Brad_Hurst

Wow, thanks for the responses guys! ‌@Hitaru, Great advice dude. I really need to take that last point home about taking things easy. I'm definetly wayyy too hard on myself but I just want to improve myself fast! I feel like I'm like this because I want to start talking to girls and want to be able to talk about a wide variety of interesting topics. I do like the idea of carrying a small notepad around and jotting things down that I'd like to find out more about. I will definitely start doing this. ‌@Ironfly, Yeah that makes sense. Experience definitely seems to be key for learning the most about things. I read quite a lot through-out the day, but I feel like the majority of what I read does NOT stay in my head. Infact most of the time, by the time I've got to the end of a article, all of the information mentioned at the beginning I've completely forgotten about! D: I shall try and stay patient, and continue to keep on learning!

Yes asking questions is something I already do alot and it is very effective. But not so much in group conversations where I always tend to take the back seat and not say much at all. I'd like to be able to hold the floor in group conversation and just take a more active role but it is difficult when I can't always keep up with the topics. I shall begin reading alot more broader subjects, as I only tend to be reading self-help stuff at the moment. Thanks guys

Hey guys, Something I tend to struggle with is that I feel I lack knowledge in alot of different areas in life. Things that most other people all seem to know. This is usually a big issue when in a group conversation, half the time the group will be talking about something and I won't be able to input anything into the conversation because I simply just don't know anything about the subject. I also just don't have that many interesting stories to tell to people because I just haven't experienced enough. I know this is down to gaming way too much in my youth and not getting out there and learning/experiencing different things. I'm only 19 but still, I feel like other people my age just know so much more random shit than me it gets quite depressing at times. So basically i'm just wondering how you guys think I can get myself up to speed with everyone else and just being able to have conversations about all the random stuff that people bring up in conversation that usually I just have no clue about. Cheers, Brad.

Yeah it's been going alright. I am getting bored in the evenings though, I don't really know what to do. I would like to start reading some books but I feel I couldn't fully make up my evening reading books lol.

