How online shopping affects our hormones

In the past, when the temple of consumption was not the Internet but the department store, when people did not yet know the benefits of e-commerce and had to laboriously drag their televisions home, people read statements like:

Research has even shown that traditional shopping can ease the sadness. What does online shopping actually look like?

Online shopping is often overwhelming on the brain, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, clinical professor of psychiatry at Stanford Medicine, told the Times. Because the urge to buy online can be satisfied much faster and it is difficult to resist.

Just like the internet, shopping can also be highly addictive. In combination, this leads to a dopamine rush. In other words, the activity can make you very happy very quickly. But it levels off very quickly.

Filling the shopping cart can therefore give a better feeling than receiving the items, psychologist Thea Gallagher told the newspaper.

Similar behavior was observed in animal experiments with rats given cocaine. Before each animal was given the medicine, a bell rang. The researchers then found that the rats experienced a more intense release of dopamine when the bell sounded than when they consumed the drug. Even if the animals weren’t given coke.

It’s exactly this dopamine rush that keeps people shopping online again and again, says Gallagher.

You can avoid impulse purchases by not saving your credit card in your web browser. And take your time before ordering the items. “My quickest rule is to just sleep on it,” says JB MacKinnon, author of “The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the World and Ourselves.” A shopping ban of one week, one month or three months is also useful.

(cst)