When Linda Mannerberg attended the Women’s Money Conference in Las Vegas Nevada in 2012, she was struggling with debt and a gambling addiction she hid from those closest to her.

She attended the conference again this year in April 2013, but this time she was in a completely different place.

She received a standing ovation for turning her financial life around in just a year.

Like many of the other women at the conference who applauded her success, I was deeply touched by Linda’s story and asked her if I could share it with our readers.

She agreed, but said she didn’t think it was a big deal. I told her I disagreed. Here is her story:

When I came to the conference last year, I was in a lot of debt. I had credit card debt, a car loan and payday loans. I would get paid and pay the interest on the payday loans, but I wouldn’t have enough to pay off the loans.

I also had a gambling addiction — I would get up in the middle of the night to go gambling.

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A psychology researcher from Australia has collected some of the first scientific evidence that video gaming can be addictive in a way similar to gambling and alcohol.

“People who spend an excessive amount of time playing video games are powerless to stop themselves from thinking about gaming,” says Olivia Metcalf, who did the research for her PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. “This is a pattern typical of addiction,” she says.

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“Many people have claimed that video games can be addictive. But this is some of the first hard evidence.”

Olivia presented about 20 video gaming “addicts” with different words and asked them to respond to the color of the word, not the meaning. They were significantly slower to name the color of gaming-related words compared to words which had nothing to do with gaming. Non-addicted gamers showed no difference in response times.

“We found that the attention system of an excessive gamer gives top priority to gaming information. Even if they don’t want to think about gaming, they are unable to stop themselves. This likely makes stopping or cutting back on gaming even more difficult,” Olivia says.

“This phenomenon, known as attentional bias, is found across heroin, nicotine, alcohol and gambling addictions, and is thought to be a significant factor in the development of an addiction.”

While most people who play video games do so without suffering negative consequences, a minority of gamers experience significant adverse changes to their diet, sleep, relationships, work and school commitments as a result of their inability to stop gaming. There has been significant debate as to whether or not excessive gaming can be considered an addiction.

Research like hers begins to build the evidence base used to determine whether the behavior can be classified as an addiction, Olivia says, and helps psychologists to develop effective treatments for gamers who are unable to stop.

A forthcoming edition of the standard reference book which defines mental health disorders—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) published by the American Psychological Association—recommends that Internet-use addictive disorder, including excessive gaming, be regarded as an area for further study.

Maryland Live expects rise in revenue with 24-hour operations

6:30 p.m. EST, December 28, 2012By Chris Korman, The Baltimore Sun

When 2 a.m. came Friday, the sound of coins hitting metal — electronically replicated, of course, since theslot machines pay out with a printed ticket — continued at Maryland Live casino. About 1,000 people stayed where they were, plugging money into the video terminals and ordering drinks.

Terry Cohen of Randallstown was there to celebrate the new schedule that will keep the casino open 24 hours a day.

“There’s nothing to do around here at night,” she said. “The town shuts down. This is nice. It gives you a place to go and spend some time and mingle and play some slots.”

The Cordish Cos.-owned facility in Hanover became the first Maryland casino to take advantage of new state regulations allowing all-day operation, opening at 8 a.m. Thursday without any plan to close again. The expanded hours — approved by voters as part of the Question 7 referendum in November — are expected to boost casino revenue, but some worry about the impact on gambling addicts.

Rob Norton, president and general manager for Maryland Live, said the casino expects a 10 percent increase in revenue. It generated $34.4 million in November; 67 percent goes to the state.

While Norton said the economics made the decision to stay open an easy one, gambling experts see Maryland Live’s commitment to full-time operation as another move to stake out ground in an increasingly crowded scene. A Horseshoe casino is scheduled to open in Baltimore in 2014, and a casino in Prince George’s County could give Washington residents and visitors a nearby gambling spot as early as 2017.

“Maryland Live has a huge advantage, in that it is up and running and can try to build that customer loyalty that is so important,” said James Karmel, a professor at Harford Community College who has studied the gambling industry. “Those people gambling at 4 or 5 a.m. are going to be hard-core, and that’s a niche you want to establish as the market gets more crowded.”

But mental health professionals worry that the lack of a closing time will cause new gamblers susceptible to addiction to fall more quickly — and lose more money while doing so.

Evonne Gershon, coordinator of Maryland’s 24-hour problem gambling help line, plans to monitor calls over the next few weeks to measure any change caused by the new hours.

Maryland Live’s opening caused a sharp increase in calls, she said, and mental health professionals across the state have clamored for more training to deal with problems related to gaming. Some of the most difficult cases Gershon has faced since she began working with problem gamblers 18 months agocame after callers went on long binges.

“Once I talked to someone who was suicidal after spending 24 hours in a casino and spending everything they had,” she said. “Staying open all the time means that much more temptation.”

Maryland Live is required to post the number for the help line, and pays $475 per machine — with 4,750 machines, that’s $2.26 million — each year into a state fund set aside to assist treatment of compulsive gambling.

