The thing that actually helped me stop impulse buying online was adding one extra step that takes 30 seconds and feels almost too simple to work
The thing that actually helped me stop impulse buying online was adding one extra step that takes 30 seconds and feels almost too simple to work I want to preface this by saying I had tried all the standard advice. Unsubscribe from marketing emails, delete your saved payment info, use a separate browser without autofill, take things out of your cart and wait 24 hours. Some of that helped a little. None of it fully worked for me because the urge doesn't live in the checkout button, it lives in the moment when you open a tab and start browsing in the first place. What actually worked was this: I created a note on my phone called "stuff I almost bought" and the rule is that before I buy anything that isn't food or a genuine necessity I have to add it to the note first with the price and the date. That's it. That's the whole system. I don't have to wait a specific amount of time, I don't have to justify it to anyone, I just have to write it down. What I found is that the act of writing it down does something to the impulse that nothing else did. When a purchase exists only as a feeling it has a kind of urgency to it. When it exists as a line of text that says "gray oversized hoodie $47 march 14" it becomes a fact instead of a feeling and facts are much easier to evaluate calmly. Most of the time I look at the list a few days later and genuinely cannot remember why I wanted the thing badly enough to almost buy it. I've been doing this for about five months. My note currently has 31 items on it. I have bought exactly four of them. I'm not saying I fixed anything, I still have the impulse, but I gave it somwhere to go that isn't my bank account and that has made a real difference.