What is a shopping addiction?

Causes of Shopping Addiction

The exact causes of shopping addiction on not entirely clear, but several factors may play a role.

Other Mental Health Conditions

Usually beginning in one's late teens and early adulthood, shopping addiction often co-occurs with other disorders, including mood and anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, eating disorders, other impulse control disorders, and personality disorders.

Personality Characteristics

This difficulty in controlling the desire to shop emerges from a personality pattern that shopaholics share, and that differentiates them from most other people. Often low in self-esteem,6 they are easily influenced, and are often kindhearted, sympathetic, and polite to others, although they are often lonely and isolated. Shopping gives them a way to seek out contact with others.

Some people develop shopping addiction to try and boost their self-esteem, although it doesn't tend to be very effective for this.

Materialism

People with shopping addiction tend to be more materialistic than other shoppers and try to prop themselves up by seeking status through material objects and seeking approval from others. They engage in fantasy more than other people, and—as with other people with addictions—have difficulty resisting their impulses.

Exposure to Advertising

People with a shopping addiction may be more susceptible to marketing and advertising messages that surround us daily. While advertising, in general, is designed to exaggerate the positive results of purchase and suggest that the purchase will lead to an escape from life's problems, certain marketing tricks are designed to trigger impulse buying and specifically target the impulsive nature of people with a shopping addiction.

Retail Therapy

As with other addictions, shopping addiction is usually a way of coping with life's emotional pain and difficulty. Unfortunately, it tends to make things worse rather than better for the shopper.
People who gain pleasure and escape negative feelings through shopping sometimes call it "retail therapy." This phrase implies that you can get the same benefit from buying yourself something as you would from engaging in counseling or therapy. This is an incorrect and unhelpful idea. 

While the term retail therapy is often used in a tongue-in-cheek manner, some people, including shopaholics, actively make time to shop simply as a way to cope with negative feelings.
Although there are circumstances when a new purchase can solve a problem, this is not typically thought of as retail therapy. Usually, the things people buy when engaging in retail therapy are unnecessary, and the corresponding financial cost may reduce resources for solving other life problems.