The Drought Reflex

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Somewhere under the cracked clay of inland Australia, there’s a frog waiting.

The water holding frog spends most of its life underground. When the rain stops and the claypans dry out, it digs down, sheds several layers of skin into a sort of cocoon around itself, fills its bladder like a canteen, and goes still. Not asleep exactly. Paused. Suspended. It can hold that position through droughts that run for years, doing almost nothing, using almost nothing, waiting on a signal that might not arrive for a very long time.

Then it rains properly, and the frog loses the plot entirely.

It surfaces within hours. A frenzy of consumption and activity It eats everything it can catch. It breeds immediately, in temporary puddles that’ll be dust again in a month, and the tadpoles grow at a frantic pace because there simply isn’t time to be leisurely about it. Everything that didn’t happen for three years happens in about a fortnight.

The ultimate ‘making up for lost time’ rampage.

Nobody watching would call the frog undisciplined. It’s doing exactly the right thing. The feast is brief, the drought is long, and the drought is definitely coming back. A frog that surfaced and decided to pace itself would be a dead frog.

I’ve been thinking about this frog. I think a lot of us are running a similar program on a different scale, and most of us haven’t noticed.

That feeling of being owed something

You’ve probably felt this even without a name for it.

You get to the end of a strict month. Or you make the final payment on the credit card. Or the tax refund lands. Or you land your first proper salary after years of eating rice and pretending you enjoyed it. And something comes off the leash.

The spending that follows is okay because it feels earned. It feels like collecting on a debt someone owed you. There’s a particular quality to it, a sort of momentum, where each purchase makes the next one easier.

Then a week or three later you look at the statement and can’t quite reconstruct the person who made those decisions.

I want to call this the drought reflex. It’s the burst of spending that follows a stretch of going without, and its defining feature is that it’s responding to the restriction that just ended rather than to the money you actually have.

Why restriction makes things more appealing

In 1966, a psychologist named Jack Brehm published a theory he called psychological reactance. His central claim was straightforward: when people believe a freedom has been taken away from them, they experience an unpleasant surge of motivation to get it back, and the thing they’ve lost access to becomes more attractive purely because access was removed.

One of the more famous demonstrations involves biscuits. Researchers led by Stephen Worchel gave people a jar of chocolate chip cookies and asked them to rate how appealing they were. Some jars had ten cookies. Some had two. The scarce cookies were rated as more desirable than the abundant ones, which is interesting enough on its own. But the highest ratings of all went to a third group, whose jar had started out full and then been swapped for a nearly empty one partway through. Same biscuit. The ones that had been taken away won.

That’s the drought reflex in a laboratory. Not scarcity by itself, but scarcity that arrives after abundance, which is really the shape of every restriction you’ve ever imposed on yourself.

There’s a second mechanism working alongside it. Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky have run a series of studies on what they call compensatory consumption. When people are made to feel powerless or diminished, they become more willing to spend on things that signal status, and they’ll pay more for them. Going without money for a stretch does a decent job of making a person feel diminished. The purchase afterwards isn’t only about the object. Part of what’s being bought is the feeling of being someone who can afford things again.

The amount of spending that goes into either purchasing or renting a new identity (or perhaps just upgrading an existing one) is intensely fascinating to me

The lockdown version

The obvious recent example is what happened after 2020.

Millions of people had their ordinary discretionary spending suspended by decree. No restaurants, no travel, no shops, no events. For a lot of households the bank balance actually improved, because there was nowhere to spend. Then the restrictions lifted and a fair chunk of the world went shopping with a kind of urgency that had very little to do with income.

Some of that was pent up demand in the boring economic sense. People rebooked the holidays they’d cancelled etc. But a lot of it was more than that. Retail data across several countries showed spending overshooting where it would have been if the trend had simply continued. If you dam up a flowing river, the water level will build up until you break the blockade and let all the water rush through in an overwhelming torrent. But this was more like someone had broken the blockade, and they additionally sparked a massive tidal wave upstream. People bought things they’d never planned to buy, at prices they’d normally have baulked at, and a decent proportion of them couldn’t fully explain why afterwards.

Nobody’s childhood caused that. The restriction was three months old.

The everyday droughts

Which is why I think the lockdown example is useful mainly as a demonstration, rather than the point. Most droughts are much smaller and much more frequent:

The fortnight before payday, followed by payday.

The strict budget you finally abandon, followed by the fortnight afterwards.

The no spend challenge that ends on the 31^st, and then the floodgates open up.

The debt you finish paying off, followed by the new balance you start building six weeks later.

The long stretch of study or unemployment, followed by the first real income.

…I could go on…

Every one of these has the same architecture. A period of restriction, a clear endpoint, and a burst of spending afterwards that’s calibrated to the restriction rather than to reality. This is also why aggressively punitive budgets tend to fail in a specific way. They don’t fail gradually. They fail in one expensive weekend, and the size of the blowout is roughly proportional to how harsh the budget was.

