How to Stop Sports Betting: A Therapist’s Game Plan for Football Season

Written By Chris Beerman

Written by Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC · Last reviewed and updated August 2026

You delete the sportsbook apps Sunday night. By Thursday Night Football, one is back on your phone.

You tell yourself you’ll only bet one game. Then you add a parlay. The first bet loses, so you live-bet the second half. Then you’re looking at the late game because you don’t want to go to sleep down $800. Monday morning, you promise yourself you’re done. Then the next week starts.

If this sounds familiar, the problem probably isn’t that you don’t understand gambling can be harmful. You may understand the consequences very well. The problem is that knowing you should stop and actually making it difficult to place the next bet are two different things.

If you want to stop sports betting, don’t start by trying to become better at resisting urges. Start by making it harder to gamble. That means closing accounts, using self-exclusion when it fits, blocking gambling access, putting barriers around money, changing how you watch sports, and telling at least one other person what is happening. Then you work on the urges, thoughts, emotions, habits and situations that keep pulling you back. That order matters.

A 2025 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that internet searches for help with gambling addiction rose substantially as legal sportsbooks spread across the United States — about 23% nationally after the 2018 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to state-by-state legalization. In Illinois, help-seeking searches were an estimated 35% higher than expected after sportsbooks opened. The same study found that online sportsbooks were associated with a larger and more sustained increase than in-person betting.

And football season intensifies the problem. The 2026 NFL regular season begins Wednesday, September 9, with New England at Seattle. From there, sports betting becomes a nearly continuous weekly cycle through the regular season, the playoffs and the Super Bowl. If you are trying to quit, you need more than a promise that you won’t bet this Sunday. You need a system.

How to Stop Sports Betting: Start With Access, Not Willpower

A common recovery plan sounds like this: “I’m just not going to bet anymore.” That is a decision, but it isn’t much of a plan.

If your phone still has multiple sportsbooks on it, your debit card is already connected, promotional notifications arrive all day, your friends are texting parlays, and you can deposit $1,000 in thirty seconds, you are asking willpower to do far too much work. A better approach is to build friction between an urge and a bet. Think of it as layers.

1. Use the strongest sportsbook restrictions available

If you are not yet ready to stop completely, most regulated sportsbooks provide tools such as deposit limits, wager limits, time limits, cooling-off periods, account suspensions and marketing opt-outs. Use them.

But be clear about what they can and cannot do. If you’ve repeatedly raised your limits, opened another account after hitting a limit, or waited for a timeout to expire and started gambling again the same hour, account limits are no longer an adequate solution. For someone whose goal is abstinence, limits are better thought of as one more barrier than as the treatment plan.

2. Consider self-exclusion

Self-exclusion is different from deleting an app. Deleting DraftKings from your phone does not prevent you from downloading it again five minutes later. Self-exclusion is designed to remove access at the account or regulatory level.

For people who have repeatedly tried to quit and returned to gambling during moments of craving, anger, boredom, intoxication, or desperation to win money back, that distinction can be the whole game.

How to self-exclude from sports betting in Illinois

Illinois has a statewide Self-Exclusion Program administered by the Illinois Gaming Board. People enrolled in the program are excluded from sports wagering with Illinois-regulated sportsbooks and from gambling at Illinois casinos. Enrollment is completed in person at an authorized enrollment site, requires a driver’s license or state ID, and takes about 30 to 45 minutes.

Illinois self-exclusion is a serious step. The minimum period is five years, and removal is not automatic once five years have passed — it takes a request, a letter from a qualified professional and the Gaming Board’s agreement. For a complete walkthrough, including what happens to open bets and account balances, read the Illinois gambling self-exclusion guide.

For someone who has been cycling through quit → urge → reinstall → deposit → lose → chase → regret → quit, self-exclusion can interrupt that cycle in a way a promise cannot.

But there is an important catch. Self-exclusion is a powerful tool. It is not a force field around every possible form of gambling — and that matters more in 2026 than it did even a few years ago.

