u/Flynniepup

Will be going for a bit :)

Come join! :)

Title is a silly joke, but I have realized that my phone/reddit is a giant trigger for my spending and I am trying my best now to kind of mindfully replace it with other things…

Basically it hit me last night, yes I do stress shop, and boredom shop, and those are issues a lot of people face, but one thing I get hit with a lot is impulse control issues from my adhd and ocd.

The adhd, especially if I’m not sleeping well or eating well will cause me to go on the dopamine hunt obviously, which is where I snack, or buy things, etc, but I’ve also found that a lot of the time when I’m low on spoons and energy my easiest way to get dopamine is to doomscroll…

Last night I was particularly annoyed because I kept randomly opening sites to shop or randomly thinking “oh yeah I wanted to buy XYZ item…” but I wasn’t LOOKING at ads or anything, I wasn’t reading anything related to the thing I wanted to buy…*something* was triggering me to get off Reddit and open up my browser and look something up. What was the trigger??? Unfortunately *this* subreddit (and a couple others). Just reading the word “shopping” made my brain go “Oh yeah shopping! That’s a thing! Hey! Remember! You wanted to buy this the other day…let’s go look at it! And while you’re here let’s browse other stuff!!”

And then how the ocd plays into it…so my particular ocd is related to having things being “just right” and I get really stuck in a perfectionist mindset and if I can’t do things correctly I spiral, I have horrible intrusive thoughts that if I don’t do something *this particular way* it’s wrong.

A lot of the time this will be things related to my health and wellbeing. So even if I’m not spending money on things for my hobbies, or clothes, or collectibles or whatever…I’ll go down the “wellness” rabbit hole and suddenly it’s me buying supplements, or skincare things, or books, or healthy food, or workout equipment, rinse and repeat, because certainly *this item/food/book* will solve my issues and is exactly what I need.

This ties into the phone issue again because I’ll end up browsing subreddits related to health or fitness or productivity and my brain convinces itself that “these are necessary purchases” but NO, me spending $50 on a bunch of random fitness items or health food or whatever is not any more necessary than me adding another action figure to my bookshelf.

*Anyway* I have gotten off on a tangent here, but, I think this has been a big wake up call for me, especially realizing that I really do spend less money when I’m less “chronically online” so to speak…and I think I really need to re-evaluate how much time I give to this device vs something else 🙃 (not like that’s the easiest thing but I’ll do my best anyway)