Taking Stock: A report on the quality of mental health and addictions services.
True Addiction
The above is sometimes just a disastrous
attempt to recoup losses, rather than true addiction, but the latter often occurs for both mental and physical reasons as follows. Trading can give you a kick and a rush, and blot out reality, just like illegal drugs. If there is an innate psychological tendency toward compulsion and addiction, the initially harmless (cheap) thrills can turn into an obsessive desire to repeat and prolong the pleasure. However, just as heroin addicts reputedly spend most of their junkie careers chasing unsuccessfully after the incredible high of the first shot, so too it is with trading addicts.
A small part of the brain, called the nucleus accumbens, is responsible for evaluating and reacting to our experiences. It is the “pleasure center” that responds to all sorts of things, including good food, chocolate, alcohol, sex and, of course, thrilling financial trading. Our brain actually produces an opium-like substance called “dopamine” which, as the name suggests, can dope you into dangerous behavioral cycles. One does not want to be a trading dope! Particularly dangerous is that this doping process is, in reality, a kind of training process by your own brain. You get rewarded for certain activities, so you learn to do them passionately. It is therefore hard to retrain and go into reverse, even if your life and/or financial solvency depends on it.
Conclusions
If you are addicted to trading or could be, you must find a way out of this perilous situation. If you trade sensibly and prudently, that is fine, but make sure you monitor your activities and keep things under control. Whatever the case, get proper training and do it professionally. If you really want to gamble, it is probably better to do it in a real and official casino, but don’t expect to beat the house any more than you can rely on beating the market.