Sportsbook Self-Exclusion Doesn’t Automatically Close Every Door

When someone tells me, “I self-excluded, so I can’t gamble anymore,” one of my next questions is: from what, exactly?

The gambling environment is fragmented. State-regulated sportsbooks are one category. Casinos are another. Video gaming terminals, fantasy contests, offshore websites, sweepstakes-style casinos and prediction markets may each involve different systems and different restrictions. If your recovery plan depends on removing access, you need to look for the doors that are still open.

Prediction markets can become a sports-betting substitute

This is an especially important issue heading into the 2026 football season. Platforms offering event contracts now let people take financial positions on NFL games and other sports outcomes. The terminology is different, the regulatory structure is different, and the interface says “contracts” or “trading” rather than “bets.” But if your problem is compulsively risking money on sports outcomes, changing the label does not change the behavior. Someone can close every sportsbook account and then find themselves putting money on NFL outcomes through a prediction-market app. (I’ve written separately about whether prediction markets are gambling, and why the risk profile is unusually high.)

For recovery purposes, I would treat this very simply: if you are trying to stop gambling on football, don’t create a loophole based on what the platform calls the transaction.

The self-exclusion mechanics here are genuinely different, and worth knowing:

  • Robinhood offers sports event contracts through its derivatives business. Its own support material distinguishes between hiding sports prediction markets and formally self-excluding from event contracts. In Robinhood’s words, you can still trade event contracts for sports events regardless of the “hide” setting; self-exclusion requires contacting support, and open positions have to be closed before the account can be fully disabled.

  • Kalshi has its own voluntary self-exclusion covering its website, app and API. But Kalshi states plainly that self-exclusion does not limit a trader’s ability to access Kalshi products through a Futures Commission Merchant — a broker, in other words — and that you can’t sell open positions during an exclusion period, so close them first.

  • SelfExclude.io, a developing cross-platform program for prediction markets, lists Kalshi and Novig as fully integrated as of late August 2026, with Robinhood, Polymarket and several other platforms still marked “coming soon.”

That landscape will keep changing. The larger point is more durable: recovery should follow the behavior, not the regulatory category. If sportsbooks are blocked but you move the same chasing, compulsive checking, oversized positions, secrecy and “I can get it back” thinking to event contracts, the underlying problem hasn’t been solved.

What about fantasy sports in Illinois?

Illinois law changed in 2026. Effective June 16, 2026, the Sports Wagering Act now provides for voluntary self-exclusion from fantasy contests as well as sports wagering, and directs the state to fold it into the existing self-exclusion system. As of this writing, though, the Gaming Board’s public Self-Exclusion Program page still describes casino gambling and sports wagering only. Because rules and operator implementation take time to catch up, I would not assume that an Illinois self-exclusion enrollment currently blocks every fantasy product or operator you use. If pick’em or daily fantasy contests are part of your gambling pattern, close or restrict those accounts separately and verify current coverage with the Illinois Gaming Board.

What about video gaming terminals in Illinois bars?

There is another Illinois-specific limitation worth understanding. The state’s Video Gaming Problem Gambling Registry is not the same thing as self-exclusion. The Gaming Board says so in capitals: enrolling in the registry is NOT the same as enrolling in the Self-Exclusion Program. The registry sends you information; it does not keep you off the machines. So if your sports gambling tends to spill into video poker or slot-style machines at bars and restaurants — and with roughly 48,000 terminals in bars, restaurants and truck stops statewide, they are hard to avoid — don’t assume sportsbook self-exclusion has solved that problem.

3. Install gambling-blocking software

Once formal exclusion is handled, add a technological barrier. Blocking software such as Gamban or BetBlocker can prevent access to gambling websites and apps that fall outside whatever formal self-exclusion system you use — offshore sites, sweepstakes casinos, the sportsbook you forgot you had an account with.

