It starts in mid-October. Green and red encroach upon Halloween’s black and orange. Thus announcing the nearly two and a half month frenzy that is the holiday shopping season.
And along with the colors, sounds, and smells we associate with this time of year comes a new layer of information overload as marketers strive to take advantage of our holiday consumer mindset. With a heightened readiness to buy between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we face marketers’ best efforts to grab our attention and get us to purchase.
Knowing what information overload is, and how it affects you can be especially important during the holidays when we are faced with consumer decisions that can hit our budget hard. Left unchecked we can become overly anxious about so many choices which can lead to poor decision making, including overspending.
1. What is information overload? Put simply information overload occurs when your brain is confronted with more information than it can process. Our brains, evolving over millions of years, have not been able to keep pace with our recent information producing technology. Working memory, which is essential for sifting through incoming information, organizing, planning, and making decisions, can process about seven bits of information. When was the last time you had the luxury of considering only 7 bits of information at any one time—the grocery store, a Google search, your daily snail mail?.
2. How can information overload effect you? Too much information can negatively impact on decision making and create stress. Angelika Dimok, who studies decision making, has identified how too much information overwhelms the brain’s ability to make good decisions. In her research she found that as the amount of information individuals have to consider increases, their anxiety rises, and “smart” decision making takes a nose dive as “… stupid mistakes and bad choices increase.” Other researchers have found that in the face of information overload individuals often either impulsively make a decision or remain indecisive. Analysis paralysis, which shuts down decision making, can happen when there are too many choices, and you get overwhelmed trying to think, or overthink, about the implications of each choice. Biologically information overload, such as trying to multitask and focus on too much at once, has been shown to increase the stress hormone, cortisol.
3. How to manage information overload and reduce stress during the holidays:
Create on a good plan to counter the consumer mindset –of always being ready to buy.
Remember buying is the final goal in a set of steps. If you can identify the steps and remain mindful of just what step you are in you can be more effective in warding off the effects of marketers’ overload of information.
- Decide for whom and what you want to buy. This is the old fashioned list with your gift recipients what you want to give. Don’t go beyond four or five items per person or you may create your own choice overload to deal with. Lists are also a great way to organize information, and outsource it to a place where your brain does not have to use valuable attention resources to keep everything in mind.
- Make a budget. You can work with an overall number in mind or an amount per gift. Regardless of your approach, budgets add another layer of organization that can help with putting order on the influx of information when you shop. Remember with information overload you are at risk for making decisions that pull you out of your budget, and you pay the price–the stress of overspending and the debt you may owe.
- Do your research. This is the real danger zone for information (or choice) overload. While you can pretty much avoid outside information in the first two steps, this step will call for researching your choices, virtually, via catalog, or in brick and mortar stores. Be especially careful about the allure of pop-ups or smart phone texts and apps, as well as “short lived” deals. Counting to 5 or taking a couple of deep breaths to break the automatic urge to respond can help you consider if you want to pursue the offer. So keep your eye on the ball. Research is not buying. It’s information gathering.
- Organize your research: One helpful step is to gather information and then break it down into manageable chunks. For instance if you are looking for a purse to give your sister-in-law and have found sixteen possibilities, randomly break them into groups of four. Keep one item from each group, and create a fifth group from the four winners. Choose your actual purchase from the final four. With this type of choice architecture you reduce your options in the final purchasing step. Gathering images and other information can help you chunk your choices down into manageable parts.
- Cultivate some tools to take your time. For instance, take a break from the decision process by doing something else. Research has shown that a lot is happening at the unconscious level when it comes to making decisions. Giving yourself time to let information incubate, allows your brain to process it, without the conscious effort it takes to chose what to pay attention to and what to disregard. We have all had the experience of being in the shower or sitting at a stop light and suddenly coming up with a decision or a solution to something.
- Avoid perfectionism. If you tend to get bogged down in the pursuit of the perfect gift, watch out. Perfectionism drives indecisiveness and tendencies to keep gathering more and more information with the belief that this will keep you from making a mistake. Replace the idea of the perfect gift with the thoughtful or appreciated gift. There really is truth to the old saying “it is the thought that counts.” You are more likely to make a poor choice if you keep heaping up the data and overloading your working memory.
Below are more sources regarding purchasing and information overload.
The Paradox of Choice, Berry Schwarz, examines the price we pay in the face of too many choices.
A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy, Sarah Lazarovic, tracks how the author gave up unnecessary Internet buying for a year. Great illustrations.