Health Potion Hoarding Syndrome

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly coming to the realization that I suffer badly from what I call health potion hoarding syndrome (I don’t know if there’s an actual term for this condition). It manifests in a few distinct scenarios:

1. Any time I get something that’s rare or precious in any way, I want to “save that for a special occasion”. And then I never end up using it (and sometimes it goes bad!), because I keep waiting for the right time, and it never feels like the right time enough. I might need this for something more special later!
2. I feel a lot of anxiety around using up any consumables, even regular run of the mill ones, unless I’m absolutely sure I have enough of a supply left to last until I can procure more. This is especially true of anything I actually depend on. Similarly, I sometimes get scared to start using something new if I won’t be able to get more of it later, because then I’ll acclimate to having it and be disappointed when I can’t use it anymore.
3. As with health potions, I also sometimes find that I’ve saved so many things for so long that I now have way more of them than I actually need. Sometimes I’ll forget that I bought some and buy some more. It’s a lot to keep track of.

We had been meaning to phase out paper towels for a while and switch to cloth napkins and reusable microfiber cleaning cloths. When paper towels became a thing to hoard during covid lockdown, we decided to finally make this switch, and the thing that unlocked it for me was to buy a LOT of reusables such that I never felt like they were in short supply. If I did, I wouldn’t want to risk using them up. So we bought something like three or four times as many as we actually needed, and now I feel no qualms about tossing one in the laundry and grabbing another, as much as I need.

I’ve been making attempts to blast through my “I want to save this for a special occasion” feelings and just enjoy special things. It hasn’t been entirely successful.

Supply chain disruptions and shortages don’t help with this. I don’t have a lot of great solutions to this other than being cognizant about how much of things I have left on hand and refilling them before I need them, but I still feel like this is an important thing to acknowledge and discuss. Just having a name for it helps.

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