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In an era when buying stuff has never been easier, Amy Shardlow describes herself as a “shopaholic”.
She says buying new clothes always follows a certain pattern: first, they help her feel confident or to forget the daily stresses in her life. Then the high fades away and is replaced by a familiar feeling.
“If I were to buy something right now, I would be riding that high… And then tomorrow I’ll be like, ‘Why did you do that? You’ve got to pay these payments off’, and all my money’s gone again,” she says.
“That’s when [I’m] stressing a bit, and then I go, ‘Oh, you know what would make me feel better about myself? I’m going to treat myself’.”
And the cycle begins again.
The rise of online shopping means there are fewer obstacles than ever to making a purchase.
Stores never close, products are cheaper than ever and can be flown in from all over the globe.
Buy now, pay later services give shoppers the opportunity to put themselves in debt in exchange for immediate gratification.
We can pay for everything with the touch of a single button.
Meanwhile, online retailers have ways of getting us to do things that we might otherwise consider irrational: staying up late into the night to catch a flash sale, or signing up to countless newsletters for fear of missing out on discounts.
Professor Mike Kyrios, a clinical psychologist from Flinders University, is interested in the ways that shopping shapes us.
“Everywhere you go, there’s a sale or an opportunity,” Professor Kyrios says.
“Then all of a sudden you have an urge and your whole consciousness is really around the need to buy.”
In recent years, Professor Kyrios says, there has been a rise of what he thinks might be a discrete disorder: compulsive shopping.
“There is a group of people – and it’s an ever-growing group of people – who have mental health issues that relate to buying … They have diminished control over their buying and shopping,” he says.
Is shopping a problem?
Over the years, Professor Kyrios has developed a set of diagnostic criteria for compulsive shopping disorder.
It includes difficulty controlling spending on consumer goods, buying unnecessary items in excessive quantities, spending beyond a budget and buying things that are never used.
He says about 5 per cent of the population – over a million Australians – are estimated to have these traits.
“The buzz [they feel] is around the act of buying … the act of finding a bargain,” he says.
“The act of having searched for something and finding it gives you a sense of euphoria, a high.”
This cycle of chasing pleasure is sometimes called the hedonic treadmill.
It is probably familiar to anyone who shops online, when there is a double delight: once when making a purchase, and then again when the package arrives at the door.
The fashion industry thrives on this buzz. And Australians are the world’s second-largest consumers of textiles, buying an average of 27 kilograms of new clothing and other textiles per person each year.
For the average consumer, this works out to more than one item of clothing a week.
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But this comes at a huge environmental cost.
In New South Wales, 80 per cent of discarded clothing and textiles ends up in landfill.
A third of the 310,000 tonnes of clothing Australians donate to charities every year ends up being exported to developing countries, where they create an environmental catastrophe.
Professor Kyrios says the more he has studied compulsive shopping, the more he has come to believe the cycle of compulsive buying is indicative of a bigger issue — and this may be why compulsive shopping is not universally recognised as a discrete psychiatric disorder.
“Over time [I’ve] had to acknowledge actually there is a social context to this that is far, far broader, and the divide between what is normal and what is abnormal sometimes is a little grey,” he says.
The bigger picture
This year, the confidence of Australian consumers has plunged to lows normally seen during a recession. Yet Australians are still spending record amounts of money.
Consumption is so central to the functioning of the economy that spending is regularly reported on as a key indicator of its health. A drop in people buying stuff is seen as a potential disaster.
For Professor Kyrios, it presents a broader question: how do we separate a potential mental illness from a condition that defines society?
“Our whole society revolves around consumerism [and] materialism,” Professor Kyrios says.
“We see a lot of problems around self-identity: ‘I don’t feel confident in the world, and I’m trying to hide what’s on the inside by showing a particular aspect or element of who I am’ … and that’s why people have buying problems.”
It’s not just a problem for individual shoppers.
Waste and excess are built into the fast fashion business model, which requires manufacturing new product lines within days to meet rapidly changing trends.
Consumers have to keep buying, as lower quality products sold for cheap degrade faster and must be replaced more often.
It means that huge waste margins are built into the budget.
In 2018, H&M reported an unsold global inventory worth more than $5 billion. Their global profit that year was about $15 billion.
“We are what we buy,” Professor Kyrios says.
“We have such a focus on buying stuff and showing ourselves to be successful. We’ve certainly forgotten more fundamental issues about what it means to be human.
“People compensate for this emptiness by acquiring stuff.”
Cutting up the credit card
While much of this is something that individuals cannot tackle alone, Professor Kyrios has some encouragement for anyone concerned by the amount they spend on impulse purchases.
His advice is to implement changes that slow down every part of the decision-making pathway.
“Cut up that credit card,” he says.
“And if there are high-risk situations, maybe have a chat with someone as to what you can do right now, this very second, to distract you from this urge.
“Do something that will get you out of that mindset … go for a walk, do some exercise, do some mindfulness, do some yoga.”
Professor Kyrios says interrupting the urge to buy and putting up barriers can often be enough to disrupt the problem.
“Urges are like bubbles in a lemonade glass. If you leave the lemonade glass on the counter and go back to it the next day, [there are] not so many urges, not so many bubbles.”
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