THE TALE OF AN ADDICTED GAMBLER: OWOYELE DIARIES

CORE-man SENSE^TM

                

           Why do addicted gamblers and smokers give up on their habits only to pick them back on in few months or days? Why would you write a resolution and not fulfil one out of the list. These and many more we would find out in this series of CORE-man SENSE^TM.

"Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided."

JOHN LOCKE

This is the identical force that drives people to gamble. Once they've gambled and been rewarded—and linked intense pleasure to the reward—that excitement and anticipation pushes them to go forward.

                                                               

               

When they haven't been rewarded in a while, often they have an even stronger sense that this time they'll be rewarded. What drives the gambler is the possibility of winning again. If a person were to gamble without ever receiving a reward, they would give up.

                                               

 However, receiving just a few small rewards, winning just a few hands, "earning" back just some of their money, keeps them in a state of anticipation that they could hit the jackpot.

                                                      

                         

This is why people who discontinue a bad habit (like smoking or gambling) for a period of months, and then decide to have "just one more hit," are actually reinforcing the very pattern that they're trying to break and making it much more difficult to be free of the habit for a lifetime. If you smoke one more cigarette, you're stimulating your nervous system to expect that in the future you'll reward yourself this way again. You're keeping that neuro-association highly active and, in fact, strengthening the very habit you're trying to break!

                                                                      

         

When people give up on a particular habit and let the bad habit take the most of them without hesitating to give it a fight or perhaps you’ve tried once or twice and thought it doesn’t just work with this kind, this phenomenon is called learned helpnessness. Learned helplessness is a destructive mindset people develop when they experienced enough failure at something. Like I often say habits are tiny fragments of thoughts neatly interwoven into actions which find enough strength or cause to be repeated often in our daily activities. Most habits can be broken by deliberate and repeated undoing of the habit, when it comes to habit you don’t just do the opposite once; you continually do the opposite against the strength of the habit until your brain can’t find any neuro-association with that act anymore. This occurs on the average for most between 21-30 days.

Thoughts results to action, and actions results to habits. Why don’t you keep a conscious watch of your thought today? “Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flows the springs of life.”                                                                      -PROVERBS 4:23