Gambling Addiction & Recovery Support Group
Compulsive gambling is an urge or addiction to gamble despite harmful negative consequences or a desire to stop. A preferred term among many professionals is problem gambling, as few people described by the term experience true compulsions in the clinical sense of the word. Problem gambling often is defined by whether harm is experienced by the gambler or others rather...
So I'm a bit of a science geek, and what helped me quit both gambling and smoking was understanding the brain and body aspects. We are animals, after all. Why I started gambling was the dopamine rush that I got when I won my first jackpot. Can't remember if I went to the casino because I was lonely or bored, and the lights and noises made me feel like I was at a party. And then to go home with a couple thousand dollars. Wow. So the next time I'm lonely or bored, my brain tells me the solution is getting back to the casino. It gets harder to get the dopamine because the machines are rigged to keep a certain percentage but you can get the dopamine with periodic wins or even the hope of winning while the images are spinning. With enough repetition you have worn pathways into your brain. Bored, lonely, sad? Off to the casino. Feed money into machine? Chance of dopamine trigger.
It is not easy to reroute those pathways you have worn into your brain. In initial days you have to white-knuckle through it. Every day you say no and do something else, that gambling pathway in your brain becomes fuzzier. New pathways start to branch out to handling your stresses some other way. Pretty soon you don't even take the gambling path any more. It's always there but no longer the well worn path. Takes only time to rewire...
It is not easy to reroute those pathways you have worn into your brain. In initial days you have to white-knuckle through it. Every day you say no and do something else, that gambling pathway in your brain becomes fuzzier. New pathways start to branch out to handling your stresses some other way. Pretty soon you don't even take the gambling path any more. It's always there but no longer the well worn path. Takes only time to rewire...
The only thing i would add to your well written post is that it takes takes time and effort.
Too often, I have seen people overcome an addiction by white knuckling through and NEVER getting over the desire to quit, partly because they have spent the entire "clean" time pining for or mourning the loss of the addiction. There is a quote I think from Alexander Graham Bell, When one door closes another opens. But many spend so much energy mourning over the closed door as to not see the open one.
So, we must DO something in addition to time passing to form a new pathway.