Curb your inner shopaholic!
Did you survey your January bank statement with a tinge of regret, or worse, stuff it in a drawer without even reading it? Do you resolve every year to 'sort your money out?' Well, Max Eames, author of The Wealth Mechanic, has some timely words of wisdom...and he's been there, done that...
Here’s the truth about why your New Year’s Resolutions so often end up kerbside!
What did most of us do on New Year’s Eve, besides drink cheap champagne as the clock struck midnight? We made New Year’s resolutions, didn’t we? The start of a new year always seems to be the opportunity for a fresh start. We usually resolve to change a habit that we can’t seem to shake: ‘I’ll stop watching so much television… I’ll stop eating so many microwave meals… I’ll stop buying things on the Internet… I’ll stop staying late at the office,’ and so on.One reason that most resolutions fail is because we haven’t examined the pay-offs we receive by maintaining these behaviours. For example, many of us who struggle with our finances fall into a series of habits that seem to give us the same sort of, shall we say, ‘rush’ as behaviour we would normally label as ‘addictive.’
Addiction
As a psychotherapist, I have been introduced to a whole spectrum of ways to define the term ‘addiction’: an inability to participate in the real world, some form of moral weakness, a lacking in willpower, a spiritual crisis – and even a disease of some sort. Having said all that, most of us tend to think of addiction as the kind of ‘misuse’ that – in one form or another – does its thing by passing our lips. But maybe the whole issue isn’t as simple as that. No doubt about it: there are certainly so-called gamblers, workaholics and overspenders who eventually find themselves suffering the same sense of despair we more readily associate with substance misuse. The feeling certainly sounds similar to what I myself felt when I – a reformed ‘compulsive spender’ – was hopelessly overspending. On a day-to-day basis, I suppose I was invariably trying in vain to bring into my life three sensations that everyone in the world seeks:
Purpose and meaning
Genuine happiness
Peace of mind
Having our fair share of each of these sensations isn’t a lot to ask for, is it? Naturally there are times when we have one or more of them in our life to a greater or lesser degree, but we want all of them equally – and most of us want them full-on, 24/7. The reality is that none of us gets an equal share of these feelings at any one moment – but (as is the case with a farmer’s three-legged milking stool) uneven legs can still provide a stable platform.
Three legged stool
In hindsight, my own problem with overspending seems to have been an attempt to manage those moments when one aspect or another of this “three-legged stool” seemed to break away. If I didn’t feel equally supported by all three sensations at the very same time, things felt a bit wobbly underfoot. So many of us fail to realise that when one of these ‘legs’ falls short for a while, without a doubt the others will balance and support us. But if we cannot accept that each of life’s supportive sensations is actually meant to step in and out of our lives, we find ourselves at odds with the way the world is set up. We then search for other forms of contentment in an attempt to sustain a permanently upbeat mood.
Happy pill spending habits?
I myself started to believe that the best way to ‘take a happy pill’ was through my silly spending habits. And you could say that I embraced life’s highs. Who doesn’t, in some form or another? But when the highs were absent, I wrongly interpreted what was happening as some sort of drug-like ‘comedown’. Ultimately, though, the same holds true for all of us: it’s all smoke and mirrors; just an illusion that we are filling some kind of emotional void.And yet somehow I believed that ‘retail therapy’ gave my life a sense purpose and meaning, made me feel happy, and eased my mind. Thus the self-confessed ‘shopaholics’ aren’t actually in search of clothes or shoes – though it certainly looks that way when an army of bags marches into the downstairs hall. Such people are simply trying to re-create an upbeat sensation, and who can blame them for that? Think about it for a minute: what’s actually IN all those shopping bags? When under the illusion that shopping brings some form of emotional satisfaction, such people are actually trying in vain to fill their bags with something money can’t actually buy.
Max Eames
Psychotherapist And Author Of The WEALTH MECHANIC programme, The 100% Proven 7-Step Financial Fix-It Formula For Absolutely Anyone In Debt
www.MaxEames.com