HealthyGamerGG - Psychiatrist Answers Twitter's Questions About Online Gambling (Gambling Addiction)

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Dr. K answers Twitter's Questions about Online Gambling! He covers everything from ADHD to Susceptibility to Loot Boxes and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I watch 10 clips of people hitting it big, what do you think my brain learns about the likelihood that I will win it big? If I saw a clip of 100 people losing a ton of money, what would I learn? If I saw a clip of 100 people winning a bunch of money, what would I learn? Why do people warning me about the risks make me want to do it more? What a great question. How can someone with ADHD have a healthy relationship with a game like poker? Oh my God, such good questions.

So when someone warns you get away from something, sometimes you want to do it more. Ain't that the truth? The question is why is that? So a couple things to consider. The first is that if you're, so that we know that like oppositional natures are somewhat of a personality characteristic. So I think some kids learn best by being told and some kids learn best by sort of figuring it out themselves.

I've spent a lot of time with kids from both camps. So some of that is just personality where we have a society where the more we standardize protocolize, you know, institute warnings, we're not really accommodating a particular type, a personality type, variant within our population, which is that some kids, like, need to be, like, they're sort of discovery learners, as opposed to dissemination learners. Some kids, like, are fine with disseminating information. They just kind of absorb it like a sponge, and they're good. But if you're a discovery learner, then what you need to do is, like, explore the concept yourself, and we just don't facilitate self-understanding. So that's the first. Issue number two is that sometimes the

reason that we're rebellious when we're told not to do something is because we discovered early on that the things that are forbidden for us are actually really fantastic. Like sometimes that's what it is. So imagine that I grow up in a household where, you know, I wasn't, so I wasn't like allowed to drink, let's say Coke, right? All the other kids get to have Coke and all the other kids get to play video games. I don't get to play video games. I don't get to have Coke. So I don't get to have Sprite. I don't get to have any soda. Pepsi, nothing. And so like when I go to my friend's house and I have a soda and I get to play video games. I'm like, wow, this is really amazing. I love this stuff. So some of us then learn what's the lesson that that child learns? The child learns that,

oh, the stuff that is restricted to me is like actually fantastic. And so once you learn that, if you've been raised in a very restrictive household, then you're going to have some programming or conditioning to run into the direction of what you've been warned away against, right? So I think those are two really, really, really key things to think about. If you want to understand why do I gravitate towards things that are forbidden, you have to explore your own experience with things that are forbidden and try to figure out like, where did this attraction to the forbidden thing come from, and recognize that a certain amount of it may be personality. Second question was, how can someone with ADHD have a healthy relationship with a game like poker? The answer is

honestly, it's hard. So what we know from research on ADHD is that people with ADHD are, first of all, more vulnerable to addictions in general compared to the population. There's a whole video about that in Dr. K's guide to ADHD and doing stuff. Basically, if you look at how the brains of people with ADHD are different, what you find is there's some neuroscience change, some changes in capacity, like higher amount of impulsivity, less amount of delayed gratification, difficulty executing and planning tasks, a tendency to procrastinate. These are vulnerabilities of the ADHD brain.

And what you find is along comes an addiction, and they're like, hey, I see that you're highly impulsive and have trouble delaying gratification. You're now my new best friend. Let's go. let's go party. Let's have a great, great time. And so it's almost like ADHD is like gives you a debuff that makes you vulnerable to addiction. So if you've got ADHD and you're playing video games or gambling or stuff like that, just recognize that it's going to be an uphill battle for you compared to a neurotypical person. And I think there's like strong enough evidence

for me to be able to make that generalization. Not saying that people with ADHD can't conquer addictions or not everyone is prone to addiction, but if we look at populations of people, if we take a thousand people with ADHD and a thousand people who are neurotypical, what we'll find is that the amount of addiction in the ADHD population will be higher than the neurotypical population. It's just how it is. The other thing is that a lot of times people think about addiction treatment and what we call dual diagnosis, which means that we acknowledge that, for example, if you have depression and you have an alcohol addiction, the two are going to be synergistic and you can't just treat one. So why do I drink? I drink to cope. So I can become sober, but if my depression is

untreated and I become depressed, I'm going to need the alcohol to cope with the depression. The flip side is even if I start, let's say, medication or treatment for depression, I can deal with that depression, but if I keep drinking, the alcohol will have a neuro-neurological effect on my mood and predispose me to depression. You can even get something called a substance induced mood disorder. So like alcohol can in and of itself cause a depressive episode. So generally speaking, when we think about dual diagnosis, we think about mood disorders and addictions. We don't think about ADHD and addiction. So oftentimes that's something that's very, very important. You have to treat the ADHD and the addiction simultaneously. Is it possible to make someone more susceptible to gambling?

