. If they know that playing gambling have a big risk, they will not do that very often and just use gambling for occasionally with the money they can afford to lose. They will not use gambling as an escape but use other things that will gives fun to them.
You just need to be able to expand your horizons and be able to find new activities and hobbies. If someone has only a job and gambling and this is all his leisure time, then such a person is doomed to the abyss. You need to meet with friends, it's free, but their words heal better than any therapy, you need to be able to ask your loved ones for support, and then the gambler is unlikely to get bogged down in uncontrolled play, and as a result, lose all his savings. In general, you need to be able to find and understand something new for yourself.
Like a proverb that in love the medicine of the heart is that you have to find a new heart as a solution to forget your previous heartbreak haha and I am also sure that the proverb also applies to other things, or what it means is that when you want to forget something then you have to find many new things to distract yourself from the pain in the past, like gambling which means I agree with you that when a gambler wants to stop gambling then the first thing to do is find a new hobby and then forget all the losses they have ever experienced in gambling, and if for example you don't want to stop completely but just want to change your approach to be better then in my opinion there is no other way than to re-understand as a whole about how gambling really is, because that way you will know what to do and what to avoid in every situation.