How to Stop Impulse Spending in 2026

Impulse spending thrives on speed. Melissa and Dave explain why implementing the 24-hour rule can completely change your spending habits.

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Your brain needs time. It needs time to process the long-term repercussions of your actions.  And so much of consumerism today has to happen in the moment, right?

The retail industry calls it, “frictionless spending” because they want you to, you know, click the button and it arrives at your house tomorrow. Uh, and so you do need to tell yourself, you know what? I’m a conscious spender. I am going to institute a 24-hour waiting period before I purchase anything unplanned over, say $X. $50, $100, whatever it is.

And this is something that you adopt as a value and an identity, and hopefully that will guide you a little bit further than just saying, I’m not going to impulse spend in 2026 cause that rule is it’s difficult to follow.

Okay. I love it. I wanna say to all of our listeners this advice to inject some time between the stimulation and the response is old fashioned, but it works. And there’s recent research in the states that says it works even better than we thought it did.

That when people do that to slow down their spending, they often don’t go back and do their spending, or they do it in much more intentional way. It is a great move to do that, and I’d love Melissa’s thing saying, don’t just say I’m not gonna impulse spend. That’s not good enough if you promise the 24 hour waiting period, by the way, especially for online purchases, it’s been proven to be even more impactful there.

That alone can make a huge difference in your savings efforts.

I think that. Giving yourself some sort of space, and it doesn’t have to be a walk, you know, we’re not necessarily, meaning, I’m not necessarily saying that you’re gonna walk around the mall. It could just be texting a friend. It just needs time, even if it’s not 24 hours, some time is better than nothing.

So I might text a friend. I have a WhatsApp group that I text whenever I think I’m thinking of buying something. And we laugh about it, we joke about it, it gives me a little bit of time. Or what I’ve taught my kids is take a photo of it. It will relieve the itch of wanting something, and it will trick your brain.

You might still get that burst of dopamine because, ooh, we’re gonna take a picture of this. We’re gonna add it to our wishlist. My phone, Dave, is just a camera roll of stuff my kids have seen that they want to buy.

And my Instagram, uh, folder is filled with screen grabs and things that I saved because I thought, oh, that, that looks good. That would be helpful to me, and I might save it. And then when I go back to it, I realize that I didn’t need any of that.