Our Brain When We Are Shopping

Shopping is never a straight line. It’s like gymnastics with its twists and turns and its uncertainty of a beautiful landing, but don’t trust me on this because I’ve never done gymnastics. You may trust me on the shopping.

Our mind plays with us whenever we’re shopping. It shows us its power by being obsessive, or capricious, or utterly unreasonable.

Yes, yes, I know that the mind can be mapped to trigger a purchase. I know this because my previous work was all about writing strategies to identify thoughts that lead to a purchase. But now that I don’t do that anymore, I can say that at best, we were all just guessing. We were just very good at it.

And, yes, yes, I know that the mind can be trained to be focused. But all bets are off when it comes to non-essential shopping.  

With all the options now, our brain is pulled into many directions, often conflicting.

Take for example my quest to buy a bottle of lotion. The chore was simple enough: buy a lotion. So, I went to the supermarket to do just that and came out with a bag of chips, a dozen of grapes, a French onion dip and a Scotch Brite. And I know that this probably happened to you, too.

It’s not a low-involvement purchase. In fact, I am highly invested in my lotions. My skin gets better care than any part of my body and buying a lotion is up there in the most important decisions I make. But, why the miss?

So, the next day, I made sure I went to my Lazada app. But on my way there, I had to check Instagram and got sidetracked by the sight of bags. Longchamp has a new campaign, Chanel has mini-movies, and Hermes takes mesmerizing photos. And there were cat videos. And inspirational quotes. And obviously not-so-real travel posts.  Of course, there was Facebook and my friends’ photos and more cat videos. I stopped there because I felt I already had too much screen time. In the end, I forgot why I was on my phone in the first place.

We’re all distracted. We no longer go from A to B because the path is lined with temptations. In my case, the path is filled with Labubu dolls, Crocs bag charms, Owalas, designer bags, canvas tote bags, and funny cat videos. Going online is like opening the refrigerator in the dead of the night. You open the door and suddenly you forget what you were going to get.

The noise is overwhelming. Everyone’s shouting in the digital world. My brain is overwhelmed with the thoughts of others.

Everyone is hawking something. Even good stories end with a sales pitch. My brain is wired to expect that everyone’s trying to sell me something, so it rebels and goes the other way.

It’s more complicated that we think. This is an oversimplified version of how my brain works when engaged in my favorite sport. We can talk about the left amygdala and the parts of the brain that tell us what to reach for, but it will take forever.

An impulse buy is probably not impulsive. There’s a part of the brain that stores micro thoughts or nano thoughts and one day, in one nanosecond, they will all come together and gang up on you.

We will make sense of the brain one day.

I have a lotion to buy.

Bye.

Butch