Unfortunately for men and women with gambling addictions, opportunities to indulge in this potentially self-destructive pastime are endless. It wasn’t always this way, but with the arrival of the Internet, gambling websites became plentiful and are now just a click away for recovering compulsive gamblers who might easily plunge headlong into the abyss.
Gambling addiction is also known as compulsive gambling, pathological gambling, or gambling disorder. It can be defined as an impulse-control disorder. If you are an impulsive gambler, you can not control the urge to gamble, even when you know it has negative consequences for your finances, you as a person or your loved ones. Problem gambling may affect up to 593,000 people in the UK. The condition can be treated by talking therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, or medications that combat cravings. Some people independently solve their addiction problem. This is called natural recovery. Others ask for help. In both cases, it is a humbling experience to face the reality of addiction. This humility extends to treatment professionals as well. To quote the famous French surgeon, Ambroise Pare (c. 1510-1590), 'I bandaged him and God healed him.'
If you’ve struggled with a gambling problem, you know that beating a gambling addiction is not easy and can only be accomplished one day at a time. Making the decision over and over not to gamble is the only way to preserve the integrity of your addiction recovery plan, and that can be quite a challenge. Gambling addictions are notoriously hard to subdue and control.
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Triggers and the Ever-present Risk of Relapse
Wherever there is addiction, there are always risk factors for relapse. There are events, circumstances or even individuals that can trigger a recovering gambler’s fall from grace.
One of the most critical aspects of overcoming a gambling addiction is to identify these triggers, and drag them out from the shadows of the subconscious and into the light. Doing this drains them of their power to sabotage recovery.
No two problem gamblers are exactly alike, but there are some common patterns to gambling relapse triggers that can make them easier to spot.
Trigger #1: Strong Emotional Responses
A key ingredient of gambling addictions is emotion. Gambling plays a role in helping addicts manage difficult emotions.
Gambling addiction is a compulsion but it is also a coping mechanism — a way of escape from psychological disturbance and discomfort. When problem gamblers experience stress, frustration, disappointment, anger, fear or boredom, they will often turn (or return, in the case of recovering addicts who relapse) to gambling to help ease their pain or restore their emotional equilibrium.
Using gambling to cope with life’s challenges is one of the biggest predictors of an eventual gambling addiction. Once such behavior becomes entrenched it changes from a voluntary choice to a reflex, and it is the type of reflex that can undermine your recovery and trigger a relapse. This can happen if you aren’t prepared to handle negative emotions in a more constructive way.
Trigger #2: Environment
It is important to realize that opportunities to gamble are everywhere. Stores sell lottery tickets, slot machines are found in bars or clubs, and online gaming and wagering sites are always accessible whenever you’re online. All can offer powerful temptation.
Temptation also comes in the form of friends and acquaintances with whom you may have gambled with in the past. Being careful about where you go, what you do, and who you do it with are all essential strategies for gambling addicts who are serious about their recovery. Environmental triggers can weaken your resolve and leave you vulnerable to influences you swore you’d never be affected by again.
Trigger #3: Money Shortages or Debt
Compulsive gambling is a losing proposition, both personally and financially. But when you need money and need it fast, gambling might seem like a legitimate way to solve your problems.
You should be clear about what your gambling addiction means. It means you have a history of rationalizing to excuse your gambling behavior and that it will be incredibly difficult to stop if you start again.
“Just this one time” is not a phrase a problem gambler should ever use, regardless of the circumstances or the urgency of the cause or motivation.
Trigger #4: Substance Abuse
Drugs and alcohol affect judgment and reduce impulse control, which makes substance abuse and gambling a toxic combination.
Studies show that between 10% and 20% of those with substance use disorders also suffer from gambling addictions. This connection is certainly not a coincidence, and there is little doubt that being under the influence of drugs or alcohol (even if you aren’t addicted to them) can undermine your recovery from gambling dependency — in a heartbeat.
Therapy and the Quest to Understand Your Gambling Addiction
While you should be able to identify at least some of your gambling triggers through private self-reflection, this is a topic you should discuss frequently during your addiction counseling sessions and also during your Gamblers Anonymous meetings (assuming there is a chapter in your area that you actively attend). Your therapist and your peers can give you valuable insight and feedback, helping you gain greater understanding about your gambling behavior and the circumstances that cause or encourage it.
