hi losingitslowly,
gambling is a lifetime illness, those circuits in our brain are already changed, and we may be able to re-wire them but this will take a long time, from a survey done a few years ago those who once met the criteria for pathological gambling 30% recover from problem gambling (1-year recovery) 50% out of that 30% relapsed within the following 4 years.
this means we have a 15% chance to be gambling-free without relapse after 5 years from now. another statistic 20% of pathlogical gamblers commit suicide. if you calcolate the odds that I will commit suicide in the next 5 years it is 17%, to give you an example Russian roulette has the same chance if I play Russian roulette I will have an 83% that I will live and a 17% chance I will die.
I am bringing these numbers not to demotivate you but to tell you that we should understand the nature of this addiction and understand that the odds are against us in this recovery. so we have to do everything that we can do to prevent ourselves from relapsing and to change the odds in our favor, and if we relapsed a safety net should be in place to not let us fall too hard.
this means we should always have some restricting that will support the overall goal which is to live a gambling free life.
as I wrote in a previous post there are two parts in my brain the rational part that tries to control things and fights the urges of gambling and wants to take me away from this activity and the other part is the irrational part of my brain where the urges comes from, the gambling is a behavioral addiction it is now coming from that part were the fight or flight response comes this is a primitive part that we can’t control all the time, do we all know gambling is bad? we all do. but we keep relapsing !!!. I once read that gambling is like riding a bicycle once we learn it even after years of not riding one we can easily ride one because this skill is there in the unconscious part of our brain it will always be there. so after years of abstinence, I could easily relapse, and I have read many stories about that.
if you add to that what I have is not an addiction to some casino games which is a clear form of gambling, I have an addiction to day trading in stocks, forex, and crypto. which is a complicated form because for instance you can consider it trading and under certain conditions, it is indeed trading, and you can consider it gambling under another condition. what I am trying to say it is easier to rationalize that a chance game is a chance game and to get over it (at least for the rational part of the brain) but it is harder to do so for something that can be a trade under certain condition and can be considered as gambling under other conditions.
after all these years of trial, I am pretty sure that I should not trade at all in the stock market and I should not even invest on my own, I should not make the decision to buy or sell a certain stock even if I am buying them as a long term investment because this will trigger the trader inside me and the trader inside me is a gambler addict and will always be.
such decisions as destroying my credit score to prevent myself from getting loans, and the decision not to invest in the stock market may look like an extreme measures, but let us face it we are in an extreme situation and it needs extreme measures to overcome it.
finally, we should do all that we can to support our rational brain against this irrational brain that keeps us gambling.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Dark Energy.