Why Do I Spend When I Am Anxious?
The Pattern
You feel the spike of anxiety and within twenty minutes you have a cart full of things you do not need. The dopamine hits at the checkout. The relief is brief and is followed by guilt. You suspect you are bad with money. You are not bad with money. You are using money to do the work of nervous system regulation, and the system is reaching for the only tool it knows how to use.
Origins & Context
Bessel van der Kolk's work on trauma and self-regulation describes the wide range of behaviors people use to produce brief downshifts in nervous system arousal. Spending is one of the most reliable and culturally permitted. The purchase produces a small dopamine release, a brief sense of agency, a momentary feeling of being held by the object that just arrived.
Gabor Mate frames compulsive spending alongside other compulsive behaviors as substitute regulators in the absence of healthy co-regulation. Barbara Stanny's work on women and money documents the specific gendered pattern: women in financial precarity often spend more on small purchases as a way to manage the unbearable feeling of not having enough.
You are not bad with money. You are using money to do the work of nervous system regulation that no one taught you another way to do.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You scroll late at night and your cart fills up. You receive bad news and the next thing you know you are buying something on your phone. The package arrives and the relief is already gone. You hide the boxes from your partner. You feel the shame and then the cycle begins again.
It shows up as the cycle of anxious spending, brief relief, deeper guilt, more anxiety, more spending. You think the problem is the spending. The problem is what the spending has been hired to manage. The nervous system needs regulation. Spending was the most available tool.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Compulsive Spending in addiction and behavioral medicine work. Gabor Mate frames it within the broader category of Substitute Regulation. Bessel van der Kolk names the underlying drive as the search for State Modulation. Barbara Stanny names the gendered version as Anxious Money Behavior. Pia Mellody's codependency framework names the pattern as Money as Mood Manager.
Related entries in this library: Self-Abandonment, Nervous System Dysregulation, Inner Child, Financial Sovereignty as Healing, Body Keeps the Receipt.
Nikita's Note
I want to be soft with this. You are not weak. You are reaching for the only regulator that was available. The work is not stopping the spending by force. The work is asking, before the cart, what state am I in and what does this state actually need.
Usually the state needs something the package will not provide. Touch, sleep, a slow conversation, a walk. The spending was a stand-in. The stand-in does not have to be punished. It just has to be replaced with something that actually meets the need.
From the work
You are not bad with money. You are using money to do the work of nervous system regulation that no one taught you another way to do.From She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained — available on Amazon.