Why Am I So Obsessed with Giving People Gifts?

In the fall of 2018, I spent the majority of December cooped up inside my apartment, hand-painting Bitmojis of my coworkers onto wine glasses. I baked them in the oven to ensure they would be dishwasher safe and wrapped them in glossy gold paper. A few days before people left for vacation, I snuck into the office around 6 am, and like an elf, I placed the gifts on their desks and waited.

This may sound extreme to people who aren’t into the holidays, but for me, it’s not even about the time of year. I love giving people presents. I love scrolling online with someone else in mind, finding the perfect thing, and wrapping it for them to open. I love anticipating their reaction upon tearing back the paper: the surprise, the dilated pupils, the pure joy as they stare adoringly into my eyes.

I love this feeling so much that I’m going broke. Ever since I was nine, gift giving has been putting me in debt.

In elementary school, I spent my entire allowance on a fancy quill pen for my dad. In middle school, I used my bat mitzvah savings to buy Christmas gifts for my sister and mom. In high school, when I didn’t have cash, I put hours into crafting a scrapbook for my crush, a girl on the Varsity water polo team who was graduating that summer.

Two decades later, the pattern continues — and every year, the consequences get worse. It’s 2022. The U.S. could be going into a recession. Luckily, I have a steady job, but my savings account is near empty. I want to buy property one day. I want to travel. I want to have the option to retire. More importantly, I want to be able to invest my money not into small tokens of affection, but into organizations, artists, and causes that make the world a more equitable and generous place to live in.

I know I need to break this habit, but I fear if I don’t give elaborate gifts to the people closest to me — the ones who have gotten me through this year — then they won’t know that I care about them. Or worse, they won’t care about me.

I reached out to a few very smart professionals for advice. Here’s what I learned:

1) The Neuroscientist

There’s nothing that puts things into perspective like talking to a scientist about your brain.

Jud Brewer, an associate professor of psychiatry at Brown University’s School of Medicine and the director of research and innovation at its Mindfulness Center, studies habit change and addiction. He told me that if I want to overcome an unhealthy behavior, the first thing I need to do is map out my habit loop. It’s a three-step process.

The trigger: What thoughts or feelings are driving my behavior?

The behavior: What action do I take when I experience that trigger?

The result: What is the feeling I get after completing that action?

“The problem is, we can convince ourselves of almost anything,” Brewer said. “I see this all the time with smoking and stress eating in patients. People think a behavior feels good, but when I ask them to pay attention and remain present while they are acting out that behavior, they notice that it actually doesn’t.”

Once you recognize a bad habit is emotionally and physically draining, you need to replace it with something uplifting. Brewer calls this the bigger, better offer. “If you recognize that a behavior is rewarding, you will do it again,” he said, “and if you recognize that it’s not, you won’t.”

He told me to start with my own curiosity. “The next time you want to buy a gift for someone, especially one you can’t afford, get curious about why,” he said. “Curiosity ultimately opens people up and feels better than the anxiety we feel after indulging in a habit we’re trying to break.”

It made sense. But I wasn’t ready to face my habit loop alone, so as one does, I turned to my therapist.

2) The Therapist

“I hate to sound cliché,” my therapist said. “But so much of this stuff goes back to childhood, even if rationally and reasonably we know better.”

Carly Ruttner, aka my therapist, is a licensed social worker with a masters from Simmons College. She has a private practice where she focuses on treating people who experience depression and anxiety, like me. I’ve been confiding in her for a little over two years.

“I’m being curious,” I told her, “but I can’t identify a trigger. The only emotion I feel when I’m shopping for gifts is excitement.” Of course, when that feeling passes, that same energy knots itself into a ball, one that slowly blooms and spreads through the rest of my body when I realize, once again, I’m in debt.

My therapist’s response? “A trigger doesn’t have to be the presence of something. It can be the absence of something: self-consciousness, lack of connection, feeling low. A trigger can be a need or a void that you feel a desire to fill. I would work backwards and ask: What is the result you’re looking for?”

As a kid, when my parents or siblings opened a gift, I would anticipate seeing the light in their eyes, and what I perceived as the expansion of their hearts as they smiled wide, gaped, and hugged me. Their expressions conveyed vulnerability and emotion that I could never really give, or get, through words alone. Looking back, I understand that, in those moments, I felt overwhelmed with love and validation.

“How you relate to other people is not set in stone,” my therapist said. “Just because you have a history of equating love and worth with things and giving, it doesn’t mean it’s a pattern that’s doomed to repeat. You have the autonomy and agency to decide what feels okay to you.”

To start, she suggested I stop looking outward for validation. She also noted that love, care, and appreciation can manifest in all kinds of ways: a phone call from an old friend, a colleague who advocates for my work, a glass of wine with my partner over dinner.

“Once you recognize that your life is already filled with these things, that trigger, or that need for validation and love that you feel when you give a gift may fade.”

3) The Happiness Researchers

That all sounded right, but did I need to stop giving gifts entirely? After all, as Aristotle, once said, “Moderation in all things.”

Balance equals happiness, doesn’t it?

I talked to Elizabeth Dunn and Chris Courtney to find out. They have pretty cool jobs: researching what makes people happy. Some of their studies surrounding the art of giving find that, even if you’re struggling to meet your own basic needs, you’re more likely to derive happiness from spending your money on someone else.

Surely, they would advise me that it’s okay to keep giving gifts, at least sometimes. Right?

“We haven’t found a limit to the benefits of giving in general,” Courtney said, “but when that giving costs money, it might be a different story. The limit depends on the individual and is very likely context dependent. When it leads to spending more than you can afford and running up revolving credit card debt, that’s probably where regret starts to creep in and clouds the positive effects.”

Dunn added that it’s not really about how much you give. It’s about who you give to, and how you do it. She told me the gifts worth investing in are those that help us build stronger connections with the people we care about. “That’s when people feel happier,” she said, “when they’re making a real connection and seeing the impact their gift has on someone else.”

4) The Bestselling Author

Have you ever heard of love languages? When I think about connecting with others in a deeply personal way, that’s the term that first comes to mind. The love language was coined by Gary Chapman, who has spent his entire career studying people and their relationships. The idea is that everyone gives and receives love in different ways. If we want to show people that we care about them, we need to understand what their love language is, or what behaviors they interpret as expressions of appreciation.

Chapman told me that this same idea applies to giving gifts: If we want a gift to have a meaningful impact on the receiver, we need to understand how that person is interpreting our gesture.

That’s where love languages come in. Chapman has identified five:

1. Words of affirmation
2. Quality time
3. Acts of service
4. Physical touch
5. Receiving gifts

Most people prefer one over the others.

“If you dig into the concept that what makes one person feel loved does not make another person feel loved, you will discover that giving gifts doesn’t sleep as deeply with everyone,” Chapman said. “If you realize six of the 10 people in your circle prefer words of affirmation and would appreciate a thoughtful card over a material item, you won’t feel as much of a need to spend money on a fancy present.”

Following our conversation, a light bulb went off. Just like, as my therapist said, I may not need to spend money to gain the love of people I care about, after talking to Chapman I realized that other people may not feel loved when they receive a gift from me.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be giving less, but I will be giving differently. The best gifts will be the ones that help me build those genuine connections: the willingness to have more vulnerable conversations, the courage to ask others what makes them feel appreciated and seen, the foresight to put my money in places where it will have an impact, and the patience to be kind to myself as I get more comfortable with self- validation.

“Our most fundamental emotional need on the human level is to feel loved by the people in our lives,” Chapman said. “If we can figure out how to handle that together, life will be a lot easier to live.”