From £700/month to control: How young adults are beating shopping addiction

It happens to most of us at some point: midnight scrolling, a sudden urge, a purchase made before sleep. The regret comes in the morning. But for a growing number of young adults, that cycle doesn't stop after one transaction. It becomes the rhythm of their life.

Research suggests roughly 7% of adults struggle with what clinicians call shopping addiction—an inability to resist spending despite knowing the financial damage it will cause. Younger women face the highest risk. The pattern is recognizable: the dopamine rush of acquisition, the brief satisfaction, then the crash into guilt and shame. For Ella Hewitt, a 24-year-old from Liverpool, the cycle spiraled into crisis. In 2021, she was spending up to £700 each month on fast fashion she often never wore. She had grown up without much money, and when she landed her first job as an HR assistant at a school, the wages hit her account and vanished just as quickly. Social media made it worse. TikTok and Instagram feeds served her an endless stream of trends, and she bought them all—usually late at night when she was tired or bored, chasing the feeling that never quite lasted.

The spending trapped her. She couldn't afford to move out of her family home. Horrified at what she was doing, she began experimenting with barriers between impulse and action. She created a wish list and forced herself to wait 30 days before buying anything on it. Most of the time, the urge evaporated. She invented an imaginary budget of £1,000 a day to spend on imaginary purchases, which satisfied the itch without the cost. She made a rule: she could only buy something if she could afford to buy it three times over. The results were concrete. She cut her spending by about 60%. She still buys things she wants, but the compulsion has loosened. She now works as an ethical fashion influencer and is planning to launch her own clothing brand.

Dish Patel, 23, from London, followed a similar arc. As a student, she maxed out a £2,500 overdraft buying clothes, food, makeup, and skincare. She was always broke. Like Ella, she was compensating for childhood scarcity, but the relief was temporary. Each parcel brought a rush that faded quickly, then the cycle restarted. She bought anything trending, but her real addiction was the apps themselves—scrolling through Asos and Pretty Little Thing to pass time. She deleted the apps from her phone. She removed ApplePay. She started leaving her bank cards at home when she went to work, buying her train ticket the night before and bringing a packed lunch. She pre-planned every day to eliminate spending opportunities. Then she added a rule: any time she wanted to buy something, she had to put the same amount into savings or investments. "I didn't want to spend the money twice," she says. It worked. She now works as a financial planner.

The vulnerability is real and measurable. Gen Z shoppers make more impulse purchases than any other age group, closely followed by millennials. Experts point to the infrastructure of modern retail: social media algorithms that target relentlessly, influencer culture that normalizes consumption, and checkout systems designed to remove friction. One click and the transaction is done. Buy Now Pay Later schemes make spending feel consequence-free. Money and Mental Health, a charity focused on the intersection of finances and wellbeing, argues that online shopping sites are deliberately engineered to minimize the psychological resistance to spending—pop-ups that pressure, designs that streamline, payment methods that defer the pain of payment.

The Ukat Group, which operates addiction treatment centers across the country, reports a rising tide of shopping addiction cases, with 90% of them women. The signs are consistent: mood lifts immediately after a purchase, then guilt and shame follow. People lie to loved ones about what they've bought. Their homes fill with unworn items. The interventions that work are surprisingly simple: waiting periods that let the urge fade, deleting apps and saved payment methods, writing shopping lists and sticking to them, unfollowing influencers, leaving cards at home. Setting a small guilt-free budget or an imaginary one. Knowing your triggers—loneliness, boredom, stress—and choosing something else instead. The pattern is clear: friction works. When spending requires effort, fewer impulse purchases happen. When the barrier between desire and action is removed, the vulnerable buy.