If paying for goods causes pain in the brain, credit cards are aspirin. Unfortunately, cards also create bigger headaches later on.

When you pay in cash, you see your wallet getting thinner. But when you use a credit card, the spending is abstract and that makes you trigger happy.

In one experiment at MIT, subjects were asked to bid on tickets to a sold-out Bolton Celtics game. Half were told to pay with cash, the other half could use credit cards. Shockingly, they found that bids were twice as high among the group that thought they would use credit cards.

Using cash is the number one antidote to overspending, according to experts. If you do pay with a credit card, beware of the trap I’ve already got this debt, so it won’t matter if I pile on more. Prelec compares it to the diet blowing excuse I ate one piece, so I may as well eat the whole cake.