“Retail therapy is buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have.”
Doom spending is that thing you do at 2 AM when the world feels like it’s unraveling and your phone screen is the only light in the room.
Your cart is full of noise-canceling headphones you don’t need, a standing desk you won’t use, and skincare that promises to fix problems that have nothing to do with your pores.
It’s compulsive buying triggered by anxiety about things you can’t control—the economy, the election, the planet melting.
You’re spending money you don’t have to feel control you won’t get, making the problem worse while pretending you’re solving it.
You know you shouldn’t. Your bank account already gives you chest tightness, which is ironic because that’s exactly why your finger is hovering over “Buy Now.”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: One in five Americans is doing this right now. Among Gen Z? Forty-one percent.
We’re collectively drowning in over a trillion dollars of credit card debt—and a good chunk comes from people buying stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have because they’re anxious about… not having money.
Your brain isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what millions of years of evolution trained it to do — just in the worst environment imaginable: a digital marketplace designed to exploit your neural wiring while an algorithm whispers:
“You deserve this… the economy’s crashing anyway… and that vintage turntable will totally fix your feelings about climate doom.”
Doom spending isn’t actually a spending problem. It’s a control problem disguised as retail therapy.
When you’re three clicks away from financial regret, the ancient part of your brain takes over — the lizard bit that helped your ancestors survive predators.
It understands three things:
threat → action → survive.
Inflation spike? Threat.
Political chaos? Threat.
Your boss sending a “hey, can we talk?” Slack message after 8 PM? Threat.
Your amygdala does what it always does: dumps cortisol into your system. Useful when running from a tiger. Slightly less useful when the “tiger” is your landlord.
But your brain doesn’t care. It craves action, not accuracy. This is action bias: doing something — even the wrong thing — feels safer than doing nothing.
So you buy something. Click → dopamine → relief.
For 45 glorious seconds, life feels containable. Then the receipt lands in your inbox like a judgmental ghost.
And your brain learns something dangerous:
This works. Temporarily. But it works.
You’ve just reinforced a neural loop it’ll default to next time.
The exact mechanism behind:
Your brain is trying to save you… with the neurological equivalent of a stone axe in a world built out of lasers.
Economic crises aren’t new. But the reason everyone suddenly started doom spending is because multiple anxiety triggers collided with frictionless spending tech, creating a psychological Molotov cocktail.
Here’s what’s swirling in the soup:
But the real accelerant? Friction disappeared.
In the past, spending required physical money — something you could feel leaving your hand. Even in 2008, you had to type card numbers manually. Now? Face ID, one-click purchasing, and saved payment information. “Buy now, pay later” buttons big enough to climb into.
The gap between impulse and action has shrunk to microseconds.
Gen Z got hit hardest. They grew up watching their parents get wrecked in 2008, graduated into a pandemic, and inherited an economy where buying a house feels like winning the lottery. Traditional financial incentives — saving for a home, building retirement — feel like myths told by boomers in rocking chairs.
Previous generations had physical bills arriving in real envelopes. You couldn’t ignore it. Now your credit card debt lives in an app you can simply… not open. It exists in a digital void until something breaks—your card gets declined, you can’t make rent, the anxiety you were shopping away becomes the crisis itself.
The brilliant, evil innovation of modern consumer finance is making consequences feel distant while making purchases feel immediate. Your future self will deal with it. Future you is the sucker holding the bag while present you gets the dopamine hit.
Here’s what’s actually happening: Your attachment style is running the show.
Anxious attachment:
Avoidant attachment:
Disorganized attachment
Doom spending becomes dissociation. The purchasing trance is an escape from feeling anything real. You’re not buying products—you’re buying unconsciousness.
Your childhood attachment wounds are showing up in your transaction history.
Each doom spending episode creates episodic memory anchors — little brain bookmarks linking a specific place, time, mood, and situation. Maybe you doom spent once at 11 PM on your couch after a horrible Zoom call. Your brain logged it.
Now:
same couch + same time + same work stress = automatic urge to shop.
You think it’s “random.”
It’s not random.
It’s a triggered old program.
This is why you can go weeks without doom spending and then — boom — suddenly you’re buying a $200 “sleep lamp” that promises circadian enlightenment.
To break the loop, you must disrupt the environment:
Once you see the pattern, you can break it.
Here’s the part where we go full therapist-tactical: Doom spending starts in your body, not your head.
The sequence is: Body registers threat (tight chest, shallow breathing, muscle tension) → Brain interprets this as danger → Shopping becomes the “solution.”
Most advice tells you to think your way out. Wrong. By the time you’re “thinking about it,” your nervous system already made the decision. You need somatic interrupts—body-based tools that reset the system before the shopping urge solidifies.
Try these:
Hum loudly for 30 seconds, or gargle water, or do the “physiological sigh” (deep inhale through nose, second quick inhale, long exhale through mouth). These activate the vagus nerve, which tells your body the threat has passed.
Cross your arms and tap your shoulders alternately (left-right-left-right) for 90 seconds. This mimics EMDR and interrupts the anxiety-loop before it reaches the “buy now” stage.
Five things you see, four you can touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste. This pulls you out of the anxious future and into the physical present, where the urge loses power.
These aren’t meditation. They’re nervous system hacks that work whether you “believe” in them or not. Your body doesn’t care about your opinions—it responds to physiology.
Let’s zoom out.
Doom spending isn’t happening in a vacuum. It happens when a society loses coherent meaning-making structures and replaces them with consumption rituals.
