Shopping can indeed improve a bad mood, a study published in the journal of Psychology and Marketing showed. In fact, in a survey of over 1, 000 American adults, 96%said they had bought something to make themselves feel better. However, the benefits of retail therapy（购物疗法）are oftenfugitiveand can give way to long-term side effects.
Negative emotions and sadness can lead to a loss of self-worth and this often is what drives people to turn to shopping when they feel down. The result:those same negative emotions can come back with regret and guilt, if we spend more than we should or had planned to. "What we're doing with retail therapy is that we're trying desperately to regulate our emotions, "says Joanne Corrigan, a clinical psychologist specializing in compassion focused therapy-a type of psychotherapy aimed at helping people with mental-health issues related to shame and self-criticism. "We don't like uncomfortable emotions. So we'll do short-lived things that make us feel good in the moment. "
When we feel down or anxious, our ability to control ourselves is reduced, making us tend to make bad decisions. Sadness, it seems, leads to more impatient thoughts, and a desire for immediate reward at the expense of greater future gains. This phenomenon was termed "myopic misery（近视苦难）" by Jennifer Lerner, professor of psychology at Harvard University and her colleagues Ye Li and Elke Weber of Columbia University in their research paper on the issue.
According to Cormell University economist Robert Frank, the key to fighting the impulse （冲动）to shop when we feel down is self-control. He points to the work of Walter Michel, who conducted the Stanford Marshmallow test, an experiment in child psychology and delayed satisfaction, which sought to examine self-control among children by offering them a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period. Follow-up studies found that children who were willing to wait longer for rewards tended to have better scores in later life when it came to measurements including SAT scores, educational attainment and body mass index（BMI）.
"For a lasting sense of well-being, we need to overcome the impulse for immediate satisfaction. "Frank says. "You ought to take a longer view of what counts, but that's where people have consistent difficulty: giving sufficient weight to things that occur not now but in the future. "
