The lift is real

The usual advice about this habit starts by telling you that shopping doesn't make you happy. You know from experience that's false. On Tuesday evening it made you feel better within a quarter of an hour. Any book that denies that has lost the argument on page one, and deserves to.

So let's start with what buying gives you, because the research is on your side here.

Selin Atalay and Margaret Meloy published a paper in 2011 called "Retail therapy". They found what you'd expect, that people in a bad mood bought more unplanned treats for themselves. Then they found something the scolds wouldn't expect. The treats worked. Mood improved, the improvement lasted, and the people who'd bought to cheer themselves up didn't report regret or guilt about it afterwards.

Three years later Scott Rick, Beatriz Pereira and Katherine Burson looked at why. Their starting point was that sadness goes with a sense that circumstances are running your life. They reasoned that shopping is full of choices, and that making choices might hand back a small sense of being in charge. In three experiments, making shopping choices reduced lingering sadness, and the sense of restored control explained the effect. It didn't work for anger, which is about other people and not circumstances.

Go back to the sofa with that in mind. The day had happened to you. The meeting was moved by someone else and the email was written by someone else. Then for twenty-five minutes you were the one deciding. You chose tan over olive and this bag over two others, and nobody could overrule you. I think that's a large part of why you put the phone down feeling like a person who'd dealt with something. In a small way you had.

There's more in the lift than control. There's novelty, because a new thing is interesting and an evening can be short of interest. You now have Thursday to look forward to. And there's a sense of reward after a day that didn't pay you much. These are real needs, and I'd be lying if I said they were foolish ones. A person who wants some say over their day, something to look forward to and a bit of newness is in good working order.

So I won't ask you to believe that the lift is fake, or that you've been fooled into feeling something you didn't feel. You felt it.

The questions this book asks are narrower, and I think more useful. Where in the process does the lift sit? How long does it last? What are you paying for it, in money and in other ways? And is the object needed for it at all?

That last question has a surprising answer hidden in Rick's paper, and I'll come back to it in chapter 14. For now, notice one detail in the summary of their work. The shopping choices reduced sadness whether they were real or hypothetical. People who chose things and didn't buy them got the benefit too.

One caution about these studies. They involved small treats and short time spans, and I've read only the published summaries. They tell us that buying can lift a low mood on the day. They don't tell us what a habit of doing it twice a week does over five years. For that we have to look elsewhere.