Gambling Recovery and Collegiate Mental Health is the Focus for 2026 on the Pod

What if recovery didn’t feel like holding your breath, but like getting your life back? We’re setting a clear course for the year: a deeper push into gambling recovery, stronger support for college mental health, and daily practices that turn emotional intelligence into your edge. The world is loud with sportsbooks, prediction markets, and “risk-free” promos; we unpack how the odds stack up, why chasing is a trap, and what it takes to step out of the loop for good.

We share why abstinence alone rarely delivers peace, and how to build real freedom instead. That means anchoring your routines to natural dopamine and neuroplasticity, using tools like the Recovery Growth Scorecard, the 18-week Recovery Freedom Circle, and the Strong Leader, Strong Character course. We revisit the wisdom of 12-step work while challenging the fear that lingers when you only tick the boxes. The goal isn’t counting days. The goal is a life where gambling doesn’t register.

We also lift the lens to where the pressure hits hardest: campuses flooded with betting ads and same-day thrills. Grades, aid, and mental health are on the line. We offer practical ways to push back, build resilience, and reclaim attention from the constant lure of quick wins. To plant seeds earlier, we preview our bilingual children’s book, Discover My Feelings, and playful dances that give kids a vocabulary for emotions—because strong EQ in childhood grows stronger choices later.

Season Eight is about depth, clarity, and action. Expect honest talk about the house edge, simple practices that actually move the needle, and a steady path toward total freedom from gambling. If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find a way out of the loop.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Core Principles
• 0:46 Natural Dopamine And Healing
• 1:32 2026 Vision And Milestones
• 1:52 Why Gambling Recovery Takes Center Stage
• 2:32 The Odds, Chasing, And Desperation
• 4:08 Recovery Over Abstinence
• 4:33 Tools: Scorecard, Circles, Character
• 5:19 Limits Of Step-Only Approaches
• 7:20 Total Freedom And Fearless Living
• 7:42 College Mental Health And Gambling
• 8:13 Children’s Book On Feelings
• 8:41 Building EQ With Fun And Dance
• 9:16 12 Steps Explain And Speaking Tours
• 9:39 Advertising Hooks And Industry Tactics
• 10:49 Season Eight And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

