In my mind, the first day of end-of-year sales still equals a frenzied queue outside a department store – even though targeted email campaigns and clickable ads mean sales no longer involve elbowing strangers out of the way to ensure you get the dress you want in your size. Or did that only ever happen in movies?
But while it’s convenient, online shopping has come at a price. End-of-season sales are nearly impossible to escape and marketers’ strategies to convince us to buy things have never been more pervasive. And with nearly two-thirds of all the clothes we buy ending up in landfill and online purchases using seven times more packaging than in-store, shopping has never been worse for the environment.
“The marketing, advertising and even the sale itself, is designed to hijack your brain’s bias towards short-term pleasure over long-term meaningful action,” says Chris Cheers, a psychologist and author. Sales create a sense of scarcity and urgency, making you feel like you’ll miss out on the silk shirt, platform loafers or micro-shorts unless you click to buy now.
An online store might give you a countdown until the sale ends; if you leave the website, often you receive an email with the subject line “you forgot something”. Or a few days later, an ad will appear somewhere else on the internet to inform you the item’s been reduced further.
This is all compounded by the way our brains are wired to keep us safe by trying to predict what will happen next. “If you don’t purchase the thing, you might miss out and your brain doesn’t want to sit with this uncertainty,” Cheers says. Making the purchase is the fastest way to eradicate that threat, so “the motivation to buy becomes so strong that we can lose sight of whether the purchase is actually meaningful to us”.
At the end of another year, when we’re feeling tired, we can be even more susceptible – but Cheers has a few strategies that can be used to counter our natural wiring.
Ask ‘why’ not ‘if’ ?
To start with, refrain from asking if the item is something you need, and instead ask yourself why you are buying it.
Asking why is helpful because it makes people focus on the function and meaning of the purchase. “Sometimes we should buy something because it makes us feel good, or we want it or feel that we deserve it,” says Cheers. But asking why we want to buy it can also highlight the emotional impulses behind our purchases.
If you are buying something because you’re feeling sad or angry or stressed, it might be a way to avoid the emotion. Instead, Cheers suggests taking a second to listen to your body, so you can figure out what you really need.
“The answer might be ‘I’m feeling really stressed, I need to go for a walk or a run’. Or ‘I’m feeling really low, I need to talk to a friend’. Or ‘I’m feeling really angry, I need to talk to this person because they’ve upset me’.
“Your answer is probably not, or might not be, I need to buy this thing.”
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If you’ve had a challenging time or are feeling exhausted from too much socialising, be aware that your brain is always searching for ways to make you feel better. Since buying things can give us an immediate sense of gratification, control and anticipation, online shopping can be a tool that makes us feel good.
But because of the way social media and our phones are set up, online shopping can also lead to cycles of endless scrolling. Cheers says to be aware that scrolling mindlessly doesn’t make you feel better, it “just makes you stop feeling whatever you’re feeling”.
While this is OK sometimes – particularly if you’re tired and just need to get through the day – feeling numb is not a helpful long-term coping strategy. “You’ve got to pay attention to how much it’s happening,” Cheers says. “If it’s too often, it means you’re not taking the time to figure out what you need to do to make things better.”
Think of the alternatives
Since we tend to zero in on short-term gratification, shopping can make us focus on what we might lose if we don’t buy the thing that’s right in front of us.
But Cheers says most purchases that genuinely improve our lives are more expensive and the result of long-term planning and saving. Missing out on a new swimsuit isn’t a huge loss, especially when compared to a beach holiday in the future.
While it’s easy to default to just getting enough in the moment, Cheers says “if you want to make meaningful change to your life, often it requires tuning out of that focus on immediate pleasure and trying to tune into something bigger, like other opportunities that might open up for you in the long term”.
