The ultimate videogame?
I joined crypto a bit older than the average user joins this space nowadays.
This means that when I started trading, I had already completed my studies and head a steady full time job with a career path.
As many of my peers around that age, my videogames hours were already dwindling down to a very low level, compared to what a highschooler or a neet in his 20s would spend playing.
It is a common phenomenon, and having less free time is only a partial explanation. Of course tiredness can play a role, when u factor in early wake up, commute, work, groceries, cooking, washing etc, by the time you sit down to play you're already not so fresh. Add in that many modern games tend to be heavy on cutscenes and dialogues, you may soon lose patience to sit down for 2 hours at a game at the end of a long day, when you're actual "play" time, when you're free to perform actions and inputs, is mere minutes.
Anyway, enter trading.
Soon enough, I started feeling that trading was scratching that itch that I wasn't really satisfying with gaming, hell I even started feeling at some point that playin games felt like a "waste of time" when I could sit at the chart making real gains, or risk missing a runner coin.
I tried for a while to tell myself these were separate hobbies: one a distraction, the other "productive." The neuroscience doesn't really back that up. Trading didn't replace gaming in my life by accident; it runs on almost the same circuitry, just with real money sitting where the loot or achievements used to be.
It is not a cheap metaphor. There's an actual mechanism behind it, and it's been studied closely enough that we can name the chemistry involved.
With the help of AI, I dug a bit around it. Here's what I found:
The engine underneath both: the variable reward schedule
Video games and financial markets both pay out on what psychologists call a variable ratio schedule: you don't know exactly when the next win is coming or how big it'll be. The idea goes back to B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning work, where animals pressing a lever for unpredictable rewards kept at it far longer and harder than animals on a fixed, predictable schedule. Unpredictability tends to be stickier than certainty, and it's been that way since pigeons in a box in the 1950s.
Loot boxes, rare drops, and critical hits are engineered versions of that same lever. So is a candlestick chart. Researchers studying gambling have pointed out that slot machines and betting games are built on exactly this kind of randomized reinforcement, and that the uncertainty itself is what drives the dopamine response, more than the payout size does.
Dopamine fires before you win, not after
Here's the part I found genuinely surprising: dopamine isn't the "reward" chemical the way pop psychology usually describes it. Work by Wolfram Schultz and Kent Berridge shows dopamine neurons respond mainly to the cues that predict a reward, not to the payout itself. Berridge's wanting-versus-liking framework splits this apart cleanly: the motivational pull toward something (wanting, driven by dopamine) is a separate system from the pleasure of actually getting it (liking, which runs more on opioid signaling). It's why the seconds before a loot box opens, or while a trade is still running, often feel more charged than however it resolves.
Imaging studies back this up outside the gambling lab too. In one PET study, people playing a video game showed striatal dopamine release around double their resting baseline. The raw size of that spike matters less than how often and how unpredictably it happens. A session that delivers small, irregular hits all evening can out-hook something that delivers one big, expected one.
Markets push this further. A Vanderbilt study using real monetary rewards found dopamine transmission rose significantly more when payouts were unpredictable than when they were certain. In other words, receiving the exact same amount of money barely moved the needle if the outcome had been known in advance.
The near-miss: when losing feels like winning
Anyone who's watched a trade come within a tick of target and then reverse knows a very specific kind of gut-punch. That has a name in addiction research: the near-miss effect. Slot machine studies show near-misses activate much of the same circuitry as actual wins, particularly in the ventral striatum, which helps explain why they tend to invigorate continued play rather than discourage it.
A candle that wicks just above your stop-loss before collapsing is a near-miss in that same clinical sense. Your brain doesn't log it as "I lost." It logs it as "I almost had it," and that one-word difference does a surprising amount of work in getting you to sit through the next setup.
Cortisol: the reward system with a body attached
This is where trading pulls away from gaming, and where it gets more dangerous. Neuroscientist John Coates, a former Wall Street derivatives trader, found that traders' cortisol tracked with market volatility, rising more on days when returns were uncertain than on days when they simply lost money. In later experimental work, his team found that sustained, chronically elevated cortisol cut participants' appetite for risk by roughly 44%. The market doesn't just excite traders chemically; over the course of weeks it can reshape how much risk they're willing to take at all.
Other research has found the same relationship from the other direction: elevated cortisol and testosterone both independently predicted more risk-taking and more price instability in experimental asset markets. The hormonal swing isn't incidental to trading. It may be steering some of it. A platformer before bed doesn't touch this system in the same way, because games simulate stakes and markets impose real physiological ones, pulling in the body's stress response right alongside the brain's reward circuitry.
Why trading can hook harder than the game it replaced
A few things fall out once these pieces are next to each other.
Markets barely end their session. Crypto runs around the clock, and forex and global equities cover most of the day between them. A game eventually shows a "Game Over" screen; a chart doesn't. On top of that, the payout is uncapped: a rare drop has a known value, but a winning trade in principle doesn't, which keeps the wanting system engaged longer than a fixed prize ever would. Losses don't reliably end the loop either. Near-miss research suggests a loss that felt close can raise motivation to keep going rather than lower it, which is close to the opposite of what a purely rational trader would do. And then there's the hormonal layer games mostly skip: gaming mainly runs on dopamine, while trading adds cortisol and, in some studies, testosterone, a feedback loop with its own momentum stacked on top of the anticipation-reward cycle.
What to actually do with this
None of this means trading is irrational, or that anyone who trades is compulsively hooked on it. It means the activity itself was built - by design in some places, by emergent market structure in others - on the same psychological scaffolding as the games it replaced, plus a body that treats financial uncertainty as a real threat. A few things the research points toward as useful:
Set a fixed, non-negotiable session limit, the same way you'd cap a gaming session, since the variable reward loop doesn't naturally cut itself off.
Write down outcomes, especially near-misses, so "I almost had it" doesn't quietly become the story you tell yourself after every loss.
Pay attention to your own state and not just your P&L: if a losing streak leaves you wired or unable to stop checking the chart, that's cortisol talking as much as it's strategy.
And keep position sizing separate from mood: the Cambridge findings suggest the version of you setting risk on a stressful day isn't the same one who wrote the original rules, which is exactly why those rules need to be decided in advance and followed mechanically rather than reinvented in the moment.
I didn't stop gaming because trading felt more serious. It's that trading found the same lever gaming used and pulled it harder, with money attached and nothing resembling a pause button.
It doesn't mean that trading is wrong, but if we're aware of these mechanism, we can work on it to make trading more careful and systematic, rather than irrational.
This piece draws on research in behavioral neuroscience and finance, including work by Wolfram Schultz and Kent Berridge on dopamine and reward anticipation, John Coates and colleagues at Cambridge Judge Business School on cortisol and trader risk-taking, and studies on near-miss effects and variable reinforcement in gambling and gaming research. It's written for general interest, not as medical or financial advice.
If trading is affecting your sleep, mood, or finances in ways that feel out of your control, it's worth talking to a professional.