The objective isn’t a technically perfect system that makes gambling impossible forever. The objective is to buy time. An urge might last long enough for you to make a bad decision, but not long enough for you to overcome five separate barriers, find another device, locate another way to fund an account, and explain what you’re doing to someone who knows you’re trying to stop. The best recovery systems do not assume you will always feel motivated. They are designed for the night when you don’t.

4. Put friction between yourself and your money

For many people with sports-betting problems, access to money deserves as much attention as access to sportsbooks. A gambling urge becomes financially dangerous when three things happen at once: urge + immediate access + available money. Change one of those variables and you create space to make a different decision.

Depending on your situation, that might mean:

  • removing stored cards from gambling-related accounts

  • reducing transfer limits

  • keeping bill money separate from discretionary money

  • lowering available credit and disabling cash advances

  • having a trusted person temporarily monitor accounts, or receive alerts for large transfers and withdrawals

  • closing financial accounts used mainly to fund gambling

  • making your debts visible instead of keeping them secret

Financial controls aren’t punishment. They are a way of preventing a 15-minute urge from becoming a $3,000 financial event. If secrecy has become part of the gambling problem, financial transparency can also be one of the first meaningful recovery interventions. You don’t necessarily need to hand complete control of your finances to someone indefinitely. But if you’ve repeatedly lost rent money, emptied savings, run up credit-card debt, borrowed secretly, or moved money around to hide gambling, continuing to give yourself unrestricted instant access deserves serious reconsideration.

5. Tell one person

Gambling problems thrive in privacy. You can tell yourself you’re quitting while keeping every account open. You can tell your partner you’re “doing better” without saying you lost another $1,500. You can move debt between cards, delete transaction notifications, and gamble on your phone in the bathroom while everyone else thinks you’re checking scores.

Once another person knows what is actually happening, recovery becomes less abstract. You might tell a spouse, sibling, friend, therapist, sponsor, or another person you trust: “I’m trying to stop sports betting. If I feel like gambling, I’m going to tell you before I place a bet.” That single rule can be surprisingly powerful — not because the other person controls you, but because secrecy no longer does. (If you are the partner or family member reading this, there is support for partners and family members too.)

If you have decided you are done and want the whole first day laid out step by step, follow the 24-hour betting shutdown plan — it takes you hour by hour through closing the accounts, blocking the apps, cutting off the money and getting through tonight's game.

Football Season Is a Trigger Environment

Most discussions of gambling triggers use words like stress, boredom and loneliness. Those are real triggers. But sports betting has another layer: the calendar itself becomes a trigger. During football season, the betting environment resets every few days.

Thursday. Thursday Night Football arrives. Maybe you haven’t bet since Sunday and feel back in control. The line is sitting there. Your group chat starts discussing the game. You tell yourself you’ll just put $50 on it so you have something to root for.

Friday and Saturday. If Thursday lost, college football creates an immediate opportunity to get it back. If Thursday won, you may feel like you’re playing with “house money.” Either thought leads to the same place.

Sunday morning. This is often the highest-risk window. You have multiple games, same-game parlays, player props, boosts, fantasy decisions, betting podcasts, social-media picks and promotional offers arriving at once. The sheer amount of stimulation makes it easy to stop thinking about individual wagers as actual money. Then the games begin.

Sunday afternoon. The early bets lose. Now the late games aren’t entertainment anymore. They’re a rescue mission. The $100 wager becomes $250, then $500. You’re no longer betting because you like the matchup. You’re trying to change how you feel about what already happened. That’s chasing losses.

Sunday night. “One last bet.” The Sunday night game suddenly becomes a chance to erase the entire day.

Monday. Monday Night Football becomes the final opportunity to get even before the week resets. And then Thursday comes again.

If you’re trying to stop sports betting, understanding this cycle lets you plan for the dangerous windows before you’re in them.

Can You Still Watch Football After You Stop Betting?

Maybe. But don’t make keeping every part of your old routine a requirement of recovery.

