Why do I keep buying things that "future me" will deal with?
You're not lazy or broken — your brain is wired to treat future-you like a stranger. Here's the neuroscience behind impulse buying and what actually helps.
You buy the thing. You know, on some level, that future-you will have to deal with the credit card bill, the cluttered corner, the subscription you forgot to cancel. And yet. The buy button gets clicked anyway — and then you feel vaguely guilty for days, which somehow doesn’t stop it happening again next month.
If that loop sounds familiar, I want you to know something before we go any further: this is not a willpower problem. It is not a maturity problem. It is not evidence that you are “bad with money.” It is, in a very precise and well-researched sense, a brain problem — one that affects almost everyone, and hits some people considerably harder than others.
Your brain is not being irrational. It’s being predictably human.
Behavioural economists have a name for what’s happening: present bias. It describes our tendency to assign much greater value to rewards available right now than to rewards available in the future — even when we intellectually know the future reward is bigger or smarter.
Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and his colleagues have been mapping this for decades. The core finding is simple and slightly humbling: we are inconsistent over time. Ask someone whether they’d prefer £100 today or £110 next week, and most people take the £100 now. Ask whether they’d prefer £100 in 52 weeks or £110 in 53 weeks, and suddenly most people are very happy to wait the extra week for the extra £10. Same gap in time. Completely different decision.
The technical term for this inconsistency is hyperbolic discounting — the way we mentally “discount” future value follows a steep curve rather than a steady slope. Far-future rewards feel almost abstract. Near-future rewards feel almost physical.
The problem isn’t that you can’t make good decisions. It’s that your brain treats future-you as a slightly different person — and you don’t feel particularly responsible for what happens to strangers.
The stranger in the future
That last point matters, so let’s sit with it.
Psychologist Hal Hershfield at UCLA ran studies where he showed people age-progressed images of themselves — essentially, what they’d look like at retirement age. People who saw their older selves allocated significantly more to long-term savings than those who didn’t. The implication is uncomfortable: without a vivid sense of our future self, we treat that person’s problems as someone else’s problems.
This is called temporal self-discontinuity, and it explains why “you’ll regret this later” is genuinely one of the least effective things you can say to yourself in the moment of a purchase decision. Later-you doesn’t feel real. Now-you has a notification, a low mood, a 20% off code expiring in 47 minutes.
Why this hits harder if your brain is wired differently
If you’re reading this with ADHD, or if ADHD has been mentioned to you by a doctor, a partner, or a very on-the-nose TikTok algorithm — this section is specifically for you.
ADHD involves dysregulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter most tightly linked to reward anticipation. The ADHD brain often has a reduced sensitivity to future rewards, which means the hyperbolic discounting curve is even steeper. The gap between “now” and “later” feels wider. The pull toward immediate reward is stronger. And the executive function systems that would otherwise act as a pause-and-consider mechanism are running at reduced capacity.
This isn’t an excuse, in the dismissive sense. It’s a mechanism. Understanding the mechanism is the only thing that actually leads anywhere useful.
Financial therapist Brad Klontz has written extensively about how shame around money behaviour tends to increase avoidance — and avoidance makes the behaviour worse, not better. Feeling bad about impulse purchases doesn’t interrupt the neural circuit. It just adds a tax of misery on top of it.
Why standard budgeting advice makes this worse
Most budget advice is built on the assumption that you need better information and more discipline. Track your spending. Make a plan. Stick to it.
That model has a fundamental design flaw: it treats present bias as ignorance. As if the problem is that you don’t know buying three candles on a Tuesday is slightly at odds with saving for a deposit. You know. Everyone knows. Knowing is not the bottleneck.
The second problem with traditional budgeting is that it puts the decision point at the moment of maximum temptation — the point of purchase — and relies on willpower to win there. Willpower is a depletable resource (Baumeister’s ego depletion research is contested in its specifics, but the general principle holds: making repeated decisions is tiring). Placing the entire weight of your financial life on a single tired “should I though?” in the checkout queue is not a robust system.
What actually works is pre-commitment — designing the decision before you’re in the emotionally activated state. Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi built the entire Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) programme on this insight. People who agreed in advance to save future pay rises ended up saving far more than people who were asked to save more right now. Same people. Completely different outcome. The architecture of the decision did the work, not the discipline.
One thing you can actually do
Here’s a small action with a disproportionate effect.
Before your next purchase that isn’t immediately necessary — anything over, say, £30 — try what I’d call the 48-hour receipt rule: add it to your basket or write it down, set a phone reminder for 48 hours, and buy it then if you still want it.
You are not denying yourself. You are not saying no. You are simply moving the decision slightly outside the activation window of present bias. A significant proportion of the time, the thing will seem less urgent in 48 hours. Not always — sometimes you’ll absolutely still want it and buy it and that’s fine. But you will have interrupted the automatic loop and given your prefrontal cortex a chance to participate.
For ADHD brains especially, the phone reminder is not optional. It’s load-bearing. The whole system falls over without it, because out of sight really does mean out of mind — and that’s not a character flaw, it’s a feature of how working memory functions when dopamine regulation is different.
This one change won’t fix your finances. I want to be honest about that. But it does something more important: it gives you a win that isn’t based on willpower, which means it’s a win you can repeat. And repeatable wins are what build new patterns.
The shame spiral doesn’t help (and here’s why)
One last thing before you go.
If you’ve spent any time beating yourself up about impulsive spending — if you’ve made budgets and broken them and felt like that proved something bad about you — I want to offer you a different frame.
You were using a tool that wasn’t designed for how your brain works. A hammer is not a failure when it can’t tighten a screw. You needed a different tool.
The science of present bias, hyperbolic discounting, and temporal self-discontinuity has been robust enough to win a Nobel Prize and redesign national pension systems. The least it can do is let you off the hook for clicking “add to basket” when you were tired and sad and the algorithm knew exactly what it was doing.
Understanding your money behaviour is not the same as excusing it. But it is, reliably, the thing that comes before changing it.
If you want to understand the deeper patterns driving your money decisions — not just the surface spending, but the beliefs underneath — the Way of Wealth Money Beliefs Quiz is a good place to start. It takes about four minutes and it’ll tell you something genuinely useful about what’s going on under the bonnet.
— Joel