If so, how do gambling sites take advantage of this? It's absolutely possible to make someone more susceptible to gambling. So if we go back to the psychology of how people get into gambling, remember, we discussed a lot of different things, impulsivity. Impaired risk calculations. Illusion of control, right? So I don't calculate the costs. I believe I can affect change. There's also aspects of peer pressure and advertising. And if trendy, our brains are vulnerable to what's trendy. So how do gambling sites take advantage of this? Really simple, right? Wow, you win $1 million. Look at all these people winning. $69,000 winning and $18 loss. Top 10, streamers biggest wins of 2020. Casino ground. How do they take advantage of it? This is how they take advantage of it. They create a

culture. They create a system where big streamers get to win. Big streamers get to win. The Rest will handle itself. Things will get clipped. Things will get shipped. Things will get shared. Things will get edited. And it'll increase the illusion of your control. It'll impair your ability to accurately predict what will happen if you spend $100 on these sites. They'll do all these things automatically. Is it even advertising? No, it's not an advertisement. They're not paying for an advertisement. They're completely in compliance with all the laws. How can we fault them? They're not doing anything wrong. This is the law. I'm like a business that's operating well within the limit of the law. I'm not doing anything illegal. That's the standard, right? Is that

that is a corporation, I shouldn't do anything illegal. Great. I'm adhering to that standard. Do loot boxes and gotcha systems count as gambling in an addiction standpoint? Why are some people can't control themselves while others can stop whenever they want? So let's talk about loop boxes. So loot boxes are this beautiful, beautiful gray area. There's a part of me that doesn't really fault game developers for loot boxes. Because loot boxes are a natural evolution of mechanics that 100% used to be okay.

So back in the day, I was addicted to Diablo too. And the cool thing about Diablo 2 is when you do a boss run, the boss drops a rain. A chill in the air. The howling of the wind. An army of monsters begging for candy at your door. Three perfectly acceptable reasons to stay in this Halloween. That's why there's Drizzly, the go-to app for alcohol delivery. With Drizzy, you can compare prices on the biggest selection of beer, wine, and spirits,

and choose from a variety of convenient delivery options. It's almost frighteningly easy. So download the Drizley app or go to Drizzi. That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y.com. Random loot. And that made the game more fun, right? Because like random loot, like random loot is fine. There's no problem with random loot, right?

We're randomizing loot. We have whole games that are built on randomization, like procedurally generated. Like what, we're going to ban procedurally generated games because they're random loop? But it's random loot. And now what we're going to do is we're going to take the random loot and we're going to put it inside a virtual box. It's just a random reinforcement schedule.

There's nothing illegal with that. In fact, it's quite legal, right? You can buy a lottery ticket. So then things got a little bit tricky. because in-game items started to have real-world value. So I opened a treasure from the Dota 2 game, and I got an item. I looked at it. I was informed by the game that this treasure sells for $600.

So I was like, let's sell it. I don't care about cosmetics. So items sold for $600, then I had like infinite steam money for a while. So then the question is, okay, hold on a second. Is this a cosmetic item if it has real world value? Are you really gambling? So some countries actually think so. So I believe it's Belgium.

I may have gotten that wrong. But some countries have actually started regulating. They've classified loot boxes under regular gamblers. They've said this counts because the second we've crossed over, or not the second, but now that we've substantially crossed over from virtual items to real world money, you're gambling for a virtual item that has no inherent value but does have an external value. You're now... So is that correct?

I'm not sure. So I'm not an expert in policy. But like what I do know is it's a one hell of a great. area. I think we're getting closer and closer to those needing to be regulated. But where is the dividing line on that? Like, you're welcome to have an opinion. I'm sure anyone out there has an opinion. I don't know that your opinion is right. Because like then, okay, so like let's just do the math. So if I can sell an item on eBay in a video game and someone is willing to buy it and it's not found in a loot box, but it drops from a boss, does that make, and the boss has a random loot table? Does that mean

that bosses and video games that have bosses with random loot tables should be regulated as gambling. I don't know. I mean, that sounds a bit extreme to me. But if you all say yes, okay, if you all say no, like feel free to share your thoughts. Now, there's a second part to the question. Why are some people, why can't some people control themselves when other people can't? Why can some people control themselves and other people can't? That unfortunately is a very complex question. So here's how I would answer it very simply. The ability to control your behavior, which we'll talk about later today. the ability to control your behavior has to do with trait and states. There's some reasons, a part of the reason why some people can control themselves is because of

