Gambling addiction is a serious issue that affects many people around the world. It is an issue that can take over a person’s life, and cause serious financial, personal, and psychological harm. Fortunately, there are steps that one can take to fight back against gambling addiction and reclaim their life.

Step One: Identify Your Triggers

The first step in the process of overcoming gambling addiction is to determine the triggers that lead you to engage in gambling behaviors. Gambling addiction is usually triggered by a combination of internal and external factors. It is important to recognize these triggers, as this will give you the ability to address them and work on ways to reduce their influence on your life. Triggers may include financial stress or difficulty, boredom or loneliness, encouragement from friends, or a sense of power or escape.

Step Two: Create Boundaries

In order to successfully fight gambling addiction, it is important to create boundaries. This can include avoiding certain places or activities that may lead you to gamble. It can also mean setting limits on how much money you are willing to spend on gambling.

Step Three: Avoid Substitute Behaviors

While working on controlling your gambling addiction, it is important to avoid engaging in substitute behaviors such as using other forms of gambling, playing video games excessively, or using drugs or alcohol to cope. These activities can increase the risk of relapse and make it harder to overcome the addiction.

Step Four: Seek Support

It is important to seek support from family and friends who can help to provide encouragement and guidance. There are also many specialized gambling addiction treatment programs available to help you learn new ways of thinking and behaving that can reduce your reliance on gambling.

Step Five: Talk To A Professional

Finally, it is essential to seek professional help if you are struggling with a gambling addiction. A professional counselor or mental health professional can provide more in-depth strategies to help overcome the addiction.

Gambling addiction is a serious issue, and it can be very difficult to overcome on your own. Fortunately, with the right tools and support, it is possible to fight back and reclaim your life. By recognizing your triggers and creating boundaries, avoiding substitute behaviors, and seeking professional help, you can take the first steps on the road to recovery.

Internet gambling is a fairly common activity that many people have engaged in, but as harmless as it may seem, it does pose a threat in some ways. To the average person, internet gambling hardly even registers in their lives, but to a gambling addict, internet gambling is a destructive trap to fall into. All the appeal that gambling has held over people for centuries is now at any internet user’s fingertips through the click of a mouse. This addictive activity has an incredible hold over many people’s lives, and can be recognized in some distinctive traits.

When internet gambling has negative consequences on a person’s life, it has become an addiction. This is the consequence that is seen the most readily. All internet gambling costs money or some kind of wager, but when a person becomes addicted to it, the money starts flowing far too quickly. It is not long before the individual cannot pay their bills and their finances are depleted. This is one way that an internet gambling addiction can become destructive.

Internet gambling can be very detrimental on relationships. It is hard for a person to retain their respect for another once they uncover their addiction, unless the addict is willing to work to defeat their addiction. Because most people go through denial over their addiction, they push their friends and relatives further and further away by going deeper and deeper into their addiction. Not all relationships can recover from the pain that addiction causes. If an addict wants to keep their relationships, it is best they work on defeating their addiction.

And lastly, a person’s health can begin to suffer because of their internet gambling addiction. The constant sitting that online gambling requires becomes hard on the body when it is endured for many hours over many days. Not only is a person constantly sedentary when they are gambling online, but the time they invest into gambling eats up their time to do much of anything else, including exercise. This deteriorates a person’s health at a rapid rate, causing weight gain, muscle loss and reduced function of the body’s systems.

Some people say that gaming and gambling are not real addictions, and that only chemical addictions actually count. This is not credible information. Addiction is present anywhere someone is overvaluing a substance or a process. Gaming and gambling online are two activities, or processes, that give people pleasure, distract them from the outside world and offer escape. They are things that people abuse by overindulging in them. Their qualifications to be classified as addictive are as follows:

• Damaging to relationships. When someone compulsively gambles online or plays video games relentlessly, the people around them who are subjected to it become resentful of it. People obsessed with these activities tune out the entire world to engage in them, including their responsibilities to themselves and to others. This becomes very aggravating to people who have to depend on them because they do not pull their weight or make contributions. They spend very excessive amounts of time gaming and gambling.
• Draining to finances. Gaming and gambling are both expensive activities to engage in. Gambling is obviously expensive, as it revolves around placing bets with money. When people begin to do this compulsively, the cost becomes astronomical. Many people do not realize how expensive gaming is as well. Someone who is gaming compulsively is investing in many games, online memberships, gaming consoles and additional gaming components. A gaming addiction inevitably costs a great deal of money.
• Deteriorating to health. Both a gaming addiction and a gambling addiction require a great deal of sitting. Overtime, this adds up to a dysfunctional body. Sitting excessively in order to game or gamble causes immense problems to a person’s health. They inevitably begin to struggle with weight gain and muscle deterioration. Severe cases of gaming or gambling addiction can even lead to blood clots forming in the legs and heart problems due to lack of cardiovascular activity.

In short, anyone who says that gaming or gambling cannot be real addictions is misinformed. These two activities, when abused and overindulged in, can cause a great deal of stress, strife and chaos to a person’s life. If you or someone you know is struggling with a gaming or gambling addiction, take it seriously enough to find help.

When we think of severe addictions, we of course think of the addictions that put people in immediate danger, such as a heroin or cocaine addiction. However, just because an addiction does not pose an immediate threat does not make it any less of an addiction. A gaming or gambling addiction, for example, can cause critical damage to a person’s life in a number of ways.

Gaming addiction typically refers to a compulsion to play video games, either alone or online with friends. Gaming may seem like a harmless habit, but when it becomes an addiction that devours many hours in a day, it is detrimental to your health, relationships and responsibilities. Because it is such an inactive use of time, the gamer will more than likely experience weight gain, a slowed metabolism and other potential health risks. They will begin to push the people in their life away through neglect and find themselves with fewer close relationships. Their personal obligations and commitments will suffer as they devalue everything but gaming in importance.

Gambling addiction is similar to gaming addiction in that it takes something meant to be a pass time and places at an exaggerated level of importance, but gambling differs from gaming in that the stakes are raised. When money is involved, there is a higher thrill and a higher cost. This element of danger is the addictive draw to gambling, and also the reason it can prove so devastating to a person’s life. Though gambling is not draining on a person’s physical and mental health the way that a substance addiction is, it can leave them in complete financial ruin, isolate them from anyone who cared for them and destroy their reputation among co-workers and peers. Plus, a person who is badly entrenched in a gambling debt may have borrowed money from dangerous people in order to finance their habit. If they are unable to pay them back, they have put their safety at risk.

Gaming and gambling addictions lead to broken, dysfunctional lives. It has been found that the brain’s dopamine production during a gaming or gambling addiction is the same as that of an addiction to a substance or a chemical-creating activity such as sex. So, while there are no dangerous biological side effects like there is to substance abuse, the addictive draw of gaming and gambling is equal in strength to any other addiction and causes the same apparent, negative behavioral shifts. For that reason, gaming and gambling addiction should be respected as serious addictions and should be treated with self-help, support groups or gambling addiction treatment.