(Radio Iowa) – With the Super Bowl this Sunday, Iowans might be willing to wager on the outcome to make it a little more interesting. While five dollars between friends is likely harmless, the temptation to go bigger is strong for some, and that could be a sign of a larger problem. Chris Sekorski is an advanced practice social worker and substance use counselor at Emplify Health by Gundersen. He says gambling on pro sports has never been easier — or more hazardous.

“There had previously been a Supreme Court ruling that banned sports betting, and that was overturned in 2018, so that opened the floodgates,” Sekorski says. “Plus, really how much online gaming and online access has ballooned pretty much makes it available to everybody. Previously, where we had to go to a casino or go to Las Vegas, now we have all those things in the palm of our hand.”

The rapid proliferation of so many sports betting apps for smartphones has opened gambling to many millions of new customers nationwide. Sekorski says those apps offer easy access to what’s known as a dopamine loop, where there’s impulse, action, and reward.”It’s not only just winning that leads to dopamine spikes in your brain, but also near misses, and the anticipation of it,” he says. “So if a hundred times a day you’re spinning a wheel on your phone, you’re reinforcing that dopamine rush a hundred times a day, and it very much hastens the cycle of addictive behaviors.”

Sekorski says there are clear ways to determine if someone is sliding into addiction.”With a substance that you’re using, you would do larger amounts of the substance. With gambling, it’s betting larger and larger amounts as time goes on,” Sekorski says. “There’s actually also withdrawal symptoms where an individual feels very uncomfortable in their skin, very restless when they’re not gambling. There’s a preoccupation where they’re thinking about it all hours of the day.”

A study done in 2021 for the Iowa Department of Public Health found only 167 Iowans received treatment for problem gambling intervention. That was less than one-percent of the estimated more than 18-thousand adult Iowans who met the criteria for having a gambling disorder. In addition to the warning signs mentioned earlier, Sekorski says there are other definite signals the problem is worsening, like falling deeper into debt.

“And then there’s behaviors where you’re lying to people about your gambling, you’re chasing your losses, where you’ve lost money, and you’re almost compulsively trying again and again to win that money back,” he says. “There’s also pretty frequently borrowing, taking out loans, asking money from friends, those types of things.”

Help is available in Iowa by calling 1-800-BETS-OFF, or at the state’s problem gambling website, 1800BETSOFF.org.