essentially like some things that are pretty hard wired, right? So if you grew up and your frontal lobes developed in a nice, healthy way, right? If they grew up in the absence of mood-altering substances. So for example, like if you didn't smoke pot before the age of 30, that has been shown to impair, I mean, smoking pot has been shown to impair frontal lobe development. So depending on how your brain developed, if you were taught by your parents to a certain degree, like delayed gratification and taught how to study and taught how to do all kinds of stuff, then it can be easier to control your impulses.

If you are not taught those things or you were born with a brain that's ADHD or whatever, then it's going to be harder for you because of your brain. But that's not the whole thing. So people will think, oh my God, that means I'm screwed. No, because there's a software component as well. And what we've learned from psychiatry is that the software component probably in a lot of ways is more important than the hardware component. That you can take someone who has ADHD and you can do therapy with them.

And if you do therapy with them or you work with someone who's like an ADHD coach, which is something that I hear a lot about nowadays. Right. So we also equip our coaches with some stuff to help people get organized. That you can learn particular things to compensate for whatever your brain is naturally tending toward. And so there's a lot of addiction is also state-based. So it's not just what you can learn, but it's how you feel in the moment.

If I'm alone in life sitting at home all day and have nothing to look forward too. It's way easier to get addicted to a substance or gambling or gaming or whatever, right? There's an internal emotional state, which we also know very strongly neuroscientific. And there's an excellent researcher named, I don't know how to pronounce this, V-O-L-K-O-W, Volkow, Volko, I don't know. Best researcher on this stuff, excellent neuroscience paper about how a lack of awareness of your internal state predisposes you to addiction. And so if you look at the mechanisms through which meditation helps people with addiction is we learn how to become aware

of our internal emotional state and we learn how to emotionally regulate ourselves. And once you have those two things, once you can regulate your state, you no longer are going to be as vulnerable to the addictive substance. So in a nutshell, it's trait and state. Part of the way that you were born,

you were wired. Some people are luckier. Other people are unluckier when it comes to addiction specifically. And then some people are more vulnerable because of their circumstances or even how they're feeling, moment to moment. I think her name is Nora Volkow. So if we look at, if you all want to see,

I'm sure this is, I don't know if this is the right paper, but this is the right person. Yep, this is fantastic. I think it's, let's see, PDF. Okay, Lance at Psychiatry is not in the public domain. But like, fantastic. Okay. Last question. Is watching people gamble dangerous? Can seeing others gamble make it more likely to become addictive? I'm going to go ahead and say, on balance, yes. There is a risk to watch people gamble. And that too, there's some nuance here, because it's not just watching people gamble. It's the way in which you watch them gamble. And what aspect of the gambling are you watching? So, for example, watching a clip compilation of people gambling, I think will probably be more harmful than watching eight hours of like someone just clicking buttons. Maybe I'm wrong so that

data could show the opposite. But I think if we look at some of these things like illusion of control and expectation of reward, when I watch 10 clips of people hitting it big, what do you think my brain learns about the likelihood that I will win it big. If I saw a clip of a hundred people losing a ton of money, what would I learn? If I saw a clip of 100 people winning a bunch of money, what would I learn? And so I do think that there is a danger to watching people gamble. But that I think is also variable, right? So it's not like binary. And so watching a stream, I mean, who knows, maybe watching a stream for eight hours is actually more damaging because you're getting inundated with it, inundated with it, inundated with it. Maybe you're watching it on the second screen and the only time

you pay attention is when there's a big win. Maybe you get bombarded with the sensory stimuli and all the banners and the logos and the colors. Maybe that that has a worst effect. I don't know. But in general, I'd say yes, that watching people gamble will make you more prone to gambling. And that's not specific to gambling, by the way. Right? So if I like watch people eat chicken nuggets, I'm going to want to eat chicken nuggets.

If I watch people playing a video game, I'm going to want to play the video game. It's how human beings work. Right now, Amazon is offering some amazing extra perks that come with a job offer. If you start a warehouse job, you can get a $1,000 sign-on bonus. That means you start earning a paycheck right away, plus you get extra cash to use before the holidays. Applying is so easy, you don't even need an interview.

It's never been so rewarding to start an hourly job that's close to home. So what are you waiting for? To join the team today, visit amazon.com slash sign-on bonus. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer.