Shopping as comfort: when a parcel stands in for a feeling

“The best part is the morning, when I know it’s arriving today.” That was said to me by a man with three unopened parcels in his hallway. Not because he did not care what was inside them. Because what he had been after was already over. It had happened somewhere between the click and the notification that the parcel had been dispatched. Everything that came afterwards was just a box.

That sentence is the most precise description of shopping I have ever heard. It points to a distinction people struggle to put into words: the purchase was not about the object. It was about a few minutes in which the body felt different.

What is this even called

Compulsive buying has no diagnosis of its own. In ICD-11 it sits among other specified impulse control disorders, while the field is still debating whether it should be treated as a behavioural addiction. There are arguments in favour – craving, loss of control, continuing despite consequences – but the evidence is thinner than you would expect given how often it is discussed.

For everyday use the description matters more than the name: buying that is not aimed at the object but at a change of state, and that causes distress or damage. A meta-analysis by Maraz and colleagues estimated that roughly five per cent of adults meet the criteria used in the research. The figure is loose, because the criteria varied.

Why the best part comes before the parcel

The neurobiology here is surprisingly well researched and thoroughly unromantic. Dopamine, which people call the “pleasure hormone”, is not released at the reward but at the prediction of a reward. Wolfram Schultz showed this back in the 1990s: neurons initially respond to the reward, and once the animal learns to predict it, the response shifts to the cue that predicts it. At the reward itself there is almost nothing left.

That explains three things at once. Why the search is more pleasurable than possession. Why unpacking is a disappointment. And why the next purchase happens sooner than you would expect – because the system is not looking for an object but for a repeat of that lift.

What is being soothed: the object or the decision

In my room I notice that shopping, for people who call it comfort, does two different jobs. The first is filling an empty evening – something is happening, the phone glows, time passes. The second is more cunning: the purchase is the only decision of the day that nobody overrules.

If a person has been compliant all day – at work, at home, with their parents – then the click is not consumption but a small act of freedom. That matters, because it changes the question. It is not about how to stop buying. It is about where else in your life you decide anything at all.

The triggers that keep recurring

When people spend a week recording when they buy, almost always the same handful of states appears: after an argument, after a humiliation at work, in boredom, in late-evening tiredness and – surprisingly often – in the feeling that you have earned something. The last is the most cunning, because it presents itself as self-care.

Shopping in loneliness has its own peculiarity: delivery brings a person to the door. Brief contact, a few words, someone who came precisely because of you. When people say this out loud, they often cry. Not about the parcel.

It helps to know that the trigger is almost never the object in the window. The object is the last link. Before it comes a state – tiredness, resentment, boredom, a sense of being invisible – that formed hours earlier and that the person usually never noticed. This is why recording works better than resolve: you are not catching the urge, you are catching the hour before it.

Who does this, and why we do not see it

In the public image this is a woman’s story: full bags, clothes, a joke among friends. The research does not confirm that picture so smoothly. Maraz’s meta-analysis found the gender difference to be considerably smaller than common belief holds; what differs are the objects and the words people use.

When a man buys tools, gadgets, car parts or equipment for a sport he does not play, nobody calls it compulsive buying. It is called a hobby or an investment. Same function, different name – and where there is no name, there is no conversation. That fits the pattern I described in the piece on why men arrive later: a problem first has to be given permission to count as a problem.

The second reason for the invisibility is more banal. Shopping is the only behaviour on this list that the environment actively encourages. Nobody sends you messages urging you to bet more; messages urging you to buy arrive every day, and they are written to sound like self-care.

Why online is different from a shop

It is not true that people have become weaker. What changed is the gap. In a shop you had to travel, choose, queue, and pay with money you could see. Every one of those steps was a chance for the urge to cool.

Now one tap sits between the urge and the purchase. Money is a number on a screen, instalment payment removes the last sober moment, and recommendations make sure that browsing never ends. Add free returns: the option of undoing a purchase removed the final brake before the click – and the return then mostly never happens.

What comes afterwards

Almost everyone who tells me about this describes the same sequence after delivery: brief relief, then emptiness, then shame. Shame is what keeps it going – because the secret grows, the statements are hidden, the price is misreported to a partner, and every secret needs something to soothe it. I have written separately about how shame works differently from guilt; here its role is entirely practical – it is fuel.

Which is why the first step with this pattern is almost never a budget. It is that somebody knows.

Budgets typically fail here for the same reason diets fail: they assume the problem is in the numbers. A person sets a limit, holds it for two weeks, then a bad evening comes and the limit becomes one more piece of evidence of their own incapacity. The next purchase is then not only a purchase but also an answer to that feeling. The loop has closed, and inside it the budget is an accelerator, not a brake.

When this is not a pattern but something else

Now the section that contradicts everything so far. All of the above assumes a learnt pattern of emotion regulation. Often it is not that.

First and most urgently: sudden, uncharacteristic spending can be a sign of a manic or hypomanic episode, especially if accompanied by a reduced need for sleep, rapid speech and a sense of unusual capability. Then it is not a habit and no exercise in this piece will help – the first address is a doctor. I have written about when a psychiatrist is the first step, and this is exactly such a case.

Second: some medicines, particularly certain dopamine agonists prescribed in Parkinson’s disease, are associated with impulse control disorders, compulsive buying among them. This is not a footnote – it is something to raise with a doctor, not a therapist.

Third, less dramatic but more common: hoarding is not the same as compulsive buying, difficulties with attention bring their own form of impulsivity, and a great deal of “excessive spending” is in fact life on a low income, where money goes quickly because there is no reserve. Calling that an addiction is both wrong and insulting.

What we know about help, and what we do not

Group cognitive behavioural therapy is the only approach with more than one controlled trial – Astrid Müller and colleagues found improvement that was maintained at later follow-up. The samples were small.

For medication there is no convincing evidence of a direct effect on the behaviour; where medicines help, they usually address accompanying depression or anxiety. The piece on why therapy is harder to research explains why such evidence is so scarce, and also why that does not mean help does not work.

What you can try this week

First: a wish list instead of a basket. When it grips you, do not buy the object – write it down with the date. Read the list seven days later. Most of the lines will feel foreign to you, and it is that experience, not any explanation, that changes your relationship to the urge.

Second: remove saved cards from your browser and apps. Typing the number is five irritating seconds, and those five seconds are often enough.

Third: check when you browse. If nearly all of it happens after eleven at night, the problem is not the products but what you do with an evening when you are empty and nobody is writing any more. The replacement is not a moral one: you need another thing that lasts half an hour and gives you something. Anything that does not arrive in a box.

Fourth: unpack before you pay for the next one. The rule is simple: as long as there is an unopened parcel in the hallway, no new order. This surprises people more than a budget does, because it makes visible what the pattern was carefully hiding.

Fifth and hardest: when you resist an urge, do not punish yourself. Self-blame raises distress, and distress is the trigger. Self-compassion here is not softness but control over the fuel.

Partners, and money

If you are reading this as a partner: an accusation of wastefulness is the least useful thing you can say. Not because it is untrue, but because it increases shame and therefore hiding.

Nor does it help to carry the parcel back to the post office on his behalf, or to pay the bills in secret to avoid an argument. That removes the only feedback the pattern was still getting from reality.

More useful is an agreement about transparency without surveillance: reviewing statements together on a set day, a separate account for personal spending, a limit the two of you set together and in advance. And an agreement to talk about debt in the morning, not at midnight – conversations about money late at night almost always turn into conversations about character.

What to remember

Shopping as comfort is not the buying of an object but the chase of a few minutes before it – which is why the parcel is always a disappointment. The reward system responds to prediction, not possession, and the internet has removed every pause that once let an urge cool. Shame is the fuel of this loop, so the first step is not a budget but a person who knows. Small detours – deleting saved cards, a list with a seven-day delay, the unopened-parcel rule – work better than promises. And most importantly: if the spending appeared suddenly, alongside a reduced need for sleep and unusual drive, or if it started after a new medicine was introduced, this is not a habit. It is a question for a doctor, and sooner rather than later.