Shopaholic confesses shopping addiction cost her $11k in three months

She once spent over $11,000 in just three months, but it took cyber security advisor Naomi Hodges years to truly recognise and manage her compulsive shopping disorder.

Affecting an average of five per cent of the population, compulsive shopping behaviours can run people into thousands of dollars of debt and ruin their relationships – very real consequences Naomi barely escaped.

Admitting she liked shopping as a teenager, Naomi's compulsive behaviour didn't truly set in until after she graduated college.

"I'm a perfectionist, so during my first years of work I was pushing myself to the limit," she told 9Honey.

"I was living in a state of consistently low self-esteem - so I shopped."

It didn't matter whether her day was good or bad, Naomi constantly felt the need to "spoil herself" with a new purchase after every success or failure.

While compulsive shopping is often initially triggered by the desire to mask insecurity and low self-esteem, it can quickly drive people to dark places.

On one occasion Naomi even followed a woman for several blocks, simply because she liked the look of the woman's shoes and wanted to get a better look at the brand so she could purchase them herself.

That moment was the turning point where Naomi realised her habit had gotten out of hand. But compulsive shopping is rarely recognised for the addiction it is, and Naomi found while her family and friends knew she loved to shop, they didn't realise how deep her compulsion went.

"Neither my friends nor my boyfriend looked at it as an addiction or something to be particularly worried about," she said.

"They didn’t understand that it was chronic. I don’t blame them, because I was the person who made them look at myself like that."

Naomi confesses she would often re-wear the same outfits around her family so they wouldn't realise just how much she was buying, and even when her mum suspected something was "off”, she denied it.

It wasn't until Naomi started to recognise her shopping for what it really was – an addiction – that she decided to make some drastic changes.

"I didn’t want to be addicted to anything, including shopping," she said.

"The constant need to search for the deals and think about the clothes I would like to purchase made me feel dependent and weak."

So she made a decision: for the next year she wouldn't buy anything. No clothes, no bags, no shoes or makeup. Naomi was quitting her shopping habit and going cold turkey in what she called her "detoxification."

"During the year of detoxification, I didn’t go to any malls," she said.

"I avoided areas where I used to go shopping. I turned on Surfshark’s CleanWeb [ad blocker] feature on every device I owned because I couldn’t stand the target ads which tempted me to buy things I had once checked online."

Towards the end of her 'detoxification' she even decided to let go of the clothes she had accumulated in the years of her over-shopping, choosing to let go of the purchases she once held so dear.

"I didn’t want to be emotionally attached to the clothes that I bought during the worst period of my life," she explained.

Naomi gathered her girlfriends and sold all the clothes she didn't use, many with the price tags still attached, and donated the money to a local charity that helps people overcome addiction.

She's just finished her year without shopping and Naomi says is all the better for it, saying she's only bought a few essentials since her shopping ban ended.

But with fast fashion and online shopping reinventing the way we shop, Naomi worries that we're slowly losing our grasp on what "healthy shopping" habits really are.

"Nowadays it seems completely normal for young girls to call themselves shopaholics," she explained.

It's a label Naomi will never use again, now committed to a life without compulsive shopping.