I'd like help managing my relationship with gambling.

How can I stay safe whilst gambling?

Now may be a good time to pause and reflect before gambling. It is important to ensure that you or others are not at risk of any harm from gambling.

To make sure, we recommend putting together a unique safety plan for your gambling.

Creating your own safety plan

To keep safe and ensure that harm is not triggered, develop your own unique safety plan.

Factors to consider

When putting together your safety plan, you can think about:

Self-awareness

Heighten your self-awareness using our RED-E resource, available on our explore your relationship page.

Setting boundaries & limits

Set boundaries for your gambling to safeguard your income and other assets of worth. This could be a weekly or a monthly limit. Make sure you stick to it, and regularly review your boundaries.

Your health

It's key that gambling is not affecting your health in any way. Use our RED-E resource, available on our explore your relationship page, to make sure your health isn't being negatively affected by gambling.

Routines

Plan your time and daily routines. This mean you can learn about the amount of time you spend on gambling. How do you feel about the amount of time you're spending on gambling? How is it affecting you, and those around you.

Take a 'digital detox'

Taking a 'digital detox' is a great way of pausing gambling for a set period of time, and is also good for your general mental health. You could do this by deleting specific apps from your phone or tablet, or staying off your devices for set periods of the day.

Explore support options

Learn more about the support services and options available to you. These could be financial tools and blocking options from your bank, safer gambling tools on betting websites or self-exclusion options. Find out more on our support services page.

Your gambling triggers‍

Spend time considering the triggers that lead to you gambling. What are the high risk situations? How can they be safely managed?Find out how Christine learned about her gambling triggers, and overcame them.

If not carefully managed, gambling can impact an individual and those around them in many ways – it’s not only about losing money. The impacts can be on mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing, relationship breakdown, employment issues, in fact almost every area of a person’s life may be affected.

Gambling support services

If you are concerned that you or someone you care about has a problem with gambling there is a lot of help available. Our support services page has useful links and phone numbers to get the support you need.