A fresh start!

Welcome kchurch

Wish you well on your journey. Staying positive and those steps you've taken should help you on your way. This isn't always easy, especially early on but in the long run, it is most certainly always worth being bet free. Should urges arise, get yourself on here and use your diary or read others diaries. Believe. You can do this.

Best wishes

-Alex

Day 4 and still staying strong! Day by day is feeling slightly better but it's a marathon not a sprint! I now have more focus and desire in other aspects of life and it feels good!
Krishan

Day 5 and have had no urge to gamble and just focused on starting to eat away at paying off my debts. I have been keeping myself busy to take my mind off betting and given control of my money to my girlfriend for the time being. I realised that during the last 5 years I haven't been happy even when I was winning and I know life will get better as time goes on.

Staying strong and focused

Krishan

Hi Krishan,

Very well done for joining this forum and your 5 days gamble free,they will soon add up trust me. Yes it is long marathon ahead, but help and support is here. Take a day at a time, and in some distance you will start seeing more benefits of life and everything around you.

Stay strong and keep going

Sandra

Thanks Sandra,

Reading some recovery stories on here have really inspired me and at the age of 23 I have time to get my life back on track as it were! I'm lucky because my friends and family are all so supportive and that was ignored when I was a gambler, I never appreciated it but now they are my motivation.

Krishan

Day 6 and got a lot done today in regards to work and then went out for a walk to clear my mind. I'm sleeping much better than when I did when I gambled and I am feeling much better within myself. I am slowly building up relationships that were damaged due to gambling and that has my full attention at the moment.

Stay Strong

Krishan

Krishan,

Welcome to the forum and well done for going five days gamble free. Take it one day at a time and all the benefits of being a happy, peaceful non-gambler will be yours. As the days add up you will notice changes in yourself and your mind-set that you would never have imagined.

Tomso.

How time flies, 512 days without a gamble. I cannot believe how much you can achieve with willpower and support from those close around you. Times have been tough of course but everyday is much improved..i am more focussed on other things now like I have taken up running and tennis, enjoying baking and also having much more time for everyone around me. I never thought I could go this long and I have no desire to go back to the place I was in a year and a half ago.

Hi and thanks so much for the support - exactly at the right time, today's the first morning (since I found my new determination to stop) that I've woken up actually contemplating gambling. I didn't and I won't.

512 days is amazing, well done. It shows what can be achieved when we truly want to stop and turn our lives around. It gives people like me hope so thanks for coming back and posting an update.

For some reason I've just sat and worked out when my day 512 will be - 1st April 2016. It seems forever away! But there's a new long term goal. On that day I will make sure I repay what you've just done for me by posting to someone in their early days to say well done, you can do it

Take care
Jess

I particularly have urges at the weekend due to sport however I now make sure I go out with friends on a Saturday afternoon just to get away from it all. My problem was always online as it didn't physically feel like I was losing money. Being only 24 I still have my life ahead of me and am determined to put the past behind me and have a positive input to create my own future.

I just took it one day at a time, some days are worse than others, and the days will just fly by and you will reap the benefits mentally and financially!

All the best

Krishan

Just an update on how it all started for me and where I am on my road to recovery. It all started at 18 first going to university. Online gambling seemed so accessable and i thought nobody could ever know I was gambling. I was very lucky in the respect my parents paid my first year accommodation up front so i had no outgoings. Started with ВЈ5/£10 football accumulators and for the first year or so kept the stakes the same and probably broke even/made a slight profit.

Second year of university came, saved quite a lot from year one which I always vowed never to touch. Stakes started to increase over time and broadened my horizons to tennis as it was always a sport I loved so I thought a quick way to make cash was to bet on a player to win a service game, for example, set one game 5 winner. To me at the time seemed logical because I could back ВЈ80 on the server holding at odds 1/4 for example. With this stupid theory I thought I could easily make back what I lost on football accumulators. This got progressively worse and thought the more I staked the more I could have won. Also each service game could be over as quick as two minutes so saw it as easy money. This only lasted so long when all my money in my current account had gone. I started digging into my £3,500 savings which lasted me until the end of my second year. That summer I vowed to stop because my year in industry was coming up which was a well paid job so this was my chance of a fresh start.

Placement year came where I secured a job for a chemical company for my year in industry, based in Frankfurt. Lasted about 3 months before I started to gamble again. I was stuck in a bad place mentally, didn't speak German, had no friends at all I'm Frankfurt and didn't feel I had anywhere to turn. I gambled every evening to pass the time. Again I was lucky as my rent was free as I lived on site so again had no outgoings whatsover so really I thought I had nothing to lose as I had a roof secured over my head. Payday would come and I would buy a big shop so I knee I would have food in the cupboard however the rest of my wages would be gone in hours. I went through a period of then thinking when next payday come if I just make ВЈ10 a day that's at least ВЈ300 a month..how hard could that be. That's when I started taking out payday loans to fund my habit. Managed to take out £2000 of payday loans in a month and thought I could make a profit and if not I could just withdraw what I deposited and pay the interest from my wages. Some months this was fine when I had a good few days so came out of the end of the first month with a profit. Next payday arrived, same story lost all my wages so turned to payday loans and was entitled to more. Lost all that and was at an all time low. Set up a payment plan with the lenders and paid off a bit a month however every payday would come where I ensured I still hand funds to gamble.

