Illusion of control: the most expensive layer
Fishing does have a skill component — cannon choice, reading the school, weapon timing all affect the result, as worked out in How Fishing Odds and RTP Work. But skill only operates below the ceiling of "the game's overall maths": it lets you play more efficiently, but it can't flip a negative long-run expectation positive.
Because there's input, a win gets credited to skill and a loss gets blamed on "played badly, one more round will do it." That attribution makes it very hard to stop — which is exactly why active-input games hook harder than pure-RNG slots.
Chasing fish: the fishing version of sunk cost
You've fired dozens of shots at a high-multiplier boss without a kill, and you think "I've put in so much already, a few more and it's dead." That's the fishing version of the sunk-cost fallacy: the bullets already spent are sunk and have nothing to do with whether this fish dies next. A boss kill is a probability event; no amount of prior misses raises the kill rate of the next shot.
It's the same psychological mechanism as "raise the bet to win back losses" on a slot, just reskinned. The signal to spot it is simple: when you start firing for "what I've already put in" rather than for "is this shot worth it," it's time to stop.
The time black hole of continuous play
Slots are round-based, with a natural pause between spins that gives you a "keep going?" decision point. Fishing and dozers are continuous — schools keep respawning, coins keep stacking, with no natural pause button. That unbroken rhythm makes it easy to lose track of time; an hour passes without notice.
Active-input games have no natural pause, so you have to build one: set a time cap and a budget cap before you start, and stop unconditionally when you hit them — not "after I kill this boss."
The shared antidote to all three traps
Illusion of control, chasing fish and the time black hole look like three things, but there's one antidote: set your budget, time and stop signal before you sit down, and fully decouple them from "feel". Don't add on a good streak, don't chase on a bad one, and leave when the time is up. Treat these as default settings before you start, not spur-of-the-moment decisions mid-game.
If the game starts affecting your mood or your life, stop immediately and seek professional help — responsible-gambling resources are listed at the foot of every page.