Day 1 again - New measures
Hi all, relapsed again. At this point I accepted that willpower alone is not enough for me, so I focused on making gambling as annoying and inaccessible as possible.
My setup now:
- Cold Turkey + Gamban on PC
- Gamban beta + Screen Time on iPhone
For PC:
There’s a Reddit guide on how to make Cold Turkey very hard to uninstall. Nothing is impossible if someone really wants to bypass it, but adding friction helps a lot during impulsive moments.
I also:
- blocked gambling keywords/websites that Gamban is not blocking yet.
- blocked payment intermediary websites
- blocked pages listing casino sites
- restricted access to some system settings/tools (basically disabled safe boot and then blocked with cold turkey the cmd.exe , use at own risk)
- blocked the Cold Turkey uninstall page itself
For iPhone:
The Gamban beta puts the phone in supervised mode, so removing it is very hard unless you fully reset the phone. I also used Screen Time to block sites Gamban missed. A family member set the Screen Time password, so I don’t know it.
I live in Latam where most gambling sites use crypto, bank transfers or Mercado Pago/payment intermediary pages. Blocking those routes helped a lot. Mercadopago is a huge digital wallet in latam , I told them to block my account forever)
I also lowered my credit card limits to the minimum possible.
Realistically, the only ways for me to gamble now would be:
- going to a physical casino (nearest one is about an hour away in public transport, so probably not happening). Also not a fan of physical casinos, too lazy for that.
- or a completely new site showing up with a new payment intermediary that isn’t blocked yet
- factory reset my phone, clean install my pc or buy new devices. As a gambler I can spend thousands gambling but say that a new phone is too expensive.
Things I learned:
- Gamban yearly subscription is worth it
- Cold Turkey premium is worth it because it lets you make blocks much harder to disable during impulsive moments
- friction > motivation
- if access is not instant, urges usually pass
One downside:
Gamban also blocks Binance, IBKR and some investing/trading related sites.
Financially this still hurts a lot (lost 2 years of savings at 29, have almost nothing to my name) but I’m trying to focus on making access harder instead of relying on self-control.
Posting this in case it helps someone else. We can do this.