2026. What is going to happen on the 1% in recovery podcast this year? Well, let's find out. Welcome again to another episode of the 1% in recovery podcast, where we encourage you to laugh every day. To work hard, work hard in recovery, work hard in relationships, work hard in your job, business, school, just work. And to love unconditionally. Put much more love out there and watch much more love return. Why? Because recovery is beautiful, your EQ is your IQ, and you cannot outthink an emotional issue. Now, we are encouraging people to download the recovery growth scorecard free on the website lifeiswonderful. That's where you get to introduce natural dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin. You get these natural hormones so then you can start changing the neuroplasticity, the transmitters in your brain to start healing, to start detoxing, to start loving life. Download the free scorecard, life is wonderful. Now, let's jump in to this week's episode. What is going on in the 1% in recovery podcast here in 2026? Well, we are going to keep moving ahead. We have now over 200 episodes. Wow. And we're going to keep moving on. First next goal is 250, and then we're going to move on to 500 episodes. But here in 2026, we are going to focus on gambling recovery. Yes, going to be still talking about the steps, and we're going to be talking about how people can truly stay stopped and move ahead and really get the most out of their life and put gambling behind them. We also are going to be talking about the mental health in college-age students, predominantly because of all the gambling. Gambling is this new epidemic. So that's why we have to focus on gambling recovery. That's why we have to focus on all the college-aid kids and on how state governments, casinos, sports books, prediction markets are all now pushing some type of gambling, as well as the influx of not just investing in stocks, but now doing all the option crypto trading where everything is trying to make money quickly, same day. Place a bet, make money. Unfortunately, they want to lure you in, entice you, thinking that you are going to be able to make some quick money for whether it's a rent or some other bill or for some type of uh play money. But in turn, the house will usually win. That's why 99% of all the gamblers will lose. And you've got to stay ahead of that and realize that the house, the sports books, they have everything, it's not rigged, but it does feel rigged when everybody keeps losing. But they have the odds in their favor. And the longer you play, the more likely you're going to lose, and then you're going to keep losing more, and then you're going to start getting into that desperation phase and start chasing, and then it's just a spiral downward. So we've got to be focusing in on recovery, gambling recovery. Because to me, everything's about recovery. It's not about abstinence. It's not about, from an alcohol term, being sober. You have to have true recovery where you don't think about gambling, where gambling doesn't affect you. The same thing like with me, both an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler, where alcohol and gambling have no effect on me because I focus on what I need to focus on. That's why we encourage people to do the recovery growth scorecard. We encourage people to do the 18-week recovery freedom circle. We encourage people into the strong leader, strong character course where you build up your character. Says right there in black and white, whether we're talking about the combo book in a gambling 12-step room, or we're talking about the big book with uh 12-step alcoholics, where it talks from the gambling side that the character, changing your character and developing better character is going to be your greatest challenge. Bill Wilson, the person who wrote the big book for alcoholics, wrote, You have you will have spiritual experiences. You have to implement spiritual principles into your life. That is what's going to sustain you to work the 12 steps. The problem is everyone keeps talking about that. You just need to work the 12 steps and then voila, you're never going to gamble again. Well, too many people still live in fear, thinking that they're only one bed away or they're one day away each, every day that they wake up, they could go back out to the drink, the drug, or the bet. And that is completely false. If you recover, if you do this BS kind of half-ass work, which you kind of just do the steps, you you let's say you say that you've surrendered, you make an inventory, you tell another person, uh, you give up character defects, you write an amends list, you make amends, you start praying and meditating better, you start doing a daily inventory, and then you have some type of spiritual experience, spiritual awakening, and then all of a sudden you can carry the message to other alcoholics or gamblers or drug addicts. That formula is not sustaining. It's not enough. It's proven over and over again why so few people, number one, actually finish the original 12 steps as well as that if you actually listen, people are counting how many days from their last drink. People are constantly having some either alcoholic gambling dream. People are constantly living in fear. You should never, never be living in fear if you've truly recovered. And it says there at the very beginning of the alcoholic uh big book that Bill Wilson was writing. His is that we're trying we wrote this book so you actually have total freedom. Total freedom from alcoholism, which also means you're gonna have total freedom from drug abuse as well as total freedom from compulsive gambling, problem gambling, pathological gambling, any term that you want to use, gambling in turn in any form. That just gets way out of control. So you've got to keep focusing. And we're also gonna be focusing because now it's affecting the mental health. Too many college students are getting affected, whether it's their grades dropping out, whether it's their financial aid. And the other few things that we are on the cusp of the children's book, Discover My Feelings, is in its last week of being illustrated, and then we're going to go to print here sometime in January, and it's gonna be made available so then the six to nine-year-old kids can go on this journey bilingual. It's gonna be in English and Spanish, and we're gonna be talking about 12 different feelings. We're gonna be talking about contentment, excitement, sadness, anger, frustration, all these valuable emotions that little kids are gonna be experiencing, but they have to have a vocabulary and they have to be able to move forward. We're also gonna be doing something fun with the book. We're also gonna be coming up with dances. They could be similar to these quick, small TikTok dances. But the essence is to have fun talking about feelings, to have fun actually being able to actually state your feelings. So you actually start building emotional intelligence with children as they move into teenage years and then into adulthood. That is so, so important. The 12 Steps Explain book is back on track where we hope to be finished here in a few months, and then we can continue and then have the 12 steps explain on how the 12 steps will work and how they work better. And it is going to be forthcoming. And also just getting on much more and more stages, whether we're talking about middle school, high schools, corporations, where we are going to be talking about mental health, we're going to be talking about gambling, we're going to be talking about addiction, talking about how to live differently and not always be swayed in by all the advertising, the incessant, nonstop, relentless advertising, which almost pushes a person to even gamble. And then they try to give you that little hook and they try to get you those freebies, especially in the beginning, you know, the guarantee of first bets, or even if you lose, you don't lose the money. You can get a, you almost have like a mulligan in golf. You're going to have another chance. You know, there's so many ways that the gambling industry is just trying to take money from you. But it's also no different than the pharmaceutical or the alcohol industry, where assuming that one magic pill or alcohol is going to solve all your problems and it doesn't. So the key thing is to keep moving forward with everything that we're doing here with the 1% in recovery podcast. So it's going to be a fabulous year as we delve into season eight, and we will have a wonderful, wonderful year. With that, we're going to conclude this episode of the 1% in recovery podcast.