Looking for a boyfriend without knowing what you want in a man is like trying to order a meal without knowing what you like to eat: whether you live to put bacon on your bacon or you’re a vegan who stifles a sob whenever your mom cracks an egg for your dad’s omelet.

 Standards are our tool for narrowing down what we want, from lunch to love. In love, it’s important to shrink down your potential partner pool, but without setting such high standards (per your own mate value and the current mate “market”) that the only boyfriend or girlfriend you’ll ever have is the imaginary kind. Though we tend to view having more options — “Sky’s the limit!” “The more, the merrier!” — as better than having just two or a handful to choose from, research actually finds that having numerous options is often the stuff human misery is made of.

 Perhaps because the psychology currently driving us evolved in environments where situations rarely offered more than a few choices — “Bison breast or drumstick?” “Eat this bug or starve?” — research on decision-making has found we are unprepared for huge sets of options. We tend to suffer “choice overload”: We get overwhelmed, choose poorly, and regret our choice afterward. However, there’s a caveat. More choice can be better, explains psychologist Benjamin Scheibehenne and his colleagues, when, prior to making a choice, a person has “well-defined preferences.”

 That’s where standards come in. Our standards for what we want in another person come in large part out of our values, though personality and genetics also play a role. Values are the principles we care most about: the standards we use to guide our behavior. Though most of us probably think of ourselves as good people with good values, the truth is, if asked to quickly name our values, we’d struggle to do it. Being unable to immediately call up our guiding principles means when we need to act quickly, we’re often clueless about what we should do, and we’re prone to act in ways we end up regretting.

Spelling out your top eight or 10 values will give you a behavioral map: guiding principles for how you’ll act and, ultimately, who you are. To write your list, you might look up “lists of values” online. Here are a few of mine (not in any order): 1. Courage. 2. Wisdom. 3. Kindness. 4. Integrity. ... 10. Seizing life (instead of blinking like a cow while it rushes by).

The person you want to be shapes the sort of person you should be with. For example, per my list of values, integrity is vitally important to me. So, when I came up with my standards for romantic partners — my “must-haves” for any man in my life — integrity was baked in: “Tall, evolved man of character who thinks for a living and cares about making a difference in the world.”

Likewise spelling out your standards for a romantic partner and vowing to stick to them should help you extract yourself when you’re magnetized by a Mr. Tall, Dark, and Manipulative: some hunky charismatic creep whose hotitude acts as a sort of sexual eclipse, blocking out what a terrible person he is. Assuming you include integrity in some form on your list, turning to your “must-haves” on a date forces you to look for evidence of good character, and when that’s missing, you’ll nix the guy and move on.

 Of course, being clear on your values and narrowing down what you want in a man won’t always be enough. There are some clever sociopaths out there who are pros at hiding who they really are. Coming up with standards for character might not allow you to identify all dignity-crushing exploiters immediately. 

However, you should be able to do it much faster than with a more “open-minded,” hope-driven approach: “Sorry, but I really have to draw the line at dating a man with a tail!”

At debt’s door

We humans are ever-failing self-disciplinarians, two-legged weasels talking ourselves into things we know we shouldn’t do. For example, there’s that saying, “Everything happens for a reason.” No, the fact that those $800 shoes are now $465 does not count as a reason.

Unfortunately, the more you behave badly, the more disposed you are to keep behaving badly — that is, to develop a habit of behaving badly. Habits are born on a microscopic level, through what might be called a conspiracy of brain cells. Typically, any action you take requires the triggering of thousands of these tiny cells, called neurons. They fire off electric signals to other neurons, ultimately messaging your body to get it to act.

Because even lifting your finger to pick your nose requires a massive army of neurons, the brain is an energy hog, guzzling more energy than any other organ. Evolution, on the other hand, is big on thrift, so it’s implemented energy efficiency measures that sometimes lead you to behave in counterproductive ways.

Whenever you repeat a behavior, retriggering the same army of brain cells, chemical changes occur that effectively wire these cellular troops together into a sort of collective action pack. This puts you on automatic, so, for example, on day two in the Airbnb, you don’t have to search for the light switch or figure out how the dimmer works; you just unthinkingly hit the switch and crank the dimmer. The more you repeat a behavior, the more automatic it becomes. You basically go into robozombie habit mode — mental autopilot — with nary a consult with your Department of Reasoning, which, in fact, gets shut out entirely from the process.

Obviously, there are good autobehaviors and bad autobehaviors, but behavior you robotically repeat despite adverse consequences (such as becoming a tent-dweller with fabulous shoes) is “compulsive.” Neuropsychiatry researcher Judy Luigjes and her colleagues define compulsivity as repeatedly feeling compelled to perform an act (and being unable to stop oneself) while at the same time “being aware” that the act conflicts with one’s “overall goals.”

Compulsive shopping is often motivated by a longing to escape uncomfortable emotions, for example, anxiety or stress. It has similarities with addiction disorders, observes behavioral economist Shahram Heshmat, such as a “buyer’s high,” a rush of excitement when purchasing an item. However, the relief from emotional discomfort is quickly replaced by guilt and remorse for the irresponsible spending, which can fuel a “vicious cycle”: the need for “another ‘fix,’ purchasing something else.”

To break the cycle, you need to “protect long-term goals from short-term consumption decisions,” Heshmat explains. This starts with recognizing your triggers: uncomfortable “negative” emotions like feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or anxious, which make you more likely to fling the future out the window to get that quick-fix buyer’s high.

Remind yourself regularly that uncomfortable feelings will not kill you. They’re also temporary. Make a pact with yourself that when you feel the urge to shop, you’ll instead acknowledge the underlying feelings you’re escaping, tell yourself you can handle a bit of feel-bad, and then do what you can to feel better, like calling up a friend. In case you get their voicemail, come up with other healthy diversions like taking a walk or streaming a trashy action flick.

Of course, what you can’t see or click on, you can’t buy. Stay off shopping websites, and wipe them from your computer by clearing your cache, cookies and history. You might also prepare to padlock your phone in a box and set a timer for a day, or at least several hours. 

To arm yourself with positive motivations to counter negative feelings, prepare to reset your emotional clock from the uncomfortable “now” to the exciting possible future. Stock up mental pictures of the benefits of behaving in financially responsible ways, like a snapshot of you and your friends enjoying drinks at a beautiful condo you buy with your savings.

 In time, as you stop responding to bad feelings by click-shopping your way to bankruptcy, the neural tentacles of your habit will weaken, as will the clutches of your compulsion. 

You might also work up a little compassion for yourself for having it in the first place. Technology has made our lives vastly easier, but it’s also given us countless new ways to mess them up.