Some people can watch football without betting fairly quickly. Others discover that watching RedZone while checking spreads on their phone is almost indistinguishable from the ritual that preceded gambling. For a while, you might need to change how you consume sports. Ask yourself:

  • Do I enjoy the game when I don’t have money on it?

  • Does seeing odds immediately trigger an urge?

  • Is fantasy football keeping me focused on props and player performance?

  • Are betting accounts on social media, sportsbook podcasts and betting shows keeping gambling constantly in my head?

  • Is my group chat primarily a gambling chat disguised as a football chat?

  • Do I start looking at lines hours before I actually place a bet?

  • Do I need to take a few Sundays away from football completely?

You do not have to decide today whether you’ll watch football normally for the rest of your life. The more useful question is: what gives me the best chance of not betting this week?

What to Do When You Get an Urge to Bet

Removing access is one part of the plan. Eventually, you also have to learn how to experience an urge without acting on it. Four strategies that hold up in practice:

Delay the decision

Don’t debate whether the bet is smart. Don’t analyze the line. Don’t open the sportsbook to “just look.” Delay. Tell yourself: I’m not making any gambling decision for the next 30 minutes. An urge creates urgency. Delaying breaks the connection between wanting to bet and immediately betting.

Change your environment

If you’re lying on the couch staring at your phone while the pregame show discusses point spreads, don’t make staying there a test of character. Get up. Go for a walk, go to the gym, take the dog out, call someone, go somewhere you would never gamble. Your physical environment is part of the habit. Change it.

Separate the thought from the action

Sports bettors often experience thoughts that sound like facts: “This line is wrong.” “I know this team.” “I can make back Sunday if this hits.” “I can’t end the weekend down that much.” “This is basically free money.”

Instead of arguing with every thought, try noticing it: I’m having the thought that I need to win the money back tonight. That small change creates distance between a thought and an instruction. You don’t need to prove the thought wrong. You need to stop automatically obeying it.

Say it out loud before money moves

Text the person who knows you’re quitting. Five words will do: “I’m thinking about betting tonight.” Now the urge is no longer private.

The Most Dangerous Thought: “I Just Need to Get Back to Even”

A $100 sports bet can become a $2,000 night because the first wager isn’t the only problem. The response to losing it is.

You bet $100. It loses. Now you need $200 back. That loses. Now you’re $300 down and the late game suddenly looks compelling. At some point you’re no longer asking “Is this a good bet?” You’re asking “How do I make what happened disappear?”

That shift is dangerous. The money is already gone. The next wager cannot change the decision that produced the previous loss; it can only create a new outcome. This is why chasing can feel completely irrational the next morning and completely logical at 10:15 p.m. The emotional goal isn’t really to win. It’s to escape being down.

If chasing is one of your main patterns, read how to stop chasing gambling losses — it goes into the beliefs that keep the chase going and what interrupts it.

And if the chase has already turned into real debt, that debt starts working as its own trigger. Recovering financially after gambling losses covers how to stop the damage growing and deal with what you owe without gambling being part of the plan.

If your betting has stayed invisible partly because everything else in your life looks fine, that pattern has its own guide: high-functioning addiction in professionals.

Alcohol and Sports Betting Are a Bad Combination

If most of your gambling happens while drinking, don’t treat those as unrelated problems. Alcohol lowers inhibition and makes a plan made sober much easier to abandon. Maybe you genuinely intend to bet $50. Four drinks later, $50 doesn’t feel significant. The early game loses, you deposit again, the late game begins, and by midnight you’ve made decisions the version of you sitting at breakfast would never have approved.

For some people, stopping sports betting requires changing their drinking routine — particularly on game days — even if alcohol isn’t the primary problem. If you suspect it might be more than a game-day habit, the practice also offers alcohol addiction therapy, and the two problems are often treated together.

What If You Bet Again After You Quit?

The hours immediately after a slip matter. One bet does not have to become an entire weekend. The most dangerous response is often: “I already screwed it up, so I might as well keep going.”

Instead, treat the bet as information. Ask:

  • What account was still available? Close it.

  • Where did the money come from? Put another barrier there.

  • What happened immediately before the bet? Identify the trigger.

  • Had I been looking at odds all afternoon? Remove that source.

  • Was alcohol involved? Change the next game-day plan.

  • Did I hide the bet? Tell someone now.

  • Was I trying to recover a previous loss? Stop before the chase begins.

Clinical guidance from the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence takes the same view: its 2025 gambling guideline recommends discussing relapse openly, understanding the triggers that lead to it — including exposure to advertising and marketing — and teaching skills to reduce the chance of relapse, such as using blocking tools, stimulus control and strategies for coping with high-risk situations.

The goal isn’t to make a slip meaningless. It is to make it useful. What failed in the system, and what needs to change before the next urge?

When Therapy Helps With Sports Betting

Self-exclusion can stop you from opening a sportsbook. It cannot tell you why being down $2,000 feels intolerable. A blocker can stop a website from loading. It cannot teach you what to do with the restlessness that shows up Sunday morning. Giving someone access to your finances can prevent a deposit. It cannot repair the secrecy that gambling created in your relationship.

That’s where treatment becomes useful. Gambling-specific therapy addresses things like chasing losses, cravings and urges, distorted beliefs about probability and control, impulsivity, boredom and stimulation-seeking, anxiety and depression, shame, ADHD-related impulsivity, alcohol and gambling together, secrecy and lying, relationship damage, financial avoidance, repeated relapse, and rebuilding routines and interests outside gambling.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the best-supported psychological treatment for gambling problems, with the honest caveat that the evidence for how well gains hold up long after treatment ends is weaker than the evidence for short-term change — which is exactly why maintenance and relapse planning belong in the plan from the start. The same NICE guideline recommends gambling-specific CBT, and suggests motivational interviewing for people who are unsure about starting treatment or want to strengthen their commitment to change. I’ve written in more detail about what evidence-based gambling treatment actually looks like.

Good treatment shouldn’t simply repeat “gambling is bad, so don’t gamble.” Most people seeking help already know that. The more useful questions are: Why does the urge become so convincing? Why does losing make you want to risk more? What function is gambling serving? What situations reliably lead to relapse? Which barriers are missing? And what does your life need to look like if gambling is no longer organizing your weekends? That is the work of sports betting addiction therapy.

A 24-Hour Plan to Stop Sports Betting

If you found this article because you’re trying to stop today, don’t try to solve the rest of your life tonight. Start with the next 24 hours.

  1. Don’t place the next bet. Not the “last bet.” Not the one that gets you back to even. Stop at the current number.

  2. Deal with your sportsbook accounts. Withdraw available balances, review any open wagers, then use the strongest restriction consistent with your goal. If you have repeatedly failed with temporary limits and want abstinence, that means self-exclusion.

  3. Start Illinois self-exclusion if you’re ready. Review the Illinois Gaming Board program and the self-exclusion guide. Remember that it involves a minimum five-year period.

  4. Close the other doors. Think beyond DraftKings and FanDuel: other sportsbooks, fantasy accounts, prediction markets, brokerage-based sports event contracts, offshore sites, gambling apps, old accounts you “don’t really use.” If you would use it to gamble during an urge, it belongs on the list.

  5. Install blocking software. Do this before the next craving, not during it.

  6. Make money harder to reach. Remove stored payment methods and add financial friction appropriate to the severity of the problem.

  7. Tell one person. Don’t wait until you’re doing well enough to admit what happened. Tell someone now.

  8. Leave the betting ecosystem. Mute sportsbook marketing, unfollow handicappers, leave betting Discords, turn off promotional texts, change the group chat if you need to. You’re trying to reduce cues, not prove you can stare at them without reacting.

  9. Make a plan for the next game. Where will you watch it? Who will you be with? Will you watch at all? What will you do during the hour before kickoff? What’s your plan if an urge hits? Decide before the game starts.

