If you follow sports to a great degree, chances are that you’ve, at some point, placed bets on a team you feel is the favorite to win a trophy. While it can be entertaining, especially the adrenaline rush when waiting for a bet to come to fruition, if that dopamine feeling isn’t controlled, it may become toxic.
In today’s world, there’s seamless accessibility to gambling; online platforms like thegruelingtruth.com host promote online bookmakers, which allow you to play pretty much anywhere and anytime. If this accessibility is misused, one can easily develop a gambling disorder, indicating that one needs to quit.
Five Signs that you should Quit Gambling
To interpret the tell-tale signs that suggest you should quit gambling, you need first to understand that you only have to quit gambling when you start participating in what’s often called “Compulsive Gambling.” Even though regular gambling can be considered a healthy stimulant for the mind, when you start doing it compulsively, it becomes a problem.
1. You’re hiding or lying about your Gambling Activities to People who know that you Gamble.
One of the first indicators that you’re starting to have a gambling problem is when you’re ashamed of the bets you’ve been placing and begin to hide it from people who know you gamble. It’s fair not to look like a loser in your circle, but in gambling, where it’s all about probability, you can’t be blamed too much for your losses unless your losses exceed a healthy bankroll for your current income and net worth. This points out that you have a gambling problem as you don’t know when to stop. In this case, you’ve got an indication that you should consider exercising self-control while gambling and quitting.
2. When it Starts Affecting your Daily Routine
We all love some entertainment once in a while; if yours has to do with gambling, that shouldn’t be an issue. However, the problem starts when you can no longer differentiate between fun, work, or even rest time. You should consider quitting gambling (at least for a while) if you find it overtaking your daily activities.
It often starts by creating more time for gambling until you max out your free time, then the practice begins to encroach into the times when you’re active at work. Next, you find yourself not being able to make up for your regular paycheck because you’ve been less productive; these are well-known stages of how compulsive gambling evolves.
3. You’re beginning to Borrow to Stake on a Win.
This often occurs when gambling affects your finances because you’ve suffered uncontrolled or repeated losses. While it’s normal to repeatedly lose money when engaging in anything that involves staking your money before the fact, it takes a toll on your finances when you do it uncontrollably. Again, this can also be traced to the tendency of your productivity to be reduced because you’ve been focusing too much on gambling; there are not enough work hours being put in daily.
4. Withdrawal Symptoms from not Gambling for a While
Another tell-tale sign that you need to reduce your gambling frequency is when you start missing the act, even when you’ve only taken a break for a day or two. Sometimes, you feel the urge to get back in action even though you’ve only just missed a betting round. That sort of urgency to get back in the game is usually an indicator that you should think of stepping aside to rethink if your current gambling activities benefit your well-being. During prolonged withdrawal, you may begin to notice restlessness, decreased sleep and appetite, depression, anxiety, and change in sex drive – pretty much the bad things that follow after withdrawal from an addictive practice.
5. Feeling of Guilt and Remorse after Every Gambling Experience
At this stage, the victim/patient typically would require a psychologist to get over their gambling addiction. This is when you start to realize you have an issue with gambling as you’re no longer playing because you enjoy it but because you can’t stop or do something else. In situations like these, you typically want to undergo therapy sessions to wean yourself off of it – seek professional help.
Although quitting gambling is easier said than done, if you notice these signs in your loved ones or yourself, you should start making conscious steps to call it quits. All machines show signs when they need maintenance and repair, and just like machines, when something is going wrong in a person’s life, it’s easier for a third-party to spot it, and offer corrective measures.