Resources
New York Council on Problem Gambling: Staying Safe after Problem Gambling
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When Shirley was in her mid-20s she and some friends road-tripped to Las Vegas on a lark. That was the first time she gambled. Around a decade later, while working as an attorney on the East Coast, she would occasionally sojourn in Atlantic City. By her late 40s, however, she was skipping work four times a week to visit newly opened casinos in Connecticut. She played blackjack almost exclusively, often risking thousands of dollars each round—then scrounging under her car seat for 35 cents to pay the toll on the way home. Ultimately, Shirley bet every dime she earned and maxed out multiple credit cards. “I wanted to gamble all the time,” she says. “I loved it—I loved that high I felt.”
In 2001 the law intervened. Shirley was convicted of stealing a great deal of money from her clients and spent two years in prison. Along the way she started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings, seeing a therapist and remaking her life. “I realized I had become addicted,” she says. “It took me a long time to say I was an addict, but I was, just like any other.”
Ten years ago the idea that someone could become addicted to a habit like gambling the way a person gets hooked on a drug was controversial. Back then, Shirley's counselors never told her she was an addict; she decided that for herself. Now researchers agree that in some cases gambling is a true addiction.
In the past, the psychiatric community generally regarded pathological gambling as more of a compulsion than an addiction—a behavior primarily motivated by the need to relieve anxiety rather than a craving for intense pleasure. In the 1980s, while updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) officially classified pathological gambling as an impulse-control disorder—a fuzzy label for a group of somewhat related illnesses that, at the time, included kleptomania, pyromania and trichotillomania (hairpulling). In what has come to be regarded as a landmark decision, the association moved pathological gambling to the addictions chapter in the manual's latest edition, the DSM-5, published this past May. The decision, which followed 15 years of deliberation, reflects a new understanding of the biology underlying addiction and has already changed the way psychiatrists help people who cannot stop gambling.
More effective treatment is increasingly necessary because gambling is more acceptable and accessible than ever before. Four in five Americans say they have gambled at least once in their lives. With the exception of Hawaii and Utah, every state in the country offers some form of legalized gambling. And today you do not even need to leave your house to gamble—all you need is an Internet connection or a phone. Various surveys have determined that around two million people in the U.S. are addicted to gambling, and for as many as 20 million citizens the habit seriously interferes with work and social life.
Two of a Kind
The APA based its decision on numerous recent studies in psychology, neuroscience and genetics demonstrating that gambling and drug addiction are far more similar than previously realized. Research in the past two decades has dramatically improved neuroscientists' working model of how the brain changes as an addiction develops. In the middle of our cranium, a series of circuits known as the reward system links various scattered brain regions involved in memory, movement, pleasure and motivation. When we engage in an activity that keeps us alive or helps us pass on our genes, neurons in the reward system squirt out a chemical messenger called dopamine, giving us a little wave of satisfaction and encouraging us to make a habit of enjoying hearty meals and romps in the sack. When stimulated by amphetamine, cocaine or other addictive drugs, the reward system disperses up to 10 times more dopamine than usual.
Continuous use of such drugs robs them of their power to induce euphoria. Addictive substances keep the brain so awash in dopamine that it eventually adapts by producing less of the molecule and becoming less responsive to its effects. As a consequence, addicts build up a tolerance to a drug, needing larger and larger amounts to get high. In severe addiction, people also go through withdrawal—they feel physically ill, cannot sleep and shake uncontrollably—if their brain is deprived of a dopamine-stimulating substance for too long. At the same time, neural pathways connecting the reward circuit to the prefrontal cortex weaken. Resting just above and behind the eyes, the prefrontal cortex helps people tame impulses. In other words, the more an addict uses a drug, the harder it becomes to stop.
Research to date shows that pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking. Just as substance addicts require increasingly strong hits to get high, compulsive gamblers pursue ever riskier ventures. Likewise, both drug addicts and problem gamblers endure symptoms of withdrawal when separated from the chemical or thrill they desire. And a few studies suggest that some people are especially vulnerable to both drug addiction and compulsive gambling because their reward circuitry is inherently underactive—which may partially explain why they seek big thrills in the first place.