When the drought doesn’t officially end

Most of these rebounds burn themselves out. A few weeks after payday you’re normal again.

The complication arrives when the restriction was long enough, and early enough, that there was never a clear moment when it lifted.

Vladas Griskevicius and his colleagues have done some of the more interesting work here. Across several studies, they found that people who grew up in lower income households behaved differently under stress than people who grew up with more, even when their adult circumstances were similar. When conditions felt uncertain or threatening, adults from poorer childhoods became more impulsive, more focused on immediate rewards, and more willing to take a smaller amount now over a larger amount later. Adults from wealthier childhoods, given the same stressful conditions, tended to move the other way and become more cautious.

The important part of this finding is what it isn’t. It isn’t a personality defect, and it isn’t a story about poor judgement. Taking the reward now is the correct strategy in an environment where later is genuinely unreliable. It makes sense to over consume when you don’t know if or when you will get another meal. If the money in your house regularly disappeared before it could be saved, if plans got cancelled because something broke, if the answer to most requests was that it wasn’t possible this month, then a preference for the certain thing in front of you is an accurate reading of the world you were in.

The trouble is that the reading gets filed as a general rule rather than a local one. The child learns that money is something you’d better use while it’s here. Thirty years later, in a completely different financial position, the rule is still running, and the drought it’s protecting against ended a long time ago.

So there are two versions of this. The short drought, where the reflex fires and then subsides. And the long one, where the reflex never fully switches off because it was set during a period that felt permanent at the time.

Before the practical bit, an important caveat

I don’t want to slide into telling people who went without that they should keep going without. That’s a miserable argument and I don’t believe it.

Spending money on things that make your life better is one of the main reasons to have money at all. I actually think that figuring out what type of spending will make you happy is one of the most important life skills you can develop. For some people that’s giving a chunk of it away. For some it’s travel, or a good bed, or their kid’s music lessons, or a car that makes them happy every time they open the door. There’s no correct list, and the person who tells you there is usually selling something.

What matters is whether the value is real and whether it lasts, and those are questions you can actually answer with a bit of attention. You might imagine that a new car will feel incredible forever. For some people it does, for years. For others the feeling is gone by Thursday, and what’s left is a payment. Neither person is wrong about themselves, but plenty of us have never checked which one we are, and just keep assuming.

For someone who never owned a decent winter coat, buying a decent winter coat is not exhibiting a psychological problem. It’s sensible. The drought reflex is a different creature. It’s the spending that happens because a restriction ended, on things you hadn’t wanted until roughly the moment you bought them.

What to do about it

Date the drought. When you notice the urge to spend without a clear reason, ask what restriction just lifted. Payday, the end of a budget, a debt cleared, a stressful stretch finishing. Naming the trigger takes a surprising amount of heat out of it, because the impulse starts feeling less like desire and more like a mechanism doing its thing.

Decide the celebration before the restriction ends. If you’re doing a strict month, write down now what you’ll spend at the end of it, and how much. A restriction with a planned release built into it produces a much smaller rebound than one that just stops. This is the reactance finding applied directly: a budget that includes a freedom of its own gives you far less to react against.

Give it a fortnight. The reflex has a shelf life. Most of the urgency fades within about two weeks of the restriction ending. If you can hold the significant purchases outside that window, you’ll make them as you, rather than as a frog that’s just smelled rain.

Buy the specific thing, not the category. During a lean stretch, keep a list of what you actually missed. When it ends, buy from the list. The list is written by a version of you who knew what mattered. The rebound version of you will happily buy things that never appeared on it.

Keep a rough record of what held its value. After a purchase over some amount that means something to you, make a note of how long the good feeling lasted. A month of this will teach you more about your own spending than most personal finance advice ever will, because it’s data about you rather than about people in general. Personal finance is personal. Some things will keep paying out for years. Some will be dead by the weekend. Knowing which is which is genuinely useful. Everyone is different. The best plan is the one that works for you.

Watch the harsh budgets. If you’ve broken the last four budgets you set, the answer probably isn’t a stricter fifth one. A plan you can actually stick to for a year will beat a severe plan that collapses in March, and it won’t build up the pressure that causes the collapse in the first place.

Back to the frog

The water holding frog isn’t making a mistake. Everything about its behaviour is well matched to where it lives. The rain really is rare, the puddle really will vanish, and the next drought really is coming. Under those conditions, surfacing and consuming everything available is not indulgence. It’s competence.

The behaviour only becomes a problem when the conditions change and the reflex doesn’t.

Most of us aren’t living in the claypans anymore. The restriction that shaped the reflex might have been a lockdown, or a hard budget, or a childhood where the answer was usually no. Whatever it was, it’s worth occasionally checking whether it’s still there, or whether you’re feasting for a drought that’s already broken.

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