Addicted to betting apps or your phone?

Whether an addiction to online gambling is first reliant on a dependency to your mobile phone.

Before I start

There is an ambivalence when it comes to writing about the times I was deep in a life of addiction. At one point in recovery, the stories were pouring out of me after being locked away in secrecy for so long. Now, one year in, I sort of shrug my shoulders and think ‘is sharing it actually helping me anymore?’ And in that question there is the deeper consideration of why I love to write and what I do it for.

The absence of the necessity to write has left behind a mocking tumbleweed on my Substack. When I reopened the app after a little bit of time away, I had a message from Sean Corcoran, who is a recovering gambler like myself; his message inspired me to write this piece. Sean is one of only a few gamblers I’ve found on Substack, along with Yannis Helios; we are all really keen to create a community who can benefit from writing and reading about gambling related harms and recovery. The building of connections is one of my motivations for writing, and I’m not talking about some Linkedin style networking nonsense, I want to feel like I know and care for a person as we share our stories.

How I became seriously addicted to gambling

I was introduced to gambling on my phone when I was at University. I recall the conversation and remember it was all about convenience. I showed my housemate my paper bet slip, it was a £2 accumulator for the Saturday 3pm football fixtures. This was a semi-regular type of bet I’d place when my gambling was under control. He showed me that I could place exactly the same bet online, the money would come straight out of my bank account and would save me the faff of walking to the bookies and having to scribble in the boxes. Little did I know this would be the start of a crippling addiction to the Skybet app. It’s easy to say this was the point my life changed forever, but I think I’d have gone down the same route whenever I’d have downloaded the app. Trust me, as a young man who likes sport and drinking beer, there was never going to be a situation where I would escape the lure of online gambling.

Betting app advertisement is everywhere, and it’s now so normalised to punt money on a game of sport. I always felt a little dirty placing my bets in the bookies. There was something grimly satisfying about having a bet on the football amidst the people who watched the horse racing, or those punching the slots in the corner of the room. I found a buzz from entering this underground world that was both scary and enticing; I would walk out of the door before it had chance to snatch me forever. When it came to betting on the app, there were none of these seedy undertones. The interface was slick and professional with images of well-liked pundits and professionals alike. This is where people went to win money, not throw it away like the degenerates in the shops; those who would grip scrunched-up newspapers and shout at the tv screens, wasting their lives away.

The apps were designed to be fast; depositing money could be done in a matter of seconds. There used to be occasions I would realise it was 2.58pm and I hadn’t yet placed an accumulator on the football, I’d almost always be able to load the app, deposit the money and get the bet on before 3pm; frantic. The idea of returning thousands of pounds after just a few clicks of a phone screen was intoxicating. At the start withdrawals took a few days to hit the bettor’s account, but in my last punting days they were instantaneous. The moving of significant amounts of money was another exhilarating pastime on the app. Hitting big meant shifting money around and maybe even paying off some debts minutes after the bet had settled; a surreal feeling of financial power. Whenever I’d hit the withdraw button I felt a great relief, but also it felt like starving myself - that money could have been invested into more bets.

The chicken or the egg?

I personally don’t think I was ever addicted to my phone, but like most teenagers, I did spend a lot of time on it. As an active person, I always stayed healthy and participated in sports and hobbies, meaning I’d put down my phone for hours and not think about it. In addition to this, I never struggled to put my phone down to have conversation or watch a film, I wasn’t attached to it. At the time I discovered online gambling, I was in a new city where I didn’t have close connections to lots of people, I started using my phone more than ever. Perhaps I was feeling a new wave of emotion I didn’t quite understand. I sought quick dopamine hits to forget about my loneliness; Instagram, Facebook, online chess, online poker; anything that helped me escape. My phone creeped into the moments of the day where I was alone, where previously a book might have been read or a hike may have been walked. So as I sat down more often looking for the dopamine, I found that the gambling apps had it in abundance. If it wasn’t for the addiction to searching my phone for quick fixes, for the convenience of dopamine, would I have become addicted to gambling?

Over recent years, the App Store has seen a wave of companies looking to profit off those addicted to the dopamine opportunities their phone applications provide. It’s an interesting cycle of dependence on one app or the other; everything is still aligned to keep you using that phone of yours. The way I see it is that if I’d have discovered TikTok before online gambling I’d have probably just become the annoying guy in a coffee shop playing loud videos, instead of building up thousands of pounds of debts gambling. But what a serious, crippling addiction to gambling gave me was a chance to recover, with support networks and information out there to help me. The mobile phone addiction is something that has taken over the world, and the scale at which people are affected makes me terrified of how many will get unnecessarily caught up in problem gambling.

Putting the phone down

As I go through my journey of recovery, I am increasingly aware of my problematic behaviours. I am less dependent on my phone to feel good for a moment; in fact I am conscious now that the temporary feelings my phone can provide me are nothing but fleeting, counterfeit micro-emotions that aren’t worth seeking in the first place. There is a significant acknowledgment that I had to overcome my phone addiction to break free of the shackles of gambling. The two worked in tandem to destroy the part of my brain that felt real emotion, feeding off my need to escape, to disassociate, and then bring me back for more.

I still use my phone for quick hits of dopamine; on the train, lying in bed, on my break at work, in a coffee shop - a little bit here and there, it is what it is. Yet, when it really matters, the phone gets put away. It’ll never stop me from seeing the people I love anymore. It’ll never drive me to the point of anxiety where I can’t leave the house. It’ll never again lead me down a road that nearly ended my life all together. Not being addicted to my phone means not being addicted to gambling, and to flip the two around has the same significance of meaning. In asking what came first, the chicken or the egg, we’re understanding that one could not exist without the other, and in my case that is the perfect conclusion.