Are you addicted to shopping? While such a question may seem staggering to some individuals, down to the everyday norm that shopping is an action and necessity, some encounter compulsive, uncontrollable shopping habits.
To be addicted to shopping means that purchasing items is indefinite, even when they are unnecessary, consequential, and incur emotional and financial issues.
While implications are widespread, down to the strength that behavioural addictions usually carry, withdrawing from online shopping or tangible purchases can be extremely tough.
As addiction is a brain condition, which ingrains itself to the point that physical and psychological damages are expected, professional intervention is required.
If you’re living with extreme debt due to obsessive shopping, if you’re hiding your shopping habits from loved ones, or if you’re suffering down to your behaviours, shopping addiction treatment & rehab will be a required step.
Physical and psychological treatment & rehab programmes will be recommended from physical detox from shopping activity, and exposure to understanding the importance and driving force of your shopping habits, physical and psychological treatment & rehab programmes will be recommended. Source such support for quite a misunderstood and niche addiction here at Addiction Advocates.
If you’re asking yourself, ‘am I addicted to shopping?’, it’s time to consider a professional evaluation, recommendations, and rehabilitation.
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Is shopping addiction real?
While such behavioural habits may be viewed as less serious, damaging, and invasive when compared with common addictions, shopping addiction is real. It’s where shoppers behave compulsively and obsessively, with little control, through the means of online or tangible shopping encounters.
Caused by a range of stimuli, behavioural addictions can result from genetics, environments, social pressures, and positive reinforcements. Yet mostly found through shopping addictions is the influence of emotional fulfilment that such action offers.
Developing a routine, a cycle and a rollercoaster of expected emotions are common through a shopping addiction.
Shopping is the means that provides pleasure and blocks out emotional spirals. Yet through bulk buying, wiping out credit cards and dipping into savings, such actions can soon turn into financial consequences, once again triggering emotional responses.
To onlookers, experiencing a shopping addiction may seem unlikely. Yet, like other addictions and their development phase, shopping will be used as a coping strategy, favouring the personal reinforcement it offers and fulfilling cravings and needs.
However, through ongoing enablement, shopping addiction treatment & rehab will soon be required, down to how rapid, excessive, and obsessive the shopping routine can become.
Shopping is so accessible that addictions can be fulfilled with a click of a button. If you’re struggling to control your exposure to such outlets, shopping addiction treatment and rehab services will be beneficial to curb, change and grow from such outlets.
Signs and symptoms of shopping addiction
Splurging now and again may feel wrong. Yet if it’s justifiable and doesn’t incur lasting impacts on your emotions, mental health and finances, such actions will be manageable.
Yet if you’re experiencing the below symptoms, a shopping addiction, standing as a behavioural problem, may be present, causing you to act irrationally towards unnecessary purchases.
Signs and symptoms of shopping addiction include:
- Consistently purchasing unnecessary items
- Shopping with the knowledge of impending consequences
- The inability to stop purchasing
- Hiding shopping habits or debt
- Experiencing financial implications down to excessive shopping
- Requesting credit or sources of income to purchase items
- Impulsive shopping, without any justification
- Seeing shopping as a coping strategy
- Serious implications of shopping, such as legal or financial issues
- Mental health implications, down to compulsive behaviours
- Lacking funds for important areas/responsibilities in life, for example, rent, mortgage or food, over materialistic or irrational purchases.
Shopping addiction signs and symptoms are very different from other behavioural addictions as it’s a niche, direct action. You’ll either understand whether you shop with intent and justification or whether your impulsive purchases are affordable and sustainable.
If your shopping habits are out of control, are extremely illogical and are impacting your livelihood, considering shopping addiction treatment & rehab will be wise at this point.
Shopping addiction treatment & rehab
As shopping addiction can become extremely serious, professional support is an encouraging step to accept. Shopping addiction treatment & rehab should more than suffice, offering interventive steps to understand addiction, taper back exposure, manage triggers, and develop new outlets of pleasure and coping.
Our support services at Addiction Advocates can help you find a rehabilitation centre offering suitable behavioural addiction treatments effective within compulsive shopping habits.
How to stop a behavioural addiction through treatment
A behavioural addiction will need to be worked through by completing treatment. Treatment will act as a detox, regulator, and management tool to help reduce and stop shopping habits.
Therapy will be the most effective form of treatment, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and dialectical behavioural therapy. Each will work to understand the compulsion behind shopping habits, with the aim to adapt emotional regulators, along with how to control the urge of such compulsion.
While it will take time to work through programmes of therapy, each step will help to increase awareness, education, management, and relapse prevention efforts of shopping addiction recovery.
In tandem with therapy, prescription medications may be recommended. However, this will depend on whether any secondary emotions contribute to or aggravate a shopping addiction.
Pre-existing mental health issues or secondary forms are found to be attached to compulsive shopping, requiring dual diagnosis treatment.
Therefore, shopping addiction treatment will be personal, suitable, and safe to work through the underlying causation of and ongoing fuel of obsessive, reinforced behaviours.
Completing comprehensive rehab
Alongside independent treatment, a comprehensive rehab programme will need to be completed to recover from shopping addiction’s physical and psychical depths. While such actions are controlled in the brain, they will display through physical behaviours and choices, controlling shopping habits and routines.
Rehab will help treat addiction holistically while combining necessary steps of recovery to deter future episodes of habitual shopping.
Shopping addiction treatment & rehab will be necessary for the event of obsessive behaviours surrounding purchases. No matter what you’re purchasing, support will be required if it’s negatively impacting your life.
While very niche and misunderstood, to be addicted to shopping is real and encountered by many individuals, especially through online means. If you’re struggling, see how our support can help you access quality shopping addiction treatment & rehab.
Seth is an author, addiction recovery expert and fully accredited member of the national counselling society. He has experience working with a wide range of addictions and mental illnesses using a number of evidence-based therapies and programmes such as the SMART models of addiction recovery.
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