Why is it so difficult to Stop Gambling? Why do I have such a difficult time with gambling. Every thing in my life is good. I have 3 great kids, a great wife. A fantastic Job. I fell good about life, but I travel a lot and get bored and always find a casino and intend to spend a $100 and end up blowing 2-3 thousand dollars. How to stop gambling for good For many problem gamblers, it’s not quitting gambling that’s the biggest challenge, but rather staying in recovery—making a permanent commitment to stay away from gambling. The Internet has made gambling far more accessible and, therefore, harder for recovering addicts to avoid relapse.
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Gambling has long served as a popular form of entertainment. And it can be a healthy way to experience thrills as long as you don't go overboard.
But some gamblers deal with problems as a result of their hobby, whether they end up being financial, emotional, or social.
If you're currently a gambler, then you should consider quitting before you experience any of these problems. And if you need some motivation to quit gambling, here are seven reasons.
1. The Casino Always Has an Edge
Outside of card counting and player vs player poker games like Texas Hold'em, the casino always holds an advantage over players.
The trick, though, is that these edges are so slim that you may not even notice until you've been playing for hours and your bankroll is gone.
Here's an example:
You're a good blackjack player who's worked the house edge down to 1.0%. If you're betting $25 per hand and playing 80 hands per hour, you'll theoretically lose $20 an hour.
The 1.0% house edge doesn't seem like much in the short term. But when you're theoretically losing $20 per hour, this really adds up.
Things only get worse when you play slots because they move at a quicker pace than table games. Each spin is decided within seconds, meaning you'll make hundreds of spins per hour.
If a slot machine has an 8% house edge and you bet $400 within an hour, that's $32 in theoretical losses. This is a lot if you're just a casual player who's passing the time with slots.
2. You'll Fall for the Gambler's Fallacy
The most frequent reason why people blow their casino bankrolls is the gambler's fallacy, or belief that past results will influence future results.
The gambler's fallacy is especially prevalent in games with even money bets like baccarat, blackjack, craps, and roulette.
Consider this example:
You lose four blackjack hands in a row. Given that you should have won at least one of these hands based on probability, you triple your next bet because you're 'due' for a win.
Are you any more likely to win this next hand? No, because your odds are the same as they were on the previous three hands.
This is where many players go wrong, though, in thinking that they can use past results to dictate a proper betting strategy. This is even more dangerous when you increase your bets because you think that you're due for a win.
3. Gambling Can Be Addicting
One reason why people enjoy gambling is because it activates dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that affects your brain's reward and pleasure centers.
Win or lose, you feel rewarded every time that you're playing slots and table games.
What's dangerous is that the more you gamble, the longer it takes for you to feel the same rewards that you got when first playing.
This is where addiction sets in and, when coupled with the casino's long term edge, will cause your finances to take a hit.
Not everybody gets to this point with gambling. But if you quit now, then you don't have to worry about becoming addicted.
4. Gambling Affects Your Mood
Gambling has more highs and lows than just about any other activity.
You feel great when you're winning and are a pleasure to be around. But when you're losing, you may feel irrational and get angry with others.
This isn't logical thinking when you refer back to the point about the house having a long term advantage. After all, if you don't want to lose then don't gamble in the first place.
Some gamblers don't think logically, though, and it affects their moods after a losing streak. This is when you start acting like a jerk to others because you had a bad session.
Even worse is when your mood is affected at the table and you make poor decisions with your bankroll and / or through strategy. Sometimes referred to as tilt, this psychological state has devastating consequences that you won't realize until after the damage is already done.
If you don't want to suffer through these wild mood swings, then spend your time on more rewarding activities like exercising or hanging out with friends.
5. Casino Visitors Are Robbery Targets
Whether or not casinos increase crime in surrounding neighborhoods is a debatable topic filled with mixed research. But one undeniable fact is that casinos visitors can be targets of robbers.
Criminals know that gamblers have money on them when they visit land based casinos. And this has led to plenty of robberies outside of casinos or even inside of them.
Poker pro Scott Montgomery was once held at knifepoint in a Bellagio bathroom and forced to hand over $2,000.
In some cases robbers stalk casinos looking for big winners. Although these winners can ask for an escort out of the casino, this doesn't stop criminals from following them to their hotel or home afterward.
If any of this terrifies you, then stop gambling so that you avoid being a robbery target. Or at the very least, stay home and gamble from the safety of your mobile device or PC.
6. Gambling Can Waste Lots of Time
If you gamble at land based casinos, chances are that you'll spend hours on slot machines and / or table games. Even if you play short sessions on your smartphone throughout the day, all of these sessions can add up to hours by the end of the week.
In the end, gambling is a huge drain on your time. And when you consider that gambling offers no reward beyond entertainment, you may come to regret all the time you've spent on it.
What's worse is if you pour hours into learning strategy and / or becoming an advantage player. The idea of beating the house as a blackjack card counter may sound appealing; but it becomes less exciting after hours and hours spent learning how to count cards.
I can think of many other fun and rewarding activities that cost little or no money, including biking, hanging out with friends, having a party, playing sports, visiting a waterpark or walking your dog.
If you're somebody who likes to take gambling trips, you should ask yourself if you can have just as much fun on the trip without gambling. By cutting out the gambling, you'll have more money for other activities on the trip.
7. Gambling Can Cause Social Problems
Earlier I discussed how gambling can affect your mood and make you more irritable. One consequence of this is that you'll start having social problems with friends and family members.
This problem is only hastened if you have an addiction that takes precedence over spending time with others. You may obsess about the next time that you can play and win back your losses while tuning out conversations with your friends / family.
Your personality will change too if you feel depression and anxiety over losses. This attitude change coupled with losses can lead to serious problems in your relationship / marriage.
Yet another downside is that you may only identify with other gamblers and ignore other people. While it's nice to make new friends, you don't want your entire circle to be filled with gambling addicts.
Conclusion
A major problem with gambling is that almost every player is destined to lose.
At times it may seem like you can overcome the house edge through good strategy and bankroll management. But unless you're an advantage player or poker pro, you'll eventually lose thanks to the casino's long term edge.
Unfortunately, many players don't consider the reality because they're caught up in the gambler's fallacy. They believe that as long as they can keep playing, they'll win back their losses and have a chance to earn a profit.
As if this isn't bad enough, gambling also takes your time and can cause social problems with your friends and family. These problems are magnified when you're stuck in a losing streak and obsessing over how you can get back on the winning track.
I encourage you to think about the 7 problems that I covered above and strongly think about if you're experiencing any of them. If so, then it's time for you to quit gambling.
Dead Broke
Theories emerge on why it’s so hard to stop
By Chris Ison
Staff Writer
It seemed to take only minutes for Carole Foley to get hooked on video gambling machines in 1990. Four years later, she had forged $176,000 worth of checks. Said Foley, who has been clean for a year: “It was absorbing right from the get-go. I had no concept how quickly I was involved.”
For some it takes years, but Carole Foley seemed to get addicted to gambling in minutes.
It was 1:30 in the afternoon, Oct. 13, 1990. Foley walked into a bar in Bozeman, Mont., the first state in the country - other than Nevada and New Jersey - to legalize video gambling machines in bars. She stuck in a quarter and pushed the buttons.
The adrenaline surged.
“It was just instant,” she said. “Within a matter of two or three days, I was playing every day. Within a month, I started flying to Vegas because there was about an $800 cap on winnings” in Montana. She moved to Minnesota later that year, and started going to casinos.
By last year, Foley, 43, of St. Paul, had forged $176,000 in checks at her job at the E.M. Lohmann Co., a religious-products supplier in St. Paul. Three months ago, she left the Volunteers of America Regional Correction Center in Roseville after serving an eight-month sentence on seven counts of check forgery.
What happened to Carole Foley? And what happens to the estimated 38,000 Minnesotans who run into serious legal, financial or family problems from their betting on blackjack or ballgames or slot machines or horse races or bingo or the lottery?
Foley, who hasn’t gambled in nearly a year, doesn’t make excuses. She knows her problem is her fault. But she also believes that something in her physical makeup caused her to be more vulnerable than some.
And some researchers are beginning to agree. A predisposition
“It really looks like, in addition to the psychological factors, that there is a physiological component,” said Dr. Richard Rosenthal, a psychiatrist and nationally recognized gambling addiction specialist in Beverly Hills, Calif., who is conducting research into the physiological factors of gambling addiction. “More than that, there’s an organic basis, or predisposition.”
Such statements fuel the debate regarding how much control gamblers have over their habits and how to approach prevention and treatment. While there are hundreds of studies, the world is still relatively ignorant about what causes gambling addiction. It is often said that research into problem gambling is 20 years behind research into alcoholism.
Rosenthal and others have been conducting research on pathological gamblers for two years and have found that abnormalities in something called the D2 dopamine receptor may make people more vulnerable to gambling addiction. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that acts as a neurotransmitter. It is involved in various disorders, such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.
“We found that it was significantly abnormal in compulsive gamblers and that the abnormality could not be accounted for in alcohol or drug addiction or depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder or attention-deficit disorder or any other abnormality,” Rosenthal said. “The second thing we found was that the severity of the gambling problem correlated to the likelihood of the gene being abnormal.”
