My Boyfriend Wants to Seek Help in His Gambling Addiction What Should He Do?

In analyzing the best way to deal with gambling urges, it is necessary to begin with what is going on in our brain.

Gambling produces rushes of chemicals in our brain, in the dopaminergic reward centers. The regulating mechanism then withholds producing the natural day to day ‘feel good’ neurotransmitters like Serotonin and Dopamine, for example, because the system was overloaded. So you have a situation in an addict’s brain, where the system regulator has for so long seen huge amounts of these pleasure stimulators that it cut way back on naturally producing them, to accomodate. There is constantly a state of ‘seeking balance’ going on in the brain. So, you have the case of the gambling addict, who over the years has developed a brain that is in a distressed state when the gambling is stopped. The natural, feel good transmitters, aren’t coming in daily in the levels they do in a healthy, non addicted brain.

Here is the crucial point: Gambling urges come about for a very particular reason. And what is that reason? First let’s look at what’s not been working in the recovery movement. If something hasn’t been working, it is because it is not addressing the true reason. How many times have you tried willpower? How many times have you said to yourself, “I won’t allow myself to gamble, I won’t allow myself to gamble, I won’t allow myself to gamble, I’ll resist these urges…arrgggh,” then find yourself gambling soon after? How many times have you thought “I must be a really bad person if I keep losing my money?”

How many times have you gone on a blitz of gambling, spent all you had in your pockets, and felt really embarrassed because in spite of it all, in spite of the fact that you know what you did was wrong, that you let everyone down, etc., etc., you still felt better? And how that created such mixed emotions in your conscience. Are things starting to make sense now?

The reason is tied in to the state of the addict’s brain, and the depletion of the naturally occurring, feel good, neurotransmitters. The addict has gotten his brain’s regulator all out of whack. Then he or she suddenly proclaims, “That’s it, I’m quitting!” A few days go by and the brain is starved for the stimulation it has been used to in the past. The regulator is holding back on the daily flow that non addicted persons get, because it knows pretty soon that a big deluge is coming in with the next win. The addict’s brain is in distress. It feels lousy. It wants to feel better.

The Main Reason you get gambling urges, even though intellectually you know the odds are against you, is that your brain is feeling very badly and it wants desperately to just feel better.

This is huge. This is a major breakthrough.
This is the “Aha!” Moment.

That’s the reason, pure and simple.

Your brain just want to feel better. Your brain is out of balance, it has been depleted of the normal flow of daily feel good neurotransmitters because of the roller coaster ride of past rushes and seeks relief. That is it.
Now, with this knowledge we can get to work on building a recovery method that will work. You don’t fight the urges, you listen to them and take quick, decisive action to give the brain the comfort that it needs. It wants to get back to equilibrium. It’s not looking to get above average, it’s so far down, it just wants to get to average. It jumps to the first thing it can think of because of what you’ve trained it do over and over. It remembers when you had some gambling wins in the past, it felt better then, so it says, “GO DO THAT AGAIN”. Now, here’s the important part. The least productive thing you can do is to immediately deny the brain the very thing it is seeking. Would you tell a person dying of thirst in the desert, there’s a glass of water over there but don’t drink it? Heck no. So why do we immediately tell our brain it can’t have the very thing it wants and then scratch our heads in wonder when we have lapses? Of course we’re going to have lapses. That is natural. The brain wants relief and it’s going to have it.
What works better is to listen to the urges, understand what the brain is telling us that it needs, and then GIVE THE BRAIN WHAT IT NEEDS. Give the brain a choice, saying, “You can feel better with gambling, true, but you can feel better in other ways as well.”
We can discover it is not the gambling per se, that is being sought, it is the desire for equilibrium, the return to balance, the need for the proper level of the feel good neurotransmitters in the reward center chamber of the brain.

The brain needs a lift, a boost, of the feel good neurotransmitters, so why don’t you just give it what it wants!
You can give the brain what it wants by offering it a choice. When the urges come, you can say to yourself, “Ok my brain is itching to gamble. Well, Brain, we could do that of course, however we could also do something else that will make you feel better as well.”
Now you can come up with creative solution