Why Shopping Lifts Your Mood for Only a Moment - The Mechanism Behind a High That Does Not Last

Just Before Buying, Not the Moment of Buying

You finally ordered the thing you had been going back and forth on. Right after the payment goes through, your mood clearly lifts. For the few days until it arrives, thinking about it is mildly enjoyable.

Then it arrives. You open it. You use it. A few days later you have stopped particularly noticing that it is in your room. The life that was going to change once you had it, the one you pictured before buying, has not much arrived.

This gap tends to get discussed as weak willpower or a habit of overspending, but it can in fact be explained from the order in which reward is processed.

The High That Prediction Creates

The circuitry involved is called the Reward System, and the signal that Dopamine carries within it responds more strongly at the moment a reward is predicted than at the moment the reward itself is received.

This makes sense as a mechanism for learning. The information needed to change behavior is the prediction that something good is about to happen; information from after you already have it cannot guide the next action. So the design puts the strong signal at the prediction stage.

Applied to shopping, the high is at its strongest at the moment you decide to buy and during the period of waiting for delivery. The moment you actually hold it is where prediction gets replaced by reality, and new information decreases. The signal weakens.

Knowing this order explains several experiences. Filling a cart and closing it without buying can still satisfy you to a degree. The night you placed the order was more enjoyable than the moment it arrived. By the time a pre-ordered item shows up, the heat has gone out of it. In every case, the high sits on the side of prediction.

The Decay After You Have It

Another mechanism is involved in what changes after you have the thing.

People adapt to changes in their environment. On the pleasure side, this settling is known as Hedonic Adaptation. Good changes and bad ones alike get absorbed as a baseline over time, after which you can only feel differences measured from there. A new piece of clothing is special for the first few wearings and then becomes one item you own. The size of a new home becomes unremarkable within a few months.

This adaptation is unavoidable as long as the senses are a mechanism for detecting change. By lowering responses to what does not change, they keep attention available for new changes.

Therefore the lift in mood obtained through shopping is structurally temporary. Try to get permanent satisfaction from shopping and you lose to the speed of adaptation, which means continually raising either the frequency or the amount you spend.

Are There Purchases Adaptation Does Not Reach?

Not all spending fades in the same way. Listing the properties of spending that resists decay gives you material for judgment.

• Things that generate an experience each time you use them: an instrument, a tool, a bicycle. Value comes from use rather than ownership, so the experience renews as long as you keep using it
• Experiences themselves: travel, a concert, a course. They remain as memory after they end and can be referred back to each time you recall them. A tendency toward slower decay than objects has been noted
• Things that create time: outsourcing housework, cutting a commute. Because the time gained can go to something else, the value persists
• Things that remove discomfort: replacing shoes that hurt, improving your bedding. Removing discomfort resists adaptation somewhat better than adding pleasure

Conversely, spending in which owning is itself the center of the value is where adaptation takes hold fastest. Things to display and look at, things bought for a collection, things bought to show other people. The satisfaction right after purchase is strong, but that level is not held.

The Risk of Buying When Your Mood Is Low

The mechanisms above connect to the behavior of shopping when your mood has dropped.

It is a fact that shopping works when you are down. Because the high arises at the prediction stage, your mood lifts from the moment you decide. And since the act includes choosing for yourself and deciding for yourself, a sense of controlling your situation also recovers. When powerlessness lies behind the low mood, this effect cannot be dismissed.

The problem is that the original state remains once the high has decayed. Shopping does not change what caused the low mood, so you return to the same means again. And because adaptation is at work, the next round requires larger spending. When anxiety about the future is what sets this loop turning, the pattern goes by the name Doom Spending.

Whether you have entered this loop is visible in your purchase records. How often you use what you bought, how many boxes remain unopened after delivery, what had happened just before each purchase. Responses for when emotion pushes you into buying start from these records.

Getting the High From Somewhere Else

If prediction creates the high, you can place that prediction somewhere other than shopping.

Putting something on the calendar is the representative case. With something to look forward to a few weeks out, the high of prediction operates throughout the period until then. The cost is smaller than a purchase, and the experience on the day remains too.

Having something part-finished serves the same function. Work in progress, a book you are partway through, a plant you are growing. Anything with room to advance keeps working as an object of prediction.

And there is the method of waiting a little after deciding to buy. Since the high has already occurred at the point of the decision, carrying it out a few days later takes nothing away from what you get. If the heat cools while you wait, you learn that the spending was not needed in the first place.

That shopping lifts your mood is normal as a mechanism. That the lift is temporary comes from the same mechanism. Hold both of these at once and you can keep a distance that does not lean too hard on shopping, without having to condemn it.