The study, which has yet to be published, involved 150 gamblers divided into four groups, depending on the intensity of each person’s gambling problem. The research showed that 73 percent of the most severe gamblers had the genetic abnormality. And the defect preceded the gambling, rather than being caused by it, Rosenthal said.
“This is hereditary,” he said. If the results eventually show a correlation between genetic makeup and gambling addiction, “this would be a great breakthrough in gambling research,” he added.
Rosenthal is not ready to say that the abnormality causes the gambling problem, and he notes that psychological factors are involved in the addiction as well. But the physiological abnormality may make people more at risk to becoming addicted.
Further, the research has found that gambling addiction seems to be in a group with a number of other disorders, including attention-deficit disorder, Tourette’s syndrome and possibly obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“The impression is that these are hereditary conditions, that there’s some organic basis for them, and that they seem to run together,” Rosenthal said. Attention-deficit disorder
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A number of studies has found correlations between attention-deficit disorder and problem gambling.
Loreen Rugle of the Brecksville Veterans Medical Center near Cleveland, the first gambling treatment program in the country, found significant signs of attention-deficit disorder in pathological gamblers in a 1990 study.
She followed up by talking with people who knew the gamblers during childhood, and many provided evidence that the gamblers may, indeed, have had the disorder as children and were never diagnosed.
Dr. Sheila Specker of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota found that pathological gamblers have higher rates of other impulse control disorders, such as compulsive buying and compulsive sexual behavior.
Rugle is also working on research involving brain imaging scans - using a dye to take a picture of brain activity - to see whether differences in brain functions are revealed in problem gamblers.
Such studies, Rugle and others say, are not intended to suggest that pathological gamblers have no control over their habits. They note that gambling addiction is a learned problem as well and that addicts are not helpless to control themselves.
Henry Lesieur, editor of the Journal on Gambling Studies, is skeptical of many studies on the physiological aspects of problem gambling, including, so far, the dopamine study. He said the dopamine abnormality is present in 25 percent of the general population anyway.
“We don’t know very much about the physiology,” said Lesieur, of Illinois State University in Normal. “The physiological research, almost all of it is done on males; it’s done with very small groups.”
Some facts about gamblers are more clear. Many studies, as well as simple observations by gambling therapists, show that a significant number of gamblers are recovered alcoholics or drug abusers. Specker also found significant histories of substance abuse, depression and sexual and physical abuse in pathological gamblers.
To some, such findings support theories that problem gambling is mostly symptomatic of bigger problems and is something people use as an escape.
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“Escape-seekers really gamble for time away from their problems,” Lesieur said. “They have a workaholic husband, for example, and they gamble, and they don’t have to worry about their workaholic husband. Unfortunately, that is an expensive way to spend your time. And they get involved in all sorts of financial problems because of it. So the irony is that . . . they haven’t solved their original problem; they’ve just escaped from it, and they’ve generated another problem. So they’ve got two problems.” From drinking to gambling
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Alcoholism, too, is often used as an escape, which may explain the high numbers of gamblers - as many as 50 percent, according to some studies - who are recovered alcoholics. Alcoholics may kick their drinking habits, but later, unknowingly, substitute gambling as their means of escape.
Action-seekers, Lesieur’s other category of gamblers, are looking for excitement. Some studies have found that high numbers of problem gamblers are prone to boredom. They tend to be risk-takers. And since many have short attention spans, as Rugle found, staying focused requires fast, risky action - just the kind of activity involved in slot machines and blackjack.
Once the gambling is underway, many problem gamblers lose some of their ability to think rationally, which allows them to keep gambling despite negative consequences. They think they can win their money back, even though, were they to step away from the action, they would realize the odds are against them. Many have a false sense of their gambling expertise.
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Recent studies in Canada and Australia found that slot machine and video poker players tended to make erroneous and irrational statements while playing.
“They believe if their luck is bad, it’s about to turn good, which is pure horse manure,” Lesieur said. “Playing a slot machine and thinking you’re going to win your way out of debt is not rational thinking.”
Whatever the cause of problem gambling, the effects clearly can be physical. Gamblers, researchers and therapists agree that withdrawal symptoms are common among recovering gamblers. “The first week that most gamblers are with us, it’s very common to get all sorts of physical complaints,” Rugle said. “Stomach problems, headaches, back problems, a lot of sleeplessness, a lot of agitation.”
Carole Foley still goes through some of those withdrawals, despite being clean for 11 months.
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“I had physical withdrawals,” she said. “Extreme insomnia. Nausea. . . . Real on edge for about the first 45 days. . . . I know even today, if I get an urge, I get extremely anxious. My heart starts racing. Even sweaty palms. I can also get nauseous.”
- Staff librarians Joan Freeman and Roberta Hovde contributed research for this story.