When Online Gambling Takes Over

It usually starts small. A free bet. A friend's tip. A match that is more interesting with something on it. For a while it is entertainment, and sometimes you win.

Then one day you are checking your phone before you are properly awake, you know exactly how much you owe and to whom, and you are doing arithmetic in a lecture that has nothing to do with the lecture.

If you are reading this late at night with that cold feeling in your stomach, you are not the first and you are not alone. What follows is not a lecture. It is a description of something I see often, and of what can be done about it.

What it actually takes from you

Money is the obvious loss, and usually the smallest one. What this really costs is time, sleep, concentration, the year you are supposed to be studying, the friendships you are managing rather than enjoying, and the easy sense of yourself you had before you started keeping secrets. Gambling steals your resources: time, money, joy, and the people around you.

This is not a character flaw

Betting apps are built by clever people to be hard to leave. They are open every minute of the day, they live in your pocket, they turn money into numbers on a screen, and they offer a free bet exactly when you were about to stop. Add advertising wrapped around the sport you love, and the surprise is not that some people get caught.

That said, the app is not really the problem, and I am not going to pretend it is. The world is full of things that can take hold of us; they are not going away, and treating the app as the enemy tends to produce short-lived fixes. What we can work with is the choosing: what you reach for, when, and what it is doing for you.

Gaming can take hold in the same way

This page says gambling throughout, but the same pull shows up in gaming. The hours disappear, sleep and attendance slip, and money leaks out through in-game purchases and loot boxes, which are gambling in all but name: you pay, you don't know what you'll get, and the near-miss keeps you going. If that is closer to your situation, you are in the right place. The work is the same.

Chasing losses

The turning point is rarely a big loss. It is the decision, after a big loss, that the way out is to win it back. From the inside it feels like the only logical move. It is the one move that guarantees the hole gets deeper. Trying to gamble your way out of gambling debt is like trying to cure poisoning by drinking more poison.

By then the betting is not entertainment. It is work, and the wages are dread.

When the money runs out

This is where it gets heavy, and where most people stop talking. Some of this may be familiar:

• Borrowing from friends, then borrowing from others to pay the first ones back
• Money meant for fees, res, books or food going into an account
• Student loan or bursary money spent, with the deadline still coming
• Micro-lenders and instant-cash apps at rates that grow the debt while you sleep
• Selling your laptop, your phone, your bike, things you will have to explain later
• Taking money or goods that aren't yours, telling yourself it is a loan you will repay on Saturday
• Lying easily and often, to people you love, about where you were and where the money went
• Acting completely out of character to avoid being found out

That last one matters. Most people I see are not as ashamed of the gambling as of who they had to become to hide it. That is worth saying out loud, because it is also the part that can be put right.

Making money online

When the debt is urgent and the options feel gone, some people start selling content of themselves online: camming, subscription sites, private requests. I am not here to judge that. How you earn money is your choice, and it is no one else's business.

What I do see is how often it doesn't stay a choice. Someone is brought in by a “friend” who makes it sound easy. Requests escalate quickly, and what felt manageable last month is not what is being asked this month. Some people are recorded and then threatened with being exposed to their contacts unless they pay, which is sextortion, and a crime committed against you. And it can become its own process addiction, with the same pull, the same secrecy and the same shame as the gambling it was meant to solve.

Two things worth knowing, neither of which requires you to tell anyone in your life:

• If content of you is out there, or you are being threatened with it, there are free services that stop it spreading: Take It Down if you were under 18 in the images, and StopNCII.org if you were 18 or over. You keep the images; they never leave your device.
• If you are being blackmailed, don't pay, and don't delete the messages. Paying almost always brings a second demand.

One thing I must say plainly: if you are under 18, this isn't work, whatever you were told. In South African law, sexual content of anyone under 18 is child sexual abuse material, and the adults asking for it are committing serious crimes. You are the one being exploited. You are not in trouble with me for it.

Where this is heading, in South Africa and elsewhere

You are not an unusual case, and this is not a small local problem.

• South Africa's national gambling helpline took 5 199 calls for help in 2025/26, almost 25% more than the year before. More than half came from people aged 18 to 35, including 198 students.
• National survey figures put adult gambling participation at about 65%, up from roughly 31% in 2017, with around R1.5 trillion wagered in 2024/25.
• In Australia, about 31% of secondary school students have gambled, with exposure to gambling advertising linked to higher risk.
• In the UK, keeping gambling advertising away from young people is now a national debate.

It is arriving here faster than the support for it is being built. That is part of why I am writing this.

What helps

There is no single right route, and very little is compulsory. What works depends on you, your situation, what you need and what you have to work with. Broadly, though:

• Telling one person. Not everyone. One. The relief of putting it down is usually immediate, and everything else gets easier afterwards.
• Understanding what the gambling has been doing for you. Escape, excitement, control, a way to fix everything alone. Until that is understood, stopping tends not to last.
• Looking honestly at the numbers with someone. What is owed, to whom, at what rate. It is almost always less frightening on paper than in your head at 2am. Where debt is serious, a registered debt counsellor can help, though that is an option, not a requirement.
• Deciding what you are aiming for, stopping altogether or reducing the harm, and agreeing in advance how you will know if it isn't working.
• Rebuilding what it cost: the trust, the friendships, the time, the sense of yourself.

What I won't do: push you to hand your bank card to someone else, or treat blocking apps as the answer. Those things can have their place for a short while, but they punish and shrink your life rather than strengthen it, and they leave the real question untouched. My aim is for you to be free of this, not fenced away from it.

About your parents

Nobody is told anything. What you bring stays between us, within the usual limits described on the FAQ page. Telling your family is your decision, in your own time, if and when you want to. It is never a condition of working with me, and I will never do it behind your back.

If the time comes when you want them to know, we can work out together how that might go. Many people find it is the moment the weight finally lifts, but that is your call, not mine.

Working with this

Gambling and other process addictions are part of my daily work, in private practice and previously in clinics in South Africa and abroad. The approach is the same one described on my Addiction and Dual Diagnosis page: no fear, guilt or judgement, no disease model and no lectures. Just an honest look at what is happening, and at what you want your life to be instead.

Getting in touch

Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form. You don't need to explain everything, or to have decided anything. “I think I have a gambling problem” is enough to start with.

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