Is Retail Therapy just buying stuff we don't need?

You don't need it, but buy it anyway... 

Have you had a look in your loft lately?  It’s full isn’t it and there’s no car in the garage either is there, because that’s rammed too, stuffed with all things you thought you wanted - but didn’t. 

You only have to look at e-bay to realise we don’t really want half the things we buy in the shops. It’s hard to know why we part so easily with our hard-earned cash, just to give it away to a charity shop, sell it for the fraction of the price, or lob it to rot in the attic? 

Whether they’d be presents from family that haven’t got a clue what you need, that advertising campaign that was just too damn good, or you just lost the plot one day and randomly filled your boots with more clutter.  Clutter that gradually takes over your house and ends up owning you...

So why is your car rusting away on the drive and the Christmas decorations buried so deep in the loft that it’ll take until January to dig ‘em out? The short answer is that our lives are jam-packed with stuff we never really wanted in the first place, but it’s more complicated than that. Maybe it’s all that Retail Therapy the shrinks tell us is so good for us?

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Are there really any therapeutic benefits of shopping?

We’ve all heard the mantra, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”. When you are fed up, the theory goes, something must be lacking, and so buying something nice might just fill that gap. It makes sense, doesn’t it?  Something is missing, you choose to buy something you want and you feel better. I’ll never be miserable again, well, not until the next time. The thing is there might be some truth in that immediate gratification makes us happy, but sadly, it doesn’t seem to last and what were once those mood-saving pair of luxury of knee-length boots are now just slumped with the others under the stairs...

Recent studies suggest that six out of ten of us buy things to “cheer themselves up”, with one in three shoppers revealing that they bought as a “form of celebration”.  The product itself, was incidental, it could almost have been anything.  The reward (the positive reinforcement, to use the psycho-speak), or pleasure of shopping appeals real.  Here are a few reasons why retail therapy works...

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