These 6 Toxic Spending Habits Are Destroying Our Mental Health

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

Here’s how.

After taking care of bills and saving a reasonable amount of our income, the money that we have left over should be spent on the things that actively bring us joy and meaningfully enhance our quality of life. But all too often, our spending habits fail to meet that standard. According to Statista, nearly half of all purchases made by 18–24 year-olds in 2018 were the result of impulse shopping. And older age groups didn’t fare much better either. Additionally, AOL Research found that 66% of the time, purchasing decisions were emotionally motivated. The top reasons respondents cited for shopping were wanting to make themselves happy and to give themselves time to unwind.

At the same time, however, all that impulse-driven and emotionally-motivated shopping actually fails to make us happy. According to psychiatrist Dr. Monish Jain, shopping to restore a sense of happiness not only fails to address the cause of the unhappiness in the first place, but it is also often accompanied by feelings of guilt and shame. The onset of that guilt and shame then leads to heightened stress for the shopper that can make them more susceptible to falling into a depression.

But declaring victoriously that the solution to these poor spending decisions is to simply shop more intentionally misses the…