“Maryland has one of the most extensive problem-gaming programs out there, and we work closely with them,” Norton said. “We are being proactive, and we do not anticipate an increase in instances of problem gaming. We see [staying open] as an attempt to reach out to a group that might live a different lifestyle, not something predatory on the casino’s part.”

Maryland Live officials already had some idea of the market for early morning gambling, as about 500 people were placing final bets at closing time on an average night.

Norton said the longer hours will open the casino to those who were unable to make it under the previous schedule — 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. (4 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays). He believes shift workers, people with irregular schedules and night owls will make use of the expanded hours; many of the people at the casino early Friday fit into those categories.

Solomon Fersha, a limousine driver from Silver Spring, came into the casino about 7 a.m. between runs. A regular patron — and member of the VIP program — Fersha often finds himself with downtime between trips and looks forward to being able to gamble on his own schedule.

“It doesn’t feel good when they tell you to leave,” he said.

Antonio Wilkins, a chef at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Baltimore, said he is not a gambler but often accompanies his wife to the casino. They arrived at 11 p.m. Thursday and stayed more than nine hours. They’d driven to Delaware for similar sessions in the past.

“It’s much better to be here, closer to home, putting the money back into the state where we live,” he said. Wilkins said he and his wife will continue to use the overnight hours because they fit into his sleep schedule; his work shift often starts at midnight, and he is accustomed to sleeping during the day.

Cohen said she had grown tired of driving to Delaware to take advantage of full-day operations there

In 1996, I’d been the Daily News’ political writer for only a month or two when the paper sent (yes, sent!) me to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention, the most un-newsworthy “news event” of the 20th Century. One of the obligatory things for journalists back in the ’90s was to follow Ed Rendell around and that I did — and I saw first-hand his bizarre obsession. The then-Philly mayor was determined to bring a House of Blues — or maybe a Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Cafe, but especially a House of Blues — to the City of Brotherly Love. At a party packed with very important people, the House of Blues guy, whoever that was, was the one who Rendell spent the night sucking up to.

House of Blues never did come to Philly. Hard Rock Cafe did — and we all know what a history-altering event that was (#Sarcasm). The truth is that mayors do this — they waste an inordinate amount of time chasing the shiny object like a Disneyquest, whatever that was. instead of the hard work of improving schools that could prepare thousands of kids for jobs that are better than selling video game tokens.

Nothiing is more wasteful in this regard than the quest for casinos. They do some good things — like creating short-term construction jobs — and some bad things, like funding government on the backs of gambling addicts. But generally, show me a city that’s hot for casinos and I’ll show you a loser city.

Urban affairts guru Richard Florida had an excellent piece this weekend on why casimos are losing bets:

Here’s more from our backyard:

The typical customer of an urban casino is neither a tourist nor a deep-pocketed whale, but a local of modest means. Dave Jonas, president of Philadelphia’s Parx Casino, told the Pennsylvania Gaming Congress in 2010 that his typical customer spends $25 or $30 dollars a visit — and many of them return three, four and five times a week.

And yet despite of this, state and some local officials in Philly are plowing ahead with their schemes for a second casino, when one slots palace in town and two more on our immediate borders seem much, much more than sufficient. Warren Buffett is right — the whole thing is revolting. Maybe Philadelphia will come to its senses before it actually catches this shiny object.

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A man found a cocoon of a butterfly.
One day a small opening appeared.
He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours
as it struggled to squeeze its body through the tiny hole.
Then it stopped, as if it couldn’t go further.

So the man decided to help the butterfly.
He took a pair of scissors and
snipped off the remaining bits of cocoon.
The butterfly emerged easily but
it had a swollen body and shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch it,
expecting that any minute the wings would enlarge
and expand enough to support the body,
Neither happened!
In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life
crawling around.
It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness
and haste did not understand:
The restricting cocoon and the struggle
required by the butterfly to get through the opening
was a way of forcing the fluid from the body
into the wings so that it would be ready
for flight once that was achieved.

Sometimes struggles are exactly
what we need in our lives.
Going through life with no obstacles would cripple us.
We will not be as strong as we could have been
and we would never fly.

We need new ways of managing pleasure that go beyond AA.

The evolutionary basis for positive feelings is a good place to start. The brain is actually a giant pharmaceutical factory that manufactures its own mind-altering chemicals. Being in love illustrates this point. Anthropologists at Rutgers University recruited students who claimed to be madly in love for an average of seven months and demonstrated that dopamine acts as our own endogenous love potion, creating intense energy, attention, and exhilaration.[1] “Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive…” [2] Without the powerful association between our reward system and romance, humans simply would not survive.

More specifically, pleasure is associated with an adequate flow of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, the reward center of the brain. Managing our pleasures is possible by the pursuit of “natural highs” — where we consciously, and in healthy ways, orchestrate the brain’s natural chemicals to promote elevated feeling states that are beneficial to the individual and society.[3] This new form of positive psychology emphasizes humans’ capacities for resiliency, strength and making rational choices.

To read the full article, Click Here

To read the full article, Click Here