Even more compelling, neuroscientists have learned that drugs and gambling alter many of the same brain circuits in similar ways. These insights come from studies of blood flow and electrical activity in people's brains as they complete various tasks on computers that either mimic casino games or test their impulse control. In some experiments, virtual cards selected from different decks earn or lose a player money; other tasks challenge someone to respond quickly to certain images that flash on a screen but not to react to others.
A 2005 German study using such a card game suggests problem gamblers—like drug addicts—have lost sensitivity to their high: when winning, subjects had lower than typical electrical activity in a key region of the brain's reward system. In a 2003 study at Yale University and a 2012 study at the University of Amsterdam, pathological gamblers taking tests that measured their impulsivity had unusually low levels of electrical activity in prefrontal brain regions that help people assess risks and suppress instincts. Drug addicts also often have a listless prefrontal cortex.
Further evidence that gambling and drugs change the brain in similar ways surfaced in an unexpected group of people: those with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson's disease. Characterized by muscle stiffness and tremors, Parkinson's is caused by the death of dopamine-producing neurons in a section of the midbrain. Over the decades researchers noticed that a remarkably high number of Parkinson's patients—between 2 and 7 percent—are compulsive gamblers. Treatment for one disorder most likely contributes to another. Peteslot com reviews. To ease symptoms of Parkinson's, some patients take levodopa and other drugs that increase dopamine levels. Researchers think that in some cases the resulting chemical influx modifies the brain in a way that makes risks and rewards—say, those in a game of poker—more appealing and rash decisions more difficult to resist.
A new understanding of compulsive gambling has also helped scientists redefine addiction itself. Whereas experts used to think of addiction as dependency on a chemical, they now define it as repeatedly pursuing a rewarding experience despite serious repercussions. That experience could be the high of cocaine or heroin or the thrill of doubling one's money at the casino. “The past idea was that you need to ingest a drug that changes neurochemistry in the brain to get addicted, but we now know that just about anything we do alters the brain,” says Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist and addiction expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It makes sense that some highly rewarding behaviors, like gambling, can cause dramatic [physical] changes, too.”
Gaming the System
Redefining compulsive gambling as an addiction is not mere semantics: therapists have already found that pathological gamblers respond much better to medication and therapy typically used for addictions rather than strategies for taming compulsions such as trichotillomania. For reasons that remain unclear, certain antidepressants alleviate the symptoms of some impulse-control disorders; they have never worked as well for pathological gambling, however. Medications used to treat substance addictions have proved much more effective. Opioid antagonists, such as naltrexone, indirectly inhibit brain cells from producing dopamine, thereby reducing cravings. Bovada credit card verification form.
Dozens of studies confirm that another effective treatment for addiction is cognitive-behavior therapy, which teaches people to resist unwanted thoughts and habits. Gambling addicts may, for example, learn to confront irrational beliefs, namely the notion that a string of losses or a near miss—such as two out of three cherries on a slot machine—signals an imminent win.
Unfortunately, researchers estimate that more than 80 percent of gambling addicts never seek treatment in the first place. And of those who do, up to 75 percent return to the gaming halls, making prevention all the more important. Around the U.S.—particularly in California—casinos are taking gambling addiction seriously. Marc Lefkowitz of the California Council on Problem Gambling regularly trains casino managers and employees to keep an eye out for worrisome trends, such as customers who spend increasing amounts of time and money gambling. He urges casinos to give gamblers the option to voluntarily ban themselves and to prominently display brochures about Gamblers Anonymous and other treatment options near ATM machines and pay phones. A gambling addict may be a huge source of revenue for a casino at first, but many end up owing massive debts they cannot pay.
What Cause Gambling Addiction Treatment Centers
Shirley, now 60, currently works as a peer counselor in a treatment program for gambling addicts. “I'm not against gambling,” she says. “For most people it's expensive entertainment. But for some people it's a dangerous product. I want people to understand that you really can get addicted. I'd like to see every casino out there take responsibility.”