Gambling addiction: Enter the 'zone' where winning is a distraction

“The zone is like a magnet, it just pulls you in and holds you there,”

Our brains are wired to experience pleasure from certain activities — and that’s a key reason we survive. Pleasure motivates us to achieve essential daily goals, like locating and consuming food. However, the overall system is more complex than just chasing physical rewards. It's not solely about tangible outcomes.

We often devote a surprising amount of time to chasing pleasurable experiences that aren’t essential for survival — like figuring out how a machine works or decoding a pattern of symbols. These kinds of mental puzzles can be frustrating, but the satisfaction of eventually cracking them keeps us going. Importantly, our brains treat the anticipation of that "aha" moment as a source of pleasure.

Chemically speaking, even if the task has no practical value, the brain rewards us in the same way it would for accomplishing something vital to survival. And it’s this anticipatory pleasure system that becomes hyperactive during gambling. It can push us into a mental state known as "the zone" — a place where even hitting the jackpot becomes secondary to the thrill of the game itself.

The "zone" is a dissociative, trance-like mental state experienced by gamblers where they become so focused on playing that awareness of time, space, social demands, and their own body and self-fades away. The goal for the gambler shifts from winning to staying in this state of flow and continuous play for as long as possible, which is facilitated by the deliberate design of slot machines and gambling environments aimed at maximizing "time on device" and thus profit.

They’re not playing to win, prove their character, or act out social hierarchies. Instead, they play simply to keep playing — aiming to enter and remain in 'the zone' for as long as they can.