The Pain of Paying: How High Prices Affect Our Emotions
Behavioral economics has long documented the “pain of paying.” Paying is not just a bookkeeping operation; it activates brain circuits linked to distress and reduces the pleasure associated with consumption. While consuming brings joy, paying brings pain, and both experiences intertwine in every purchasing decision.
In contexts of high prices or economic uncertainty, this pain intensifies. It’s not just about how much we pay but the feeling that each purchase confirms a loss of economic capability. Public health research warns that after years of high inflation, consumers react more sensitively to even moderate price increases, associating prices with stress and loss of control.
Moreover, our minds anchor to an internal price table. We remember how much things cost a few years ago, and any deviation is interpreted as a loss, even if income has improved. This is where the emotional burden of consumption begins: daily activities like grocery shopping, paying utilities, or refueling become evidence that “everything costs more.”
Emotional Inflation Doesn’t Lower with the IPC
People pay more attention to the prices of goods they buy frequently – food, energy, housing – and tend to remember price increases more than decreases. This is the frequency bias: our perception leans towards prices we see more often. This explains why, despite moderating inflation, the feeling of high prices persists.
The Bank of Spain notes that inflation doesn’t affect everyone equally: households with lower incomes allocate a larger proportion of their income to basic goods, perceiving price increases more intensely. At the European level, a report concludes that the cost of living disproportionately affects young people, families with high rent, and households facing increasing essential expenses.
All this configures an emotional inflation that persists even when actual inflation decreases, feeding off the memory of accumulated price increases and reinforcing each time we interact with sensitive prices (food, energy, housing).
Cost of Living Fatigue: When Monitoring Prices Becomes Exhausting
Besides the immediate tension of paying more, there’s a less visible burden: cost of living fatigue, associated with constant expense vigilance, repeated price comparisons, and the feeling of constantly sacrificing to make ends meet.
This fatigue manifests in three increasingly common behaviors:
- Price monitoring: Checking deals, following price comparison apps, etc., activities that consume time and mental energy.
- Consumption-induced guilt: Spending on leisure or small pleasures generates moral tension, even when the economic situation is reasonably stable.
- Continuous sense of loss: Feeling “life was better before with the same,” despite partial recovery data in family disposable income.
Parallel to this, public health research links economic tensions to higher levels of anxiety, insomnia, and depressive symptoms. It seems that the stress related to inflation has accumulative negative effects on well-being. Not only has “making ends meet” become more difficult; managing inflation has become an additional emotional burden.
Can We Reduce the Emotional Burden of Consumption?
Prices don’t depend on individual decisions, but we can improve how we psychologically manage them. Behavioral economics suggests several useful strategies:
- Set personal price anchors: Decide in advance what we consider reasonable to pay for certain goods (e.g., a liter of oil or dining out), reducing the sense of injustice in each purchase and avoiding repeated frustrations.
- Plan instead of improvising: Setting monthly budgets and limiting certain categories of spending reduces the “pain of paying” and turns spending from an unexpected, unpleasant surprise into something expected.
- Delay non-essential purchase decisions: Implementing a “24-hour waiting rule” for impulsive acquisitions helps deactivate decisions made under stress or fatigue.
Ultimately, while inflation is measured in percentages, its emotional impact manifests in worry, fatigue, and daily sacrifices. Understanding that prices affect both our wallets and well-being is crucial for designing economic policies sensitive to the real experience of households. And for us, as consumers, to take better care of ourselves amidst uncertainty.
