Signs Of Sports Betting Addiction
Are you worried or concerned about your sports betting or the sports betting of someone you know? While a mental health professional is needed for a formal diagnosis of disordered gambling, you can spot some of the signs of a sports gambling addiction independently.
You don’t need any formal education or expertise to realize that betting has become a problem.
Signs of a sports betting addiction often overlap with general gambling addiction indicators but can have specific nuances related to sports.
This article will give you an overview of what to look for if you suspect sports betting addiction. It’s important to know that addiction is a process and can worsen from relatively manageable stages to complete rock bottom for an individual.
Regardless of the addiction severity, it’s never too late to quit sports betting and begin recovery from the affliction. Recovery can involve a formal disordered gambling diagnosis.
Let’s cover what you need to know to begin your journey away from gambling or give you the information to help someone in your life.
Sports Betting Addiction Overview
There is no sequence of events to determine whether you or someone you know has a sports betting addiction or is in the process of developing one.
Many signs can develop alongside other signs, or you might not experience some of the signs that mark a gambling problem while experiencing others.
Ultimately, people are unique, and no one develops a sports betting addiction in exactly the same way. However, patterns have emerged among those who suffer from sports betting addiction, with remarkable similarities between experiences. This is part of the reason why group therapy, often in the form of Gambler’s Anonymous, has been effective for some people.
You aren’t alone if you’re suffering from a betting problem, so here’s what to look for in your experiences that many others have also dealt with.
Preoccupation with Betting
An early warning sign for a developing sports betting addiction is spending an excessive amount of time analyzing sports statistics, player or team news and associated betting odds beyond a casual interest. 24/7 sports media caters to many people in this problematic way.
What counts as excessive varies based on the person. However, if your sports betting interest veers into a fixation or obsession, that could be a precursor to developing a gambling problem.
Being a diehard sports fan is fairly common and has become normalized in many countries, especially the U.S. with football. This passion can be harmless, but it becomes a risk when you mix in gambling. Millions of people already have a deep emotional connection to sports.
Ironically, if you are obsessed with following sports then betting might be especially unsuitable for you. Casual sports fans often lose less money betting on sports than hardcore fans.
Now that we’ve covered the mental fixation with thinking about sports and odds, let’s dive into what it means to lose control over gambling itself.
Inability to Stop or Control Betting
Arguably the most clear-cut sign of an addiction to sports betting is a difficulty with stopping or scaling back the act of gambling. This can be defined as compulsive gambling.
It’s compulsive because you have started to lose control over your own behavior. An example is opening up a sports betting app with the feeling of it being almost involuntary, like it has become such an ingrained habit that you are no longer consciously deciding to gamble.
Sports betting has blown past even the problematic state of being a routine into a real danger zone. You feel that your impulses to gamble are too strong to resist.
Of course, there are stages of this slide into compulsive sports betting, but you should be able to notice things going off the rails at a relatively early stage in the addiction. Getting help to prevent sports betting addiction from further hurting your life is crucial.
Time vs. Money
Commonly, before a total inability to stop gambling are concerns that you’re spending too much time and/or money on betting.
Perhaps you think it’s just a matter of reducing your bet sizes because you’ve lost a bit more than you felt comfortable with. Perhaps you think solving the developing problem is just a matter of cutting down your screen time because you think that you’re spending a bit too much time looking at a sports betting app or website.
Reducing time and money spent gambling can be effective for some people, but for a huge number of gamblers, doing so ranges from difficult to nearly impossible.
Failures to reduce the time and/or money used for sports betting can be huge red flags to watch out for before your problematic gambling evolves into a full-blown gambling disorder.
Increasing Bet Sizes (Chasing Losses)
Even more concerning than an inability to reduce the size of your bets is increasing your bet sizes to feel the same gambling euphoria (more on that later) or to recoup losses.
The desire to get even, back to where you started monetarily, might seem relatively harmless at first, but this can become an uncontrollable urge in problem gamblers. This is called chasing losses, and it’s one of the most glaring warning signs of gambling addiction.
Some people chase losses that they experienced in a single day. For other sports bettors, the loss chasing might be to recover money lost over the previous month. Regardless of the time frame in question, gambling in order to get back to even is risky.
It’s best to quit betting entirely if you feel a desire to quit gambling upon getting back to even.
Debt & Financial Hardship
Financial problems can range from immediate for some problem gamblers or take years to develop for others. The sports betting industry often preaches the vague concept of “setting a budget” for gambling, but doing so is very difficult for a great many sports bettors.
Borrowing money to gamble, whether from friends or family, often comes later in the addiction process, with early signs often being increased credit card debt or depleted savings.
