If gambling feels like vanishing into a trance, that's dark flow. Here's the neuroscience of why slot machines numb your brain, and the practice that breaks it.
Why do you zone out at the slot machine? Why does gambling make you forget everything? Researchers call it dark flow, a dissociative trance state where time, money, and pain disappear. You are not gambling to win. You are gambling to vanish. Here is why that escape is destroying you, and what your brain was actually searching for all along.
By Kate Mosley, Gambling Recovery Coach.
Why You Gamble to Escape: Dark Flow, the Slot Machine Trance, and How to Break It