Rational thinking is slow and uses up a lot of energy, therefore the brain often opts towards instinctive thinking to make decisions.

Although this leads to faster decisions, it can leave us exposed to making irrational, foolish decisions that are driven by emotion and gut feels, rather than logical reasoning.

Our failed ability to recognise forever increasing dopamine baselines is critical to why we fall into an obsessive cycle of buying.

The awareness, and then control of our own buying habits come from seeing that our mental wellbeing doesn’t seem to improve as we buy more things. In fact, our wellbeing may even decline with an ever increasing dopamine baseline that seems forever out of reach.

One core driver of why we buy things we don’t need, is the insatiable need to acquire approval from our peers, making our buying rates a reflection of our current social status state.

If we feel like we need to boost ego or self esteem, we buy more, if we’re happy with who we are, we want for less.

Talk is cheap, action and past behaviour is everything. What someone has done defines who they are, what they say is often how they wish to be defined.