2018 no more gambling

Hi all.

Background on myself and my compulsive gambling problem.

Apologies it may be a long one.

I am 25 years old and have always had a interest of sorts in gambling since being the legal age to gamble. However it has only been this year 2017 that it became a serious serious problem.

Until around March earlier this year, i only ever bet on sports (which I understand can be just as destructive as casino gambling for some people) however for me personally it was never a big problem, I would sometimes lose maybe £30-40 max over a weekend mainly on football accumulators, still not great i know but was never a huge problem for me financially or otherwise. However I look back now and realise that the seed was definetly being planted in my head, although the amounts being lost weren't great at that time, the overall urge to gamble was definitely increasing over time.

Then sometime around march, I ventured into playing live online casino games, blackjack in particular. I was completly hooked from day 1, had a big win of a couple thousand pounds from a small deposit. I went onto lose this within a few days of continuing to gamble, and the spiral downwards continued and i never recovered since that day.

Over the next weeks and months my gambling continued to get more and more intense and destructive, I would waste whole month salarys in the space of a few hours playing online blackjack. Id gone from maybe gambling £100 in a whole month to gambling that amount every few seconds on each hand of BJ I played.

I took out loans and got over £14000 in debt to feed my gambling, which to me is a crazy amount of money. I lost every penny of it to online casinos.

I have had occasions where ive got 'lucky' and won a chunk of my losses back, only to lose the lot and some again within the space of a few hours. I can not win, because I can not stop and its took me a long time to realise that, once I've started I will continue to gamble until everything and I mean everything is gone again. I have repeated this process so many times over the course of this year, and I am truly and deeply sick of it and am ready to move on from this horrible chapter of my life.

Gambling is a pointless and destructive habit for me and i want to stop for good, and I know i can do just that.

I have installed a app called gamban on all my devices and PC, it is very useful and i recommend it. It can't be unistalled as far as I know and blocks all gambling sites. This is going to be a great help for me i feel, as self excluding myself has never worked as i always manage to find another casino to sign up to.

I last gambled 3 days ago, and im determined to make that the last day I ever lose my hard earned money to gambling again. I am have wasted so much financially but more importantly mentally and emotionally, the pain this has caused me this year has been ridicolous.

Thanks for reading