My year placement was over and just about paid off all my debts that I owed. Arrived back to my original home in Wales in July 2011 and first thing I did there was secure two summer jobs, one working at a 5* hotel and other working nights stacking shelves at sainsburys. In total I would earn and £1500 a month and did that for three months. I then quit the hotel job and got transferred stores with Sainsburys to the Huddersfield store where I was studying. With the money I had saved that summer not gambling I managed to pay for my first two rent installments and still had some saved for a rainy day.

This was my final year of a Chemistry could so i knew this was going to be tough! So my first term student loan came and went about a month without an urge to gamble..so far I had gone 121 days a thought this was it now..I'm never going back to the place I was in. I was exhausted working two jobs all summer and thought all that hard work must count for something. Slowly the work load increased, pressure from fellow students for my help increased and felt increasily stressed to keep everyone happy. I made absolutely no time for myself and got to the point where I couldn't face the world so locked myself in my room for days on end. This is when thoughts creeped into my mind about gambling as I would complete and submit work early so had evenings completely free. Unfortunately I returned to gambling with initial small ВЈ10 deposits then same old story , stakes increased, losses increased. What drawn my to online gambling was the secrecy about it all and the fact I didn't feel I was physically losing as I never saw the money I had lost..to me it just seemed like a number..almost as if it wasn't real. Went down the same route of payday loans/ payday wages being lost on gambling..maxing out my ВЈ5000 overdraft and £1500 credit card. I was at an all time low..managed to stay focussed and graduated with a 2:1 in the end but I wasn't happy within myself. All income I had would go straight in gambling. Again payment plans were set up and then I secured my first job relating to my degree and this was the boost I needed. Still I gambled every day but a little less as I ensured all my outgoings were paid and the rest I had would go on gambling. Got to the point in June 2013 where all my debts were paid off but was still gambling. I opened up to my current girlfriend at the time, my family and friends and told them I had every intention to stop.

This was when I first made this post. From that day, 27th June 2013 I didn't turn back! Been through a lot since..I was living in Cardiff and met my girlfriend in a queue at the killers gig 5th November 2012 and she was behind me. We got chatting and one thing led to another. She lived in Plymouth and I was living near Cardiff so one weekend she would come up and one weekend I would go down. Opened up to her about my gambling problem a couple of months in (June 2013) and have managed to be gamble free since. Life was going well and in March this year we decided time was right to find our own place together. I secured a job in Plymouth and made the move in April. A month in and she ended the relationship with me, stating she wasn't ready for this after all so I was renting a house for us which had stay in for a minimum of 6 months and rent wasn't cheap. Times were tough, I had no connections down here and thought its only a matter of time before I turn back to gambling. The 6 months passed and thought I would move to a shared house where the rent was almost half the price and was an opportunity to meet others. To this day I still live in the shared house, made new friends, taken up new hobbies and most importantly stayed motivated and didn't gamble.

Every day I feel more like my old self again before gambling was ever an issue and have never looked back but only ever forward.

Staying strong and sending my best wishes to you all.

Krishan

Finding things tough at the moment as the build up to christmas always seemed to be the height of my problems! Still keeping motivated and not giving in! I have come this far I really don't want to go back!

Krishan

Just a quick check in, hope youre all well.

Day 516 and already getting closer to my next target of day 600 then before you know it it will be two years since my last gamble! This is what is keeping me going, that and other posts on here knowing that things can change so quickly!

Krishan

Hi Krishan,

I'm still in awe of your 500+ days. You've come too far to go back to the gambling life. You're absolutely right, things can change so quickly. Just one spin could be the beginning of the end. Because we won't stop at just one spin, if we win we'll keep on playing, if we lose we'll keep on playing. And the reality is we don't know when we'll stop, £100 down? £500 down? £1000 down? More? It makes me feel physically sick that I had such disregard for money - I was exactly like you, money held no value at all, just numbers on a computer screen.

I know for me, still being very early in recovery, the misery gambling has caused is still very fresh. It's a memory far more vivid and far more powerful than any of the wins I ever had. For me personally, I think remembering the hundreds of small losses and all the associated feelings, and forgetting about the big wins, is what will get me through. If I focus on the bad side of it, hopefully I can override any positive memories of gambling that try to take hold.

But as you say, it's just one day at a time. It's all we can do. It's our addiction, ours to control or ours to be controlled by. I think we should stick with the first one, it makes for a happier life.

Take care
Jess