Picking up an alternative to leave a habit is a good way to go and in this case there are so many things that you can do as an alternative to reduce your gambling time.
I personally have my day job which consumes my entire day and this leaves me only the weekends to gamble.
Also, sometimes I binge watch movies, series, go out with friends and thus this makes me gamble only when I have time left for gambling on weekends.
Sometimes it is every weekend that I gamble and then there are times where I don't gamble for 2-3 weekends.
So we really need to have a good patience level and self control so that we can control our gambling habits.
That's the only thing we can do to leave old habits and start new habits so that we have less time to do old habits. And it's good if you have a day job that can take up your entire day so you can really leave behind your old habits to try to focus on your daily work. And if you only use the weekend to gamble, that's okay too because that's your choice. After all, you can gamble whenever you want. And yes, using your time for other things, as you mentioned, is also very beneficial because you can get pleasure apart from gambling. And that means you don't depend on gambling to get pleasure because you can do other things with your family and friends to get that pleasure. In this case, we must always have self-control so that gambling does not make us return to the casino too often.
That is a very good point that you have said. Not many know this but its true that we shouldn't have just one source of pleasure.
I got to understand this point few days back when I was watching one of the motivational videos on youtube.
They said that if we depend on one source for pleasure then our life becomes dependent on it and when we don't have it we become very sad or go to depression.
This holds true in gambling as well. If there's no other source of pleasure then we don't have money for gambling then our life becomes hell.
But if there are other sources of pleasure then we can rely on it and not being able to gamble doesn't bothers us much.