This addiction to gambling is no fantasy.

• Author: Sack, David
• Position: Athletic Arena - Essay

"For those considering getting involved with daily fantasy sports, keep this in mind: playing undoubtedly will be just as exciting and easy as its backers advertise but, just as with other forms of gambling, stopping can be difficult."

IN THE OLD DAYS of fantasy sports leagues, the thrills came in slow motion. Participants would pick their athletes, track the players' real-life performance over the course of the season, and, months later, see whose virtual team had come out ahead, usually for a modest pool or bragging rights. Today, fantasy sports sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings have accelerated the concept, allowing players to pay an entry fee and choose from a multitude of daily contests that offer quick payoffs and a chance at big money. In other words, fantasy sports is starting to look a lot like gambling, and that is bringing increased scrutiny to what currently is a largely unregulated billion-dollar industry.

More important to those of us in the behavioral health field, fantasy sports play increasingly feels like gambling to its participants, and that is prompting concern that we now have a whole new gateway to gambling addiction. It is the new immediacy that can set problems in motion. We know that delayed reward, such as the six-month wait you used to have to see how your fantasy sports team had done, does not lend itself to an addiction cycle. Immediate reward, such as we now have with fantasy games that start and end within a day or a week, does. It is how evolution wired us. For the sake of survival, early humans needed to evaluate quickly what they were experiencing. Things that trigger the brain's reward system--food, water, and sex, for instance--create powerful memories, prompting the desire to seek the reward again.

This worked well when rewards were hard to come by, but we now live in a time when instantaneous and repetitive rewards abound. There is palate-tempting food at every turn, porn available at the touch of a button, and, now, the thrill of daily fantasy sports play as close as your smartphone. Our brains were not designed to handle this rewards tsunami, and they adapt by limiting the flow of pleasure-inducing chemicals. As a result, tolerance develops, and it takes more and more of the activity or substance to produce the same euphoria. Some, for reasons that include genetics and psychological makeup, are more vulnerable than others to getting stuck in this cycle of chasing a thrill that becomes more and...