What do you replace it with?

That is such a good question that I have asked myself so many times. You say every hobby can fulfill certain things but not that buzz of gambling. I love sport but I completely understand where you are coming from, I find that hard to answer but I did have some thoughts as to what might replace that buzz....

Putting the minimum you would spend on gambling in a day, in a savings account that you can't access but you can see it mounting up every day. I say minimum because my dad suggested this to me, he said put what you would have spent gambling in a jar every day, first of all I said 'well I'll have to take another loan out to do that' so I thought about only putting the minimum in a jar, but I wouldn't trust myself with that jar so would really have to be a savings account of my husbands.

Then I mentioned my dads suggestion to my boy and he said if you put the minimum of what you would have spent in a day of gambling would be 20 pound (2x £10 scratchcards) 'minimum' In a year would be 7,300 pound, I told him he must have calculated it wrong but he didn't lol. o*g 7,300 pound in a year of not spending the minimum of 20 pound a day. That means in a year when my loans are paid off, I will have 7,300 pound which is just over what my loans were in the first place. That shows to me just how crazy gambling really is.

I think it would give you a buzz to see that money add up every day if it's possible for you to do, as well as keeping your hobbies to take up the time... maybe?

When you empty that glass of water (addiction) you have to fill it with something, maybe what you have been doing isn't enough to fill your glass, look into other ways that you can fill it properly, might be things you can do that you never knew you could x

i saw on here the other day something that really struck a chord with me, gambling is like a wine that fills a wine glass, u can stop gambling but then you will have nothing in your glass so you can't drink. We obviously need to fill the glass with something healthy like orange juice to drink, but sometimes like at weekends when we need to destress who wants to drink orange juice. We need to find something which lets us destress but isn't bad for us. For me after online poker i tried pub poker thinking less funds needed and social. However i found with it Alcohol on weeknights and fruitmachines before and inbetween. Slowly but surely fruitmachine losses became more and more and i spent too much money. So december this year i quit pub poker and joined a gym. I also gave up my nicotine gum in december making me completely non smoking. It started great i went to gym every day lost loads of weight built up my muscles and became addicted to that. Now the only problem was that i didn't feel a sense of release of stress that i found thru my ciggerettes (nicotine), poker hands and fruit machine games. I now luckily can drink alcohol on the weekends and have found that that provides a release of stress. I do note that drinking alcohol all the time is also very bad for our health (and who wants big rosy red cheeks from drinking too much whisky). I do feel that summer and the sun also gives me vitamins and a sense of relaxation that you dont get in the winter. So maybe Sports outside over the summer would give you and me a sense of relaxation that we need to feel well thru everyday life and maybe destress us?. Either way i've improved a hell of a lot, i've only gambled twenty pounds since december the 23rd. I have had my moments where i've been like what the hell am i doing im living way too healthy i need to be bad!!!!!! Maybe the sense of feeling fine for not doing anything bad will come with time as we are definitely not used to it. Anyway rant over hope i've helped in some way. adam

Cheers guys, some really interesting thoughts there.

For me, somebody who has tried and failed several times before, the need to replace gambling with something has become increasingly apparent. The gym is great and helps me de-stress for sure. It definitely helps keep me away and is probably a close thing as I’ve found to keeping me away permanently but that specific dopamine injection I get from gambling is unparalleled. For me it’s actually a combination of the buzz and going into a sort of comfortable twilight world when I’m playing the online slots. I definitely do it to relieve stress. Friday nights are a firm favourite.

Angel, your idea of putting money away is a very good one and one I have actually been trying for the past 6 weeks. I have been steadily frittering away my mortgage reserve account over the years and made the decision back in late March to start paying it back at the rate of £500 per week until late next year. That’s a lot of money to have to find on a week to week basis but am due some dividends this year and next, which normally means ‘gambling funds’ in my vocabulary, but so far so good I’ve made all the payments so far.

I have to be careful though. Through this journey of discovery (sounds cheesy but that is what it is) I have found out many things about how this works. For whatever perverse reason (and not including the times I am gambling in a rut, chasing my losses), I am much more likely to gamble when I have a bit of a build up of cash in the bank and things are generally going well in my life. I was doing well a few weeks ago and my girlfriend made a comment that finally we were making savings (before the more we earn the more I secretly gambled). We’d saved £7,000 in just a few months. That, bizarrely, was then the catalyst to what I hope will end up being my final relapse. I heard her say that and again all I could think of was gambling it, like it was free tokens, which I pretty much then did, albeit out of the reserve account that she has no access to.