Doom spending: what it is, why your brain does it, and how to stop (2026)

In Intuit Credit Karma's 2024 survey, 27% of Americans said they were doom spending to cope with stress, and the number climbs to 37% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials. Picture how it usually goes: it's 11pm, you've spent twenty minutes reading about layoffs and rent and whatever the economy decided to do this week, and somehow you're staring at a checkout page with three things in the cart you didn't know existed an hour ago. That isn't carelessness with money. It's your nervous system doing something reasonable with an unreasonable amount of uncertainty. This post explains what doom spending is, the three mechanisms in your brain that make it so reliable, and what actually interrupts it.

Key takeaways

What doom spending means

Doom spending is buying things to cope with anxiety about the state of the world: the economy, the news cycle, your job security, the general sense that the future is unstable. The purchase isn't about the item. It's about turning the volume down on a feeling that doesn't have an obvious off switch.

Intuit Credit Karma, which helped popularize the term in a 2023 survey, defines it as spending money despite concerns about the economy and foreign affairs. That "despite" is the whole thing. Doom spending usually happens while you're already worried about money, which is the part that makes people feel a little crazy about it.

Its closest relatives feel similar but run on different fuel.

That distinction matters because you can't solve doom spending by fixing the bad day. The bad day isn't the trigger. The uncertainty is. If you want the full picture of the retail therapy version, the psychology of retail therapy covers it. Doom spending sits closer to the anxiety that quietly drives so much spending, and it has a few mechanisms of its own.

Why your brain reaches for the cart when the world feels heavy

Three things are happening underneath, stacked.

Spending is a control behavior

Anxiety, at its core, is the feeling that something important is out of your hands. Most of what's in the news genuinely is. You can't fix the economy from your couch, and refreshing the feed one more time doesn't count as doing something about it.

But you can choose the blue one instead of the green one, apply a discount code, and have it arrive Thursday. Psychologists call this compensatory control: when real control is unavailable, your brain reaches for anything that delivers the sensation of it. Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky showed this directly in a study titled Desire to Acquire, published in the Journal of Consumer Research. People who were made to feel powerless were willing to pay more for products, specifically products that signaled status, as a way of making up for the power they lacked.

A purchase is a tiny, completable project in a world of giant, uncompletable ones. On a day that's mostly made of things happening to you, your brain isn't really choosing the sweater. It's choosing the feeling of having chosen something.

Your brain is tuned to the bad news

The scroll leaves you rattled even when nothing in it was about you because your brain runs on negativity bias, a built-in tilt toward noticing and remembering threats more than good news. For most of human history that kept people alive. Today it means twenty headlines about layoffs land harder than one about hiring, and your stress response doesn't check whether the layoffs were at your company.

Mood does the rest. In Heart Strings and Purse Strings, Jennifer Lerner, Deborah Small, and George Loewenstein found that sadness raised the price people were willing to pay for an item, and participants had no idea the sadness was doing any of the work.

The future gets foggy, so today wins

The third mechanism is the one that turns an occasional purchase into a pattern. Your brain already discounts the future: $100 today feels better than $110 next month, even when the math says otherwise. Uncertainty cranks that way up.

Think of your sense of the future like a windshield. On a clear day you can see far ahead, and decisions about next year feel real. Fill the air with fog, and your brain does the only sensible thing a brain can do in fog: it drives by what it can see. Which is right now. A headline about the economy doesn't just inform you. It thickens the fog, and suddenly the $80 thing in your cart feels vivid while "retirement" feels like a rumor.

The internal monologue sounds like this: the world is a mess, I can't afford a house anyway, so the $80 doesn't matter. Credit Karma's 2024 data has the same logic in survey form. 36% of Americans said they can't rationalize saving money because of how uncertain the world feels, rising to 47% of Gen Z and 43% of millennials. The problem isn't that people don't know saving is good. It's that saving requires believing in a future, and the news is making the future hard to picture.

💡 The myth worth retiring. The popular theory says doom spenders have given up on the future. If that were true, you'd feel fine afterward. You don't. The purchase feels good for about an hour, then the guilt shows up, and guilt only exists where caring still lives. People who doom spend usually care intensely about their future. The regret is the proof.

The Feed-to-Cart Pipeline

The mechanisms are old. The delivery system is new, and it deserves a name.

The device that delivers the doom is the same device that sells the remedy. You read a terrifying headline, your stress spikes, and the very next thumb movement can put you inside a shopping app. Sometimes you don't even have to switch apps, because the ad is sitting two posts below the headline, targeted at exactly the emotional state the headline just created.

Thirty seconds from dread to checkout. Your grandmother's stress didn't come with a Buy Now button attached.

The survey data shows the pipeline at work. In Credit Karma's research, 53% of Gen Z and 49% of millennials said that getting bad news online or on social media directly drives them to stress spend. Not bad news in general. Bad news on the same screen as the store.

Who doom spends the most

The pattern runs wider than any one generation, but the numbers concentrate under 45.

The APA figure is the one to sit with. In the 2023 Stress in America survey, 82% of adults aged 18 to 34 named money as a significant source of stress, and in 2024 the economy was a significant stressor for 73% of all adults. Younger people are the group carrying the most financial stress, the most screen time, and the least sense that the traditional milestones are reachable. When those three line up, the pipeline runs hot.

