Gambling employs various tactics to keep you ‘stuck’ in the game. It relies on thoughts such as chasing losses, magical hopes, and isolation, creating a vicious cycle that makes it difficult to stop. In this article, we will examine the 3 most fundamental ways it affects people’s behavior.
1) The Idea of Chasing Losses
While gambling enters each person’s life for a different reason, it remains in all individuals through some common tactics-ideas. The most frequent and influential of these is the idea of chasing lost money. Thoughts such as “I’ll get it back and then stop,” “If it just returns everything once, I won’t play again,” or “I would stop if it gave me back my money” are some of the most common thoughts-tactics gambling uses to persist.
2) Magical Thinking
Gambling often tries to convince people that they have found a unique way to “break” the algorithm and win money or recover what they have lost. Magical charms, amulets, superstitions, and thoughts like “I know how to profit from this,” “I know when it will give me money,” “I have to give it money for it to return double” and so on, are common magical thoughts that keep people in the game.
3) Consequences, Lies, and Isolation
Gambling gradually and methodically leads people to isolation after first causing a plethora of financial, emotional, interpersonal, and social consequences. In turn, these consequences place the individual in a larger vicious cycle of lies, concealment of problematic behavior, and ultimately more isolation, where the person completely surrenders to gambling and problematic behavior.
Through psychotherapy, people can recognize, understand, predict, and address both the reasons why gambling entered their lives and the aforementioned tactics-ideas it uses to persist.
