JOHN NAISH

Visiting a local council tip, I met a busy crew of charity volunteers who monitor people throwing out their household goods, and who retrieve anything decent and re-sell it. The hoard of rescued items they showed me was astonishing. It included immaculate flat-pack furniture that had never been assembled, piles of new kitchen gadgets and sports gear, and even unridden bicycles.

My tip is hardly unusual. A new study shows we throw away more new stuff than ever. A million tonnes of electrical and electronic gadgets alone get dumped every year in Britain, says a report by a Yorkshire-based recycling consultancy. All this stuff takes time and money to earn. Then we just bung it. Why?

Another new study offers an important clue: we're more prone to spend money on stuff when we're anxious or unhappy, claim American researchers in the journal Psychological Science. When we feel sad, we feel more needy, value the things we own less and are more likely to spree, the study reports. This adds to a growing body of research that shows how our buying behaviour is driven largely by primitive motivations in our brains; ancient acquisitive instincts prodded into a frenzy by modern culture.

Our hunter-gatherer brains are almost wired to buy. Scans performed at Emory University, Atlanta, show how the brain's "reward chemical", dopamine, is released as shoppers see a product and ponder buying it. But dopamine is all about the hunt, not the trophy. Anticipation, rather than buying, squirts it around our skulls. And the effect is only fleeting: once you've sealed the deal, the chemical high flattens in minutes, often leaving a sense of regret that some shop-owners call "buyer's remorse".

Anxiety plays a role, too. A study of students in the journal Behavioural Research Therapy reveals that anxious people are more likely to gather possessions. Getting gripped by the urge to stockpile stuff in times of threat would have helped our ancestors' survival chances. This old instinct helps to explain how advertising campaigns can prey on our deepest insecurities: you're not good enough, or popular enough, and other people are happier because they've got stuff you haven't.

But when we buy things we don't need, it proves disappointing. And in our throwaway society, we're then encouraged to bung them out, which is depressing. So we head back to the shops for more of that "retail therapy". It's a vicious, glum and planet-polluting cycle.

There's another problem, too: our primitive brains never evolved an "enough" button. In times of scarcity and famine, we never needed one. Now, despite the world of abundance surrounding us, an idea still haunts our heads that we can never have enough.

How can we break free? Two things that can help are often sidelined by our modern consumer experience: a sense of gratitude and a sense of value. We are encouraged to think that any consumer item we've just bought or already own is "so last year" and should be replaced by something newer and shinier, which would make our lives somehow better.

We need to change the way we own and value our things. We need to declare that we generally have "enough stuff". Instead of having a throwaway attitude to our possessions, we need to develop sustainable, rewarding relationships with them - by buying only items that are made to last for ages, which meet a real need and which we can grow to treasure. Tests by psychologists in Texas have suggested that people who show appreciation and gratitude tend to be significantly happier with their lot, so they need fewer retail kicks.

Most of all, we need to stop to consider what is "enough" for us in our lives, instead of exhausting ourselves by chasing after ever more wasteful, unrewarding things. Our throwaway habits don't just cause global warming, they cause personal overheating, too - more stress, more exhaustion, more burnout.

Despite our motivation to gather and hoard, this idea of sufficiency is an ancient and wise one. From the beginning of civilisation until the advent of consumerism, we created cultures that mitigated against our instinct for over-consumption. Aristotle, for example, invented the idea of the "golden mean", which pointed out how the path of happiness lay in the middle ground between having too little and too much. We have forgotten such lessons. But today, saying "enough" is our one hope of escape from the wrecking cycle.

  • John Naish is the author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99).
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