Theft or embezzlement happens in more extreme cases, but criminal activity to continue to fund gambling often marks a person nearing rock bottom in their gambling addiction.
Using Betting to Escape
Gambling can be harmless entertainment for some people, but for many others it’s used as a form of “escape” to avoid unpleasant feelings, perhaps covering up underlying mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression—which can be acute or chronic.
Sports betting can command nearly your complete focus, which is an intoxicating feeling for people looking for a reprieve from negative thoughts and feelings.
It can be challenging to become self-aware of this behavior, but there can be indicators to pick up on. If you had a bad day at work or school and you look to gambling to feel better, that’s a worrying sign. If you have a significant adverse life event, such as a breakup or the loss of a loved one, and you go on a gambling binge to deal with the trauma, that’s a danger sign.
Using gambling to deal with acute stress is dangerous, but it’s arguably even riskier to seek gambling as a way to cope with more chronic issues like anxiety and depression.
Mood Swings
If you’re using gambling as an escape from negative thoughts and feelings, you will likely have mood swings based on your gambling results. These swings can further undermine you.
Gambling is, at best, a temporary fix, a band-aid of sorts. Given your mental health struggles, it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to emotionally regulate yourself to deal with the ups and downs of gambling. Some days you might win, some days you will lose, and this roller coaster of euphoria from winning and negative feelings from losing will ultimately worsen your mental health.
A big win might have you feeling confident and in control, while a big loss might wreck your self-esteem and put you on the metaphorical mental ice skates.
Social Withdrawal
Using gambling for escapism often involves withdrawing from other social activities in order to gamble. These could be activities you had once enjoyed.
This withdrawal often involves secrecy about your betting habits. You should quit gambling entirely if you’re starting to feel ashamed or embarrassed by your sports betting and find yourself being dishonest to conceal your betting activity.
This social withdrawal doesn’t necessarily have to be physically isolating yourself. You could be compulsively checking your phone to bet or check in on the status of your bets while you’re in the presence of others or in the middle of other activities.
Difficulty in being “present” around other people with a preoccupation with gambling is a warning sign of a sports betting addiction. Your social withdrawal could start off as merely looking at your phone a lot when with friends or family, eventually leading to complete self-isolation to gamble via a mobile device in private.
Relationship or Work/Career Loss
Closely related to social withdrawal is neglect of responsibilities you have in life, whether they’re responsibilities to friends, family, children, work or groups/organizations you belong to.
Neglecting to fulfill such responsibilities can begin to erode relationships, creating a vicious compounding process of isolating yourself more as you feel strain in your relationships.
Gambling can be a predominant factor in divorce or family breakdown. At least one study has shown that the mood swings from sports betting increase the chance of intimate partner violence.
Worsening Physical Health
Sometimes, gambling causes you to withdraw from activities that are good for your overall health and longevity. This can include neglecting physical exercise and poor eating habits.
More extreme cases of sports betting addiction can lead to skipping or failing to make necessary doctor’s appointments and declining personal hygiene.
Studies have shown that gambling is bad for your heart health.
As always, the horrible impacts of gambling addiction can compound. Social withdrawal because of gambling can lead to poor personal hygiene that in turn reinforces more social isolation, relationship loss and neglect of responsibilities.
Stages of a Sports Betting Addiction?
Now that we’ve covered the basics of what to look for in yourself or someone you know, let’s discuss whether it’s possible to understand sports betting addiction in terms of stages. We’ve used this word loosely throughout this article.
While in a general sense this addiction can progress over time, it’s unfortunately impossible to categorize the signs neatly into clear-cut stages. This is because every person has a unique experience with problem gambling, with addiction developing rapidly for some people and taking years for others. Some people can also manage a relatively mild addiction for a long time.
You might have heard the informal and somewhat controversial term “functional alcoholic” before, which means someone who is addicted to drinking but can, at least temporarily, keep their life on the rails. The concept of a “functional problem gambler” has yet to become a popular concept among non-medical professionals, and we’d argue that the concept has little benefit for understanding sports betting addiction or recovering from it.
Moreover, you’re not going to find a medical health professional that would give you a label of, for example, “stage 3” sports betting addiction—because addiction isn’t conceptualized like cancer. Instead, terms such as at-risk gambler are used to describe the early part of a possible descent into full-blown sports betting addiction (officially called disordered gambling).
While you’re not going to find a linear path for sports betting addiction, you can, of course, detect early warning signs and take a break from sports betting or quit entirely. It’s never too late to quit. Real winners in life know when to walk away from something that is hurting them and/or holding them back.
Image by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press