Windfalls are a specific pressure point. The Harris Poll found that 62% of Gen Z adults expecting a tax refund planned to spend most or all of it to cope with economic uncertainty. A refund is the largest lump sum many people see all year, and found money carries looser rules than earned money. Add fog about the future and spending it feels almost automatic.

What the loop actually costs

The relief from a doom spend fades fast, usually within the hour. What's left is the original dread, still there because the purchase never touched its cause, plus a fresh layer of money worry on top. That new worry is itself a stressor, so the behavior meant to calm you down quietly raises your baseline anxiety. The guilt afterward isn't a correction. It's fuel. Beating yourself up after a doom spend feeds the exact feeling that drives the behavior, which is why managing the guilt is part of the fix, not a distraction from it.

🔁 The doom spending loop: bad news creates distress. Distress drives a purchase. The purchase creates guilt. Guilt is distress. The cycle refuels itself, and it's strongest exactly when you're most depleted, which is why trying harder rarely works against it.

There's a subtler cost too. The recurring charges that pile up during a rough news month (the subscription you signed up for at midnight, the delivery membership, the app you forgot about) keep billing long after the dread has passed.

How to stop doom spending

Not a 12-step program. Three moves, in order of leverage.

1. Watch for the handoff. There's a specific moment when your thumb travels from the news to the store. Most people have never once noticed it happening, because it takes about a second and feels like nothing. Just noticing it is the intervention. Name it as it happens: "that was the handoff." Then name the feeling underneath, not "I want this" but "I just read something that made me feel powerless." Naming an emotion activates your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that reads the fine print and goes quiet under stress. That creates a gap between the feeling and the cart, even if you still buy the thing five minutes later.

2. Put a hallway between the doom and the store. If the pipeline is thirty seconds long, make it three minutes long. Log out of shopping apps so checkout requires a password. Delete saved payment details. Close the news app before you open anything else. None of this stops a determined purchase, and it isn't supposed to. It gives your prefrontal cortex time to arrive at the scene. The broader playbook for this lives in how to stop spending money, and it's all friction, not restriction.

3. Give the control craving a cheaper win. Your brain isn't wrong to want a completable task when the world feels unsteady. It's just shopping at an expensive store for one. Small, finishable things scratch the same itch: clean one shelf, answer one email, take a ten-minute walk and choose the route. It sounds almost insultingly small. That's fine. The mechanism doesn't care about impressive. It cares about done.

Then there's the cleanup. You can do the sweep yourself: pull two months of statements, highlight every charge you didn't consciously choose, and cancel what you don't use (how to cancel subscriptions walks through it). Or let impause do it: the agent finds the recurring charges and fees the doom-spending weeks leave behind and gets them back with your approval.

Give it two to four weeks. Your brain learns. The pattern that built itself can be unbuilt, one interrupted handoff at a time.

A gentler way to think about it

Doom spending is your nervous system reaching for control in a world that keeps refusing to hand any over. That's a deeply human move, not a character flaw. The news will not be getting quieter. What is in your control is the thirty seconds between the headline and the checkout, and that's more than enough room to work with. If you want a faster read on what's driving your own spending, the spending personality quiz takes about three minutes.

Frequently asked questions

What is doom spending?

Doom spending is buying things to cope with anxiety about the economy, the news, or events outside your control, rather than because you need or even especially want the item. The term took off around 2023 as housing costs and economic uncertainty dominated conversations among younger adults.

Is doom spending a real thing?

Yes. In Credit Karma's 2024 research, 27% of Americans said they doom spend to cope with stress, with rates of 37% among Gen Z and 39% among millennials. The mechanisms underneath it, compensatory control and steeper discounting of an uncertain future, are well documented in behavioral research.

Who doom spends the most?

Gen Z and millennials, but that reflects circumstances more than character. Adults aged 18 to 34 report the highest money stress of any age group in the APA's data, and they spend the most time on the screens where the news and the store sit side by side. Pressure plus exposure drives the pattern, not age.

How do I stop doom spending?

Interrupt the loop instead of banning the behavior. Notice the moment your thumb moves from a headline to a cart, add friction so checkout takes a few minutes instead of a few seconds, and give your brain a small finishable task that delivers the same sense of control. Then clean up the recurring charges the rough weeks left behind.

See what the rough weeks have been costing you

impause finds the money you're wasting, gets it back for you, and helps you stop wasting it, starting with the charges you don't remember agreeing to. Download impause or learn more at impause.com.

Sources

• Intuit Credit Karma, Economic concerns heighten as young Americans doom spend to cope with stress (Qualtrics survey of 1,001 U.S. adults, October 2024)
• Intuit Credit Karma, Forget doom scrolling, Americans now doom spend to cope with stress (Qualtrics survey of 1,004 U.S. adults, November 2023)
• American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2023: A nation recovering from collective trauma
• American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2024: A nation in political turmoil
• Lerner, Small, and Loewenstein, Heart Strings and Purse Strings: Carryover Effects of Emotions on Economic Decisions, Psychological Science, 2004
• Rucker and Galinsky, Desire to Acquire: Powerlessness and Compensatory Consumption, Journal of Consumer Research, 2008
• The Harris Poll for Origin, Majority of Gen Z plan to doom spend tax refund as recession fears rise, April 2025