Buy, buy, buy! Excessive hoarding of things may be caused by "dementia"? Netizen: My hands are shaking after reading this

Expert of this article: Liang Shan, PhD, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Today, the annual Double 11 "Shopping Festival" is here again.

Frequent shopping and stockpiling have become the shopping norm for many people.

After being criticized by family and friends, many people feel guilty, but they can't control themselves from adding items to their shopping cart.

There is a saying on the Internet: If you like to hoard things all the time, it may be a sign of dementia.

Is it true or false? Let’s find out today.

Why do many people like to hoard things?

From the perspective of animal evolution, collecting supplies has evolutionary advantages. Animals and humans with abundant supplies are more competitive and more likely to survive and leave offspring.

Over time, traces of this evolutionary legacy have been preserved.

Generally speaking, people who are prepared for danger in times of peace will tend to exhibit some degree of hoarding behavior.

Hoarding Disorder (also known as hoarding disorder) is a common psychological and behavioral abnormality in modern society. It belongs to the category of mental illness and has an incidence rate between 2% and 6%.

The hoarding behavior of ordinary people does not affect their daily lives, but people with hoarding disorder will hoard large amounts of items at home and are unable to discard them, even if these items are worthless or even garbage in the eyes of ordinary people, and even if the accumulation of these items seriously affects their lives and may even pose a threat to their lives (such as fire, mold, rodent and insect pests, etc.).

The study found that the brain activity patterns of hoarders were significantly different from those of healthy people and patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When asked to throw away their useless items, the anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex of hoarders surged. These two brain regions play an important role in determining the importance and relevance of items. Obviously, hoarders give too much importance and relevance to items that most people consider to be garbage.

What are the symptoms of hoarding disorder?

Presumably, some of you have seen extreme hoarding phenomena on TV or the Internet. The hoarded items fill up almost all available space, including desks, sinks, beds, cabinets, ovens, corridors, and stairs, etc., piled all the way to the ceiling. Even the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom cannot be used, and there is only one narrow passage in the house for barely passing through.

This situation is called hoarding disorder, which is a pathological condition.

Common symptoms of hoarding disorder include:

Keeping many things of no use or value;

Unwilling to throw anything away (may move things around but not throw them away);

emotional attachment to useless things;

procrastination;

Inability to make decisions to discard items;

Lack of ability to organize items;

Impulsive, excessive purchases of items that are not needed or that do not have the space to store;

Feeling guilty about the pile of stuff;

Lack of social interaction;

Because excessive accumulation of items creates unsafe and unsanitary living conditions;

While the average person may have one or two of the above characteristics, people with hoarding disorder will exhibit most of the above behaviors and feel very anxious or distressed at the thought of discarding any of the hoarded items.

What are the triggers of hoarding disorder?

The main causes of hoarding disorder include:

Black-and-white thinking: demanding perfection from oneself, not making any mistakes, fearing throwing things away by mistake, unable to make the decision to discard personal belongings;

Impulsive behavior patterns: Failure to consider possible consequences and impacts when engaging in behavior, such as impulse shopping;

Wrong ways to cope with stress: Acquiring things (hoarding) to relieve negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, loneliness and powerlessness;

Having suffered from material deprivation in childhood, they overcompensate when they become adults and gain a sense of security through hoarding to alleviate their fear of the unknown future.

Excessive emotional attachment to objects: Using shopping or hoarding to satisfy emotional needs.

Excessive hoarding could be a sign of dementia?

Hoarding disorder is not an isolated mental illness. Patients often have behaviors and symptoms such as anxiety, depression, impulsivity and compulsion.

Some people with hoarding disorder also suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, have difficulty paying attention to things they are not interested in, and often exhibit impulsive behaviors such as impulse buying.

In addition to psychological problems, since hoarding seriously affects normal life and diet, most hoarding patients often have metabolic abnormalities such as obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension and diabetes. They are also at a significantly higher risk of infection by pathogens such as mold and bacteria, as well as falls and fractures.

There is also a saying on the Internet: "Excessive hoarding may be a sign of dementia." Is it true or false?

Strictly speaking, this statement is not wrong, but it can be misleading.

Although excessive hoarding may also occur in people with dementia, it is more common in people with hoarding disorder or those with a tendency to hoarding. The reasons why the two exhibit similar behaviors are completely different.

People with dementia have decreased cognitive abilities, and their ability to remember and organize their belongings is impaired. Some patients' homes are messy simply because they have forgotten or cannot remember how to organize.

Hoarders have normal cognitive abilities, but they simply delay the task of organizing their belongings indefinitely, so they are unable to discard useless items, and even feel anxious or painful at the thought of discarding things.

Hoarding and other common behaviors or habits

Hoarding and Collecting

Some people like to collect specific items, such as matchboxes, wine, stamps, coins from various countries, etc.

The main difference between collecting and hoarding is that collectors will classify their collections and place them carefully in specific places instead of piling them up in a disorderly manner in places such as stairs or corridors.

Hoarding and Sloppiness

The house is rather messy, with items placed randomly, but it does not affect daily living. This is often just due to laziness, procrastination or not knowing how to organize things, and has not reached the level of hoarding.

However, if they encounter traumatic life events in the future, this group of people are at a higher risk of developing hoarding disorder than ordinary people.

Of course, there are also studies that have found that people who place things in a mess have better creativity, which does not fall into the category of hoarding disorder.

Hoarding and thriftiness

In fact, being frugal does not mean not throwing things away, and throwing away useless things does not mean waste. On the contrary, piling up a lot of useless things at home is a waste of space.

The elderly in the family love to hoard things, such as empty bottles, boxes, bags, etc. If the elderly do not have brain trauma or diseases such as dementia, they may suffer from hoarding disorder.

How to alleviate excessive hoarding behavior?

For people with hoarding tendencies or mild hoarding disorder, they can make conscious adjustments and improvements through communication with family and friends, increasing social activities, establishing good concepts of thrift and waste, learning better organizing skills, and cultivating healthier eating and living habits.

For people with severe hoarding disorder, if the above methods are ineffective, professional psychotherapy or even drug treatment should be considered.

In summary

Ordinary people occasionally exhibit some degree of hoarding behavior

It's not a mental illness

When you can't throw away useless items

Hoarding of goods

Seriously affects life, social life and work

Maybe you have hoarding disorder.

Excessive thrifting, waste and impulse buying

is associated with hoarding disorder

If it affects your daily life excessively, you need to be vigilant

The pictures in this article with the "Science Popularization China" watermark are all from the copyright gallery. The pictures are not authorized for reprinting.