Shopping high ‘is like hit of cocaine’

A SHOPPING hit can have the same biological effect as a line of cocaine, according to new Australian university-led worldwide research.

The findings, by researchers at South Australia’s Flinders University, have prompted calls for Buying-Shopping Disorder to be reclassified as an addictive behaviour.

“The physiology between Buying-Shopping Disorder and drug addiction is very similar,” Flinders University Professor Mike Kyrios told the Sunday Territorian.

Prof Kyrios is among five researchers from Australia and Germany who reviewed more than 70 research papers linking common traits between Buying-Shopping Disorder, or BSD, with medically listed behavioural addictions such as gambling and internet addiction.

“Recent research findings indicate an overlap in key characteristics of BSD and disorders due to substance use or addictive behaviours, suggesting the ... categorisation of BSD as a behavioural addiction,” says the study, published by Current Behavioural Neuroscience Reports.

BSD is classified by the World Health Organisation as a potential “other specified impulse-control disorder” – a class of psychiatric disorders typified by impulsivity, including kleptomania (an inability to stop stealing).

While there is no reliable data in Australia, recent international studies suggest BSD affects almost 5 per cent of the adult population in developed countries, with almost one in 14 Americans affected.

Prof Kyrios said BSD was much more than just an impulsive urge to spend and suspected the problem was getting worse with the advent of online shopping.

He said BSD was typically associated with feelings of intense euphoria during and just after uncontrollable shopping, followed by guilt, shame, anxiety and depression, and then by craving for the next “hit” with more and more extreme behaviours in order to feel the same intensity of the high.

“Your body craves to shop so that you can get the same physical reaction – that feeling of euphoria,” Prof Kyrios said.

“The heart rate goes up, there is a release of tension, feelings of happiness and you’re on a high.

“But there is the coming down too and this then triggers the next cycle of anxiety, guilt, depression, which triggers attempts to compensate these negative feelings by buying or shopping . . . and the craving starts all over again.”

Prof Kyrios, a clinical psychologist, said he was aware of BSD sufferers ending their lives, of theft and identity fraud, huge debt and of marriage and family breakdown due to financial strain and distrust.