvy.

When I saw there was a “Top 10 List” I experienced a wave of concern, since competition can often lead people to greater amounts of overspending, but thankfully the site is not set up in a way that would favor that kind of unhealthy competition.

I found the site to be a helpful gateway for people who spend more than they should. It provides a means for them to get help and join a community of others who face the same problem – a problem that is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Justin Tausig, MHC

www.myinnervision.com