  10. Get specialized help if you’ve been unable to stop on your own. Repeated failed attempts to quit aren’t evidence that you should try the same strategy harder. They are evidence that the strategy needs to change.

Frequently Asked Questions About Quitting Sports Betting

Can I stop sports betting without giving up sports?

Yes, many people eventually can. But if watching football currently triggers intense gambling urges, temporarily changing how much you watch — or how you watch — may make early recovery easier. The goal isn’t to prove that you can sit through seven hours of football surrounded by betting content. The goal is to stop gambling.

Is deleting my sportsbook apps enough?

Usually not, if you have repeatedly downloaded them again. Deleting an app is easy to reverse. Self-exclusion, account restrictions, blocking software and financial barriers create stronger friction.

What if I only gamble during football season?

A problem does not have to happen 365 days a year to be serious. If football season repeatedly produces debt, secrecy, chasing, relationship conflict, lost sleep, work problems or failed attempts to quit, the fact that the behavior is seasonal does not make the consequences less significant. If you’re not sure where you stand, the free gambling addiction test on this site takes about two minutes and nothing you answer leaves your device.

Is trading sports prediction markets the same as sports betting?

Legally, prediction-market event contracts are regulated differently from sportsbook wagers, and that dispute is still working through the courts. From a recovery perspective, the more important question is what the behavior is doing for you. If you stopped using sportsbooks but continue risking money on NFL outcomes, checking prices compulsively, increasing positions after losses, hiding activity and trying to get even, changing platforms has not solved the underlying problem.

Does Illinois self-exclusion block every form of gambling?

No. Illinois’ Self-Exclusion Program applies to Illinois casinos and sports wagering, and state law now provides for adding fantasy contests. Other products have separate systems or no binding system at all — the Video Gaming Problem Gambling Registry, for example, is specifically described by the Gaming Board as different from self-exclusion. Treat self-exclusion as one important layer of a broader recovery plan.

You Don’t Have to Wait Until the Losses Get Worse

One of the traps in sports betting is believing you need a more dramatic reason to stop. Maybe you’re still paying your bills. Maybe nobody knows how much you’ve lost. Maybe you’ve never borrowed money. Maybe you aren’t gambling every day. Maybe you keep thinking you’ll get control of it after football season.

You don’t need to wait for a catastrophe. If gambling is taking more money, attention, time or emotional energy than you want to give it — and your attempts to change keep collapsing when the games start — that is enough reason to do something different. (If you’re still weighing whether it’s a problem at all, the signs of sports betting addiction are worth an honest look.)

Start with access. Close the accounts you can close. Use self-exclusion if it’s appropriate. Block the routes back in. Protect your money. Tell someone. Then work on the part of the problem that doesn’t disappear when the apps do.

Want that first step written out? 24-Hour Betting Shutdown Plan: a therapist's plan for your first day without sports betting — a free, printable, hour-by-hour guide to today.

Sports Betting Addiction Therapy in Chicago

Chicago Addiction Therapy provides specialized gambling addiction therapy in Chicago and online across Illinois and Minnesota — including sports betting, chasing losses, prediction markets, and gambling that overlaps with alcohol use, anxiety, depression or ADHD.

If you’re ready to stop sports betting, schedule a free 15-minute consultation to talk through what treatment would look like.

If You Need Gambling Help Right Now

Illinois: call 1-800-GAMBLER or text GAMB to 833234. The Illinois helpline is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can connect you with treatment.

National: call or text 1-800-MY-RESET, or chat at 1800myreset.org.

If gambling losses or anything else have left you thinking about suicide or harming yourself, call or text 988 now, or go to the nearest emergency room.

This article is general information from a licensed therapist, not legal or financial advice. Self-exclusion rules, platform tools and prediction-market regulation change frequently; confirm current details with the Illinois Gaming Board or the platform before you rely on them.

Research and Sources

Chris Beerman
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