Excessive Shopping Habits – Who doesn’t like shopping? For some people, shopping is an activity that can be done to relieve fatigue or stress. However, you should be careful not to overdo it. Read the guide to eliminate excessive shopping habits. Shopping is a fun activity. What’s more, nowadays, in addition to shopping in physical stores, you can also shop online. That means you can even buy items that may not have been available or marketed before.
Benefits of Shopping
Do you believe that shopping has various positive benefits? Starting from making you happier, to making your muscles more active. Why is that? Read the full explanation below!
Reduce Stress
The first benefit of shopping is to reduce stress. Shopping is considered an effective activity to relieve stress. This is because when shopping, you can shift your mind away from the fatigue you feel.
When shopping, especially with family or friends, you probably won’t think about work or other problems, right?
Your mind will be focused on looking at various items right in front of you. Your brain can take a break from problems or heavy routine activities, making you feel calmer and more comfortable.
Improve Mood
The reduction in stress levels while shopping will undoubtedly improve your mood. With a better mood, you can continue your daily routine more happily.
Train Your Brain and Psyche
Price plays a vital role in shopping. For shopping enthusiasts or shopaholics, getting quality items at a discounted price is a gratifying achievement.
To get the best price, you need to search for the best quality products, calculate discounts, haggle or find additional discounts, and re-calculate the total cost. With the mental effort required to find the lowest prices, it’s not surprising that shopping is seen as a way to train the brain.
Body Becomes Active
It’s not just the brain that sharpens its skills during shopping. Your body becomes more active as you move from one store to another to explore various quality products.
Unconsciously, you may take hundreds of steps during a single shopping trip. This number increases even more if you shop in larger malls. Plus, if you have to carry multiple shopping bags, it adds to the physical activity.
Certainly, an active body burns more calories and helps reduce body fat. In essence, shopping is not a detrimental activity as long as you don’t overdo it. Excessive shopping, such as buying items you don’t need and exceeding your budget, can lead to problems.
In the medical world, excessive shopping is recognized as a condition known as Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD), where a person shops excessively due to poor control.
If this happens, various issues may arise, from anxiety to accumulating debt. Therefore, if you feel that you have this habit, try to eliminate or reduce excessive shopping habits.
Guide to Eliminating Excessive Shopping Habits
Of course, only a doctor can diagnose whether you have CBD or not. However, if you feel that you are spending too much money, it’s better to try to reduce or eliminate excessive shopping habits.
Here are some tips for getting rid of excessive shopping habits that you can try:
Create and Stick to a Shopping Budget The first step in eliminating excessive shopping habits is to
create a shopping budget.
This budget can serve as the maximum limit you can spend. In other words, when the budget is exhausted, you should stop buying unnecessary items, especially those not previously planned for.
Make a Shopping List Creating a list of items
you want to buy will help you control your shopping expenses. The trick is to write down all the items you need. Then, you can prioritize them based on their importance.
This means you should sort the items, starting with the most needed or essential ones, and then consider postponing the purchase of less essential items.
With a shopping list, you can avoid buying unnecessary items while still getting a certain level of satisfaction. Why is that?
You can feel happy because when you want to buy something, you’ve at least written it down. Automatically, your brain will think that the item is on the list of things to buy.
Avoid Frequenting Shopping Centers
Another guide to eliminating excessive shopping habits is to avoid certain shopping places, such as malls or areas where your favorite stores are located.
By staying away from these places, the desire to shop with stimuli will be reduced.
Turn Off Online Shopping Program Notifications
Not only should you avoid physical stores, but you should also steer clear of online stores. The easiest way to do this is by uninstalling shopping apps from your smartphone.
However, this method may be inconvenient if you need to make online purchases regularly.
Therefore, the best way to avoid excessive online shopping is to disable notifications from various online shopping apps that you have installed. This way, you won’t be tempted by persuasive messages encouraging you to shop.
read to Shopping Addiction Can Be a Sign of a Mental Health Disorder
Stop Using Credit Cards If Necessary
The last resort in eliminating excessive shopping habits is to stop using credit cards if necessary. It’s true that this is a drastic step to take, as credit cards can also be used for other essential purposes.
However, credit cards can become a “black hole” that leads to excessive shopping because you can simply swipe the card and “pay for it later.” Therefore, if you don’t really need a credit card in your daily life, we recommend discontinuing its use.
However, this guide doesn’t have to be applied in every situation, depending on each person’s financial circumstances.
