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Black Friday This is how anxiety about Covid 19 influences our purchases
Stress and the feeling of instant reward can cause us to buy more things than we need or really want
Black Friday 2020 live
With Christmas just around the corner, the already mentioned last Friday in November and the state of stress generated by the current situation, this year we reached a perfect farm to make purchases that we later regret. It is difficult, with so much publicity and encouragement, that when the «Black Friday»We do not feel like buying something.
In general, many people use the you buy as an outlet for your troubles. You can even have an addiction, although it is not recognized as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, last updated in 2013. “A purchase gives us instant gratification, but a bit false,” he explains. Antonio Ruiz, advisor in Applied Neuroscience and Biotechnological Integration. The professional states that, when making a purchase, the basis is that we achieve a goal that we have set ourselves in the short term, which makes us feel good. “We also increase the feeling of possession, which we associate with a status, with belonging to a social group and with balance which, even if unconsciously, makes us feel better,” he points out and warns that this gratification “passes us by. Quick”. “If we saw it in a graph, this feeling of reward would go down very quickly”, he points out and gives the example of buying a car: at first we are very excited, but after a year we have assumed it as normal.
A date like “Black Friday” is designed to make consumers buy more, through various stimuli. A language full of words like “take the opportunity” or “get it” is gradually permeating; there are many messages with the same objective that end up awakening in us needs that in reality are not. “We came to try to rationally argue these supposed needs,” says Antonio Ruiz, who adds that this year, given the climate of instability and doubts, you can lead us to think that we need things when in reality we do not.
Stress and shopping
In general, Antonio Ruiz thinks that right now we are more accelerated; Although we do not feel so much stress, it is present in our environment. «We are facing a situation in which we spend more time in front of a screen than ever and, if we combine this with general stress and all those stimuli that we were talking about, we come to think that, with a small purchase, we are going to calm our anxiety ”, he points out.
It is a reality that we do not all have the same level of control over our impulses, and there are people who cannot control compulsive shopping. «This activity stimulates the same parts of the brain that triggers alcohol intake.», Says the professional, and recalls that, this year, we must take into account another particularity. Right now we are more socially isolated than we have ever been and we, as social beings, can find through shopping a way to connect with others. “If, for example, my whole group of friends has bought a product, and they don’t stop talking about it, I may feel the need to buy it myself, to be able to connect with them,” he says.
Buy with a head
It is essential to learn to buy in a measured way, both in the weekly purchase of food, as well as in products for our home, clothes or “whims” that we want. “Are justifiers rational decisions we make, in this case purchases, but that does not mean that we have to be 100% radical and austere “, says Antonio Ruiz, advisor in Applied Neuroscience and Biotechnological Integration, who specifies: “It is not wrong to buy something, what is wrong is to abuse”.
He warns that, in general, we are “bad” thinking in the medium and long term and that we must learn to anticipate what may happen. «The human being, in general, prefers to live in the here and now. We have to learn to make a forecast. When it comes to shopping, it’s okay to indulge yourself sometime, but we have to make sure before we can afford it, ”he says.
Another danger, Antonio Ruiz warns, is that most purchases are made with a credit card. “We all have an aversion to loss, and with the credit card, we do not see what we lose”, he says and continues: “It is a kind of” art “of camouflaging the loss: it is not the same to hand over a 50 euro bill and passing “a piece of plastic” through a machine. ”
Six tips to avoid compulsive shopping
Finally, Antonio Ruiz leaves us six guidelines to relativize the impulse to buy, and to be able to do it in a responsible way:
1. It is essential be aware that we are in a delicate situation, in which stress reigns.
2. It is important assess what real needs we have, and what is just a whim.
3. We must make a “financial chart” of our current situation: a list of income and expenses and think, in six months, what scenarios may occur.
4. We can allow us some license and buy, for example, a gift for someone we love, or something that we really want to have.
5. It is betterr avoid having credit cards “engraved” on any online platform.
6. We can select the product we want to buy, and wait 12 to 24 hours to buy it, so as not to do it on impulse.