Day 353 - Make Quitting Gambling the Foundation to a New Life
I still think about gambling every single day, I think about it all the time. I get urges to gamble, I have frequent thoughts such as “Wouldn’t playing a little poker tournament right now be fun?”, “What is the harm in putting a few hundred on a slot machine?”, “Wouldn’t sitting down to a nice NBA game with a small bet on be enjoyable?”. I have these thoughts everyday. It is kind of odd, since I have spent the past year telling myself how much I hate gambling, how it has destroyed my life… and yet my brain looks at the prospect of gambling as a “I wish we could do this nice harmless thing”.
If I had only quit gambling, if I hadn’t also switched up my entire life philosophy, if I had not also implemented other daily habits, if I had not started focusing on my health and sleep then I think thoughts like these would have me relapsing. That is what happened before when I had breaks from gambling, when I had tried to quit before. Yet, something is different this time. Before, when I was having an urge to relapse, I had nothing backing it up. I wasn’t changing my life, my life wasn’t getting better without gambling. While my bank account may have been getting healthier, I certainly wasn’t. And so… after enough urges I was back gambling again, because why not? I had nothing to lose.
Now, I have a lot to lose. Thinking about gambling again, about actually relapsing, to me now seems like a disgusting prospect. It makes me sick to my stomach to even consider gambling again, because I have a lot to lose. I have almost a year of real hard tough life changes. I have almost a year of self discovery and spiritual growth. It doesn’t make sense to me to relapse… I would be giving up so much. This is were all addicts should try to get to, to the point where relapsing just doesn’t compute anymore in the brain. Where the thought of relapsing becomes foreign and alien. I don’t gamble… anything else just doesn’t make sense anymore.
It is not easy to get to this point, because it takes real change. I love the old wisdom of “Quitting was easy, changing everything else was the hard part”. The main wisdom here is that when I say everything I mean EVERYTHING. You can’t just be the same person and decide you are done with your addiction, you really do have to become a different person. I already wrote an article about how hard it is for adults to actually really change themselves. In the article I want to talk about a technique that I used early on in my recovery and use everyday still.
For me, the idea was that I was not going to gamble anymore, I knew that… and I knew I had so many other things in my life to change and fix. I knew changing my life was going to be incredibly hard and be a long process with many road bumps. What kept me going, what got me to start cleaning my room, eating better, sleeping better, working better.. was that at the end of the day I knew two things.
Quitting gambling is not easy, the likelihood of quitting and not relapsing was low, especially since I was doing this on my own, no therapy, no support groups. So I knew that everyday I didn’t gamble was a HUGE SUCCESS. Something to be PROUD OF EVERYDAY.
No matter what, I was no longer a gambler. I could have an off day on everything else… but NO MATTER WHAT I WASN’T GOING TO GAMBLE.
So, when I came to real life hard choices, hard actions, I always deferred back to these two beliefs. I could stall out my progress on changing my life, but no matter what I was going to keep being a non-gambler, and in doing so I was doing and accomplishing something incredibly difficult. If I could do that then I could do anything. What gave me the power to continue changing my life is that I always had this foundational thing to fall back on. I knew quitting gambling was something I could feel proud of and celebrate internally. I gained power from thinking about how hard it was to quit, how far I had already come.
If I was having a tough time doing something I knew I wanted, for example, eating more healthy, then I knew I had the ability to do it, because I had already quit gambling. I knew I would be able to do it eventually, because I had already quit gambling. I knew that if I got down on myself for not doing it, I could say to myself it took 20 years to quit gambling, I am not going to beat myself up over delaying my goals a few days.
Quitting Gambling is easy, changing everything else is the hard part… BUT it is only in reflection that we say Quitting Gambling is easy. The reality is, quitting gambling is fucking hard as well, statistics back it up. Quitting gambling is the hardest thing I ever have done and it will be the hardest thing I ever do. Everything else is easy in comparison. Yet, it is only easy because I have the foundation of quitting gambling.
Think about the following “Climbing Everest is easy, Climbing every other mountain in the world is the hard part”. It is true, but doesn’t diminish the incredible difficulty it took to climb that first mountain. Never diminish the difficulty in quitting gambling. Instead use it. The most useful technique that got me through the tough first six months was everyday I told myself I was basically climbing a mountain everyday, that what I was doing was incredibly hard and that few other adults go through such hardships. I found comfort and power in knowing what I was doing was very hard.
Today, while it may seem like some of the life changes I want to make are harder then quitting gambling… I know deep down that I was sitting on my bed at 3 months in telling myself I was climbing a mountain everyday. I know deep down I was crying when listening to gambling podcasts. I know deep down how fucking hard a struggle it was to get to this day. I use that to help me keep going, I use that to help me make the hard life changes. I use that everyday to keep me from gambling.