Previous generations had: Religious communities. Tight-knit neighborhoods. Civic organizations. Labor unions. Extended family networks.
These provided identity, belonging, purpose—the deep stuff humans need to feel stable.
We replaced all that with… buying things.
There’s a micro-ritual void in modern life. We don’t have small, repeated ceremonies that affirm who we are and where we belong. So buying becomes the surrogate ritual.
Each purchase is a tiny ceremony of self-definition:
“I’m the kind of person who owns this.”
“This product reflects my values.”
“This makes me part of this tribe.”
Uncertainty drives symbolic consumption. When you can’t control the macro (economy, climate, politics), you control the micro (what you own).
Each item becomes a talisman against chaos—it won’t actually protect you, but it feels like it might.
This is why doom spending feels spiritual in the moment. You’re not shopping. You’re performing an identity ritual in a culture that killed all the other rituals.
The real antidote?
Rebuild meaning in non-consumer ways.
Join something. Do something. Make something.
Your identity needs more fuel than Amazon boxes.
Let’s get predictive, because doom spending is about to get weaponized in ways that’ll make today’s problems look quaint.
“Doom subscriptions” are coming.
Not “subscriptions you regret.” Subscriptions designed to soothe existential dread:
They’re already emerging.
AI-triggered emotional shopping will read your biometric data—heart rate from your smartwatch, typing patterns on your phone—and hit you with purchase suggestions the moment your anxiety spikes. Not when you’re browsing. When your body signals distress.
Emotional-recognition shopping apps are in development. They’ll use your camera to read facial micro-expressions and serve products that match your real-time emotional state. Feeling overwhelmed? Here’s a weighted blanket ad. Feeling inadequate? Here’s a status-boosting purchase.
AI versions of you predicting your next impulse-purchase window.
Retailers will exploit it.
Ethical companies might help you block it.
Either way, the war is data vs. your wallet.
The future of doom spending isn’t about willpower. It’s about whether you control your data or whether your data controls your wallet.
Let’s be clear: Willpower is a myth.
If resisting bad decisions relied on willpower, humans would be thriving.
Your brain follows a trail:
anxiety → buy → relief.
You don’t destroy that highway. You build a better one.
Urges peak and fade within 90 seconds — if you don’t act.
When you feel the urge: Put the phone down. Not just lock it—actually put it in another room. Stand up. Go outside. Do ten pushups. Splash cold water on your face.
Movement and temperature changes signal to your brain that the “threat” has shifted, interrupting the anxiety-purchase loop.
Try this: Close your eyes. Picture yourself three months from now. Two versions exist.
Version one has the credit card debt from this doom spending episode, plus all the other episodes, and the crushing anxiety that comes with it.
Version two doesn’t have the thing you want to buy, but also doesn’t have the debt.
Which version do you actually want to be? Make the future feel real.
Removing a bad habit without replacing it is psychological suicide.
Your brain still needs dopamine.
Exercise triggers the same reward pathways but improves your life instead of draining your bank account. Creative projects give you the sense of control that doom spending pretends to offer.
Social connection is massive. Call a friend. Your brain interprets genuine human connection as safety, which is what it’s actually seeking.
Tactical hack:
Delete your saved payment information.
Make every purchase require manually entering card numbers. This adds just enough friction that your conscious mind catches up with your impulse.
Try the opposite habit:
Every time you feel the doom spending urge, immediately transfer $10 to savings instead. Same action (moving money), opposite result.
Doom spending isn’t about the thing you’re buying.
It’s about the story underneath it.
Ask yourself:
“What does financial instability actually threaten in me?”
Safety?
Love?
Identity?
Journal it out. Write: “I’m anxious because…” and keep going until you hit something that makes you uncomfortable.
Most doom spending isn’t about the present. It’s about old stories. Maybe you grew up without enough and buying things proves you’ve made it. Maybe your parents fought about money and spending feels like freedom.
What am I grateful for that can’t be bought? Your health. Relationships. Skills. Freedom.
When you regularly acknowledge what you already have that actually matters, it’s harder to believe that a purchase will fix your life.
So here we are. Back at the beginning. It’s 2 AM, or maybe 2 PM, and the world still feels unstable. Your phone is still in your hand. The shopping cart is still there.
What if — just this once — you closed the tab?
Not because you’re enlightened. Not because you’ve transcended your biology. Just because you recognized the urge for what it is: your brain trying to protect you with outdated software.
This is hard work. You’re going to doom spend again, maybe tomorrow, maybe tonight. That’s fine. You’re not trying to be perfect. You’re trying to build new neural pathways, and those take time.
Rewiring your brain happens in dozens of tiny, unsexy decisions.
Here’s one concrete thing you can do right now:
Delete one saved payment method. Just one. Tiny barriers work because doom spending relies on frictionless impulse.
Your brain wants to doom spend because it’s scared. It sees the anxiety and reaches for the familiar solution, even when that solution makes everything worse.
Thank it for trying. Your brain is doing its best with outdated software.
And then show it a better way.
DISCLOSURE: In my article, I’ve mentioned a few products and services, all in a valiant attempt to turbocharge your life. Some of them are affiliate links. This is basically my not-so-secret way of saying, “Hey, be a superhero and click on these links.” When you joyfully tap and spend, I’ll be showered with some shiny coins, and the best part? It won’t cost you an extra dime, not even a single chocolate chip. Your kind support through these affiliate escapades ensures I can keep publishing these useful (and did I mention free?) articles for you in the future.
READ NEXT