Picture yourself sitting on your couch and you decide to place a bet on LottoStar’s Win A Private Island ScratchCard game - just for the fun of it. As you continue to scratch, your heart suddenly skips a beat. R75 Million is yours. What now?! Many emotions and thoughts are running through your mind – it’s a lot. Let’s explore the psychological stages that many people experience.

The Disbelief Stage

In most cases, disbelief reigns supreme! This is the “pinch me, I must be dreaming” phase, refreshing the website to check your account balance, staring at the number and screenshotting it, etc. Psychologically, these types of reactions cause the brain's protective mechanism to do exactly what it was built to do – protect us from shock.

Psychologists call it "emotional dampening", where the mind's instinct is to slow down a stimulus that's too large to process immediately.

The “Who Do I Call Stage”

At some point, the silence breaks and this kind of news can't be handled alone. Choosing who to tell first is a big deal. Sometimes the first call isn't usually the most "logical" one such as calling your financial advisor or lawyer. It's the person who is most emotionally central to your life in that moment. For many people, that's their mom or dad, their significant other or their best friends. This stage highlights our desire for validation, as well as a need for guidance in navigating the new reality or way forward. Who do you think you would call first?

The Impulse

Now this is where the excitement can lead to spontaneous decisions and actions. For some, they buy cars. For others it's their dream home. For many South Africans it's paying off debt or someone else's before their own and this could be a parent, a sibling, a friend who's been struggling financially. The psychology behind this stage is the brain’s reward system that’s firing on all cylinders, releasing dopamine in response to the massive win. The brain always needs a proxy, and it finds one very fast.

The Plan

Eventually - sometimes days or weeks later the logical brain takes a step in.

This is the stage where lists get made, calls to lawyers and accountants happen, conversations about "what does this actually mean for my life" happen and honestly, there’s no universal "right" answer to what someone does with a life-changing win. Some people move, some don't move at all. Others tell everyone or tell almost no one, quit their jobs the next day or keep going to work because it turns out the routine matters to them more than they realised.

So, What Would You Do?

There's no right answer. That's the whole point. The psychology of a win that big isn't about the money itself but it's about who you are when the external pressure lifts and you suddenly have room to think.

Through it all, the experience is a reminder of life's unpredictability and the reactions we possess in the face of life-changing events. Whether it’s an impulsive splurge or a carefully crafted plan, each step is valid in its own right.

LottoStar could be the start of a chain reaction, unlocking doors to dreams that have been long held in the heart – and that could all start with just one bet.