If your spending habits have put you into a bad financial situation, with extreme and unmanageable credit card debt, whether you'd call it an addiction or a habit isn't what's important. What's important is that this is hurting you, it's impairing your life, so it's great that you want suggestions about how to stop this behavior. So here are some thoughts for you to begin with.

First, keep in mind the following general ideas:

• Shopping is an equal opportunity, all purpose mood changer.
  What this means is that one of the commonest reasons that people overshop is to feel better, to enhance their mood. If this is true of you, you might think about how you're really feeling and what you really need. It's probably not that new piece of clothing. It's probably something that relates to the emotion you may be trying to ease with the shopping. For example, if you shop because you're lonely and you like the attention and company that you get from the salespeople, you need to find another way to meet that very real and important need for company and attention.
• You can never get enough of what you don't really need.
  This is related to the first point. Let's say that some of your buying is because you need to express anger and you're afraid to do that directly, or feel hopeless about being heard, no matter what you buy, it won't take care of the need to express your anger. You've got to find a way either to do it directly, remove yourself from a bad situation, find healthier ways to express your angry feelings, and/or learn to bear these feelings knowing that they will pass.
• Shopping is not about buying, it's about being.
  Shopping is a way we search for ourselves and our place in the world. We can search for ideas and experiences, not just goods and services. When we look at shopping with this kind of wide-angle lens, we're likely to feel much more satisfied and spend considerably less.

Now, here are a few specific suggestions:

• Be a private eye around your buying behavior. Identify the cues or triggers that lead to overshopping or overspending,e.g. a bad day at work, a fight with a spouse, feeling lonely, bored, or in need of reward, free time, or the holidays perhaps. Look for patterns and connections.
• Look at the consequences of your overshopping. In what areas of your life is it costing you? Financially? Emotionally? Socially? Occupationally? Spiritually?
• Choose someone in your life to be a Shopping Support Buddy and brainstorm together about how that person will support you to stop overshopping.
• Expect that you may very likely feel worse before you feel better, since the anesthetic qualities that the buying supplied are now gone. But if you stick with your resolve, you'll begin to feel the gain in self esteem that comes from being in control.
• Write down everything you spend and assign each expenditure a necessity score, based on how necessary you deem it to be, from 0, for something entirely unnecessary, to 1/3 somewhat necessary, 2/3 very necessary to , essential. At the end of the week, add up the actual cost of each expenditure and then calculate a necessity cost, which is the actual cost multipled by either 0, 1/3, 2/3, or 1, whatever necessity score you've assigned to that expenditure. If you total the week's actual costs and the week's necessity cost and then subtract the necessity cost from the actual cost, you'll be able to determine how much you could save if you were only buying things that were more necessary rather than less.

There are many more proven strategies for stopping overshopping available, free of charge, on our website. Just sign up on the lower left hand corner of the home page, for our quarterly newsletter, and you'll get, free, our two special reports, 3 Proven Strategies for Stopping Overshopping, and More Proven Strategies for Stopping Overshopping.

Now that you're beginning to realize the negative consequences of your shopping, you sound motivated to begin to take steps to do something positive for yourself. Feel free to call us if you have further questions. 917-885-6887