Hey guys, Brad here. This is the first post of my journal and it will be the first of many more to come! If you would like to know a little more about my gaming addiction and why I am here please refer to my introduction post here: I decided to quit playing video games on Thursday 06/04/2017. So it's currently day five of no gaming and the reason I delayed getting my journal out is because I was actually busy doing other things! (Not gaming) On Thursday I came home from work (I work 8-5 Monday to Thursday and 8-1 on a Friday with a 40 minute commute each way... So this already occupies alot of my time already!) and had been reading Cam's post earlier that day also discovering Game Quitters in the process. I decided to take action straight away without even giving a proper goodbye to my games. To be honest I didn't really get up to anything interesting, I had just bought myself an amazon firestick and had been wanting to watch the new Grand Tour (The new PROPER Top Gear), this arrived on the Thursday so I decided to watch a couple of episodes with my sister (To my amazement she enjoyed watching it). It was then time to eat, usually either my Mum or Sister cooks but I decided that i'd like to try and cook for the day. I do not cook much at all, i'm terrible at it! Although I do serve up some pretty darn good weetabix for breakfast (yep that's how crap I am ). Only problem is, we had no food in the house. So my sister and I went out quite late at night and bought the food for the meal, I spent the evening with my sister, attempting to cook up this meal, I believe it was only chicken with some veg and rice (it had some funky name but I don't remember). Anyways it tasted pretty good, that's only cause my sister was telling me what to do every step of the way haha. Friday, again another day at work. When I got home I went straight to the gym for an hour, completing another day of my 5x5 Stronglift program, although I struggled to complete my 70kg squat. I then began to pack my bags to head off to my dads for the weekend, he lives in the Norfolk countryside about 3 hours from myself. I spent the 3 hours listening to music with my sister. Once we arrived I had a small catch up with my Dad before heading straight off to bed. To be honest I don't know why I'm describing my days but hey-ho i feel like it. Saturday was a beautiful day in England (FOR ONCE). i spent the day chopping down trees in the garden with my Dad, enjoying a nice beer as we celebrate chainsawing down the big tree in the center of his garden. Sunday was sunny again so I tried to enjoy the sunshine as much as possible, going on a nice bike ride with my sister and step brother and then I was helping my Dad clear up the garden for the rest of the day. I also watched the Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix, Awh man what a performance by Max Verstappen (My favourite F1 driver currently!) Yesterday(Monday), After work on my commute home I decided to start listening to my Audio books again, my Dad recently got into them and is always talking about them. I had listened to them in the past but only for a short period of time. Anyways I decided to try them again. The first book I chose was "Rich Dad Poor Dad" - By Robert T. Kiyosaki. It basically talks about the way the rich think about life and the way the ordinary think about life - Very interesting, highly recommended. Reading this book made me feel powerful as I felt I was getting a load of knowledge which would help me for my future, so when I hit the gym soon after work feeling powerful from my new knowledge, I blasted through my program with no struggles whatsever. That 70kg squat that I was struggling with before, I just completed with pretty much no struggle at all. It is amazing how feeling powerful in your head helps you be physically powerful! Today - After getting home from work I watched the latest episode of "Designated Survivor" and another episode of "Grand Tour" and then decided to start properly going through the Game Quitters program (Hence why I have started this Journal). I should mention that before I started going through the program I joined a discord channel where my best friend from like the age of 5 and whom I have played many games with for many years and also one of his friends whom I am also friends with. I had told my friend previously by text that I have decided to quit gaming and only really gave him a brief description of why. So as you can expect when I joined the first thing they tried to do was to ask me to play a game, I said No. And they sniggered to each other "So he's serious then" I then started to explain in more detail of why I wanted to quit and what I wanted to achieve. My best friend started to explain that he still plays games and he can also socialize and do other things, he's also had a girlfriend for 4 years. He just couldn't seem to see WHY I had to quit and why it was necessary, because he is not nearly as addicted to games as me. The other friend commented: "It sounds like you're having a mid-life crisis." They both laughed and continued to take digs at me trying to quit games. I fought them off and remained strong to my decision and it felt good. Soon the discussion was over, they were currently playing Dark Souls 3 so they continued their in-game talk. I decided I didn't want to be in that environment any longer and quit the channel, immediately loading up the Game Quitters website. And after a long ass post here I am I really do appreciate if you have read any of this first post, I know it's all alot of useless crap that you really don't want to read But to be honest just writing about my days and tracking what I do even though nobody will probably read it is quite satisfying in a weird way. And I can see why the program tells you to do it! Here's to the start of a new chapter in my book! Cheers! Brad.

Ayy, thanks man! Ahah I did the same thing. But it was only my CBT so I'm not doing anything crazy. Although I do plan to do my A2 license at some point when I have more experience. But yeah they are awesome to ride especially when riding with a couple of friends.

Wow thanks for all this info! Yeah I think I have the same inner gremlin too!

Hi ‌@Schwing, I felt pretty much the same way towards girls, I wasn't really too bothered about them because I was enjoying my own thing ( computer games) But obviously it doesn't present many opportunities to meet them so the chances of finding said compatible women was very difficult. And if I did see a girl I liked I just assumed that once she got to know me she'd think I'm a loser. It also doesn't help that I keep saying to myself I won't have anything interesting to talk about because I just don't have the general knowledge and good stories to tell like everyone else. I never know random films people would talk about or just random topics because instead of finding out about that stuff I was gaming instead. I guess one of my roots does stem from my parents splitting up. When I was on my computer I was out of the way and my mum didn't have to worry about me doing drugs or something like that on the streets. But yeah I am in my head wayyy too much when I speak to people, like I could be having a decent conversation with someone but for some reason half way through it I just start to get into my own head and start either thinking about what I want to say and kind of stop paying attention to what they are saying or I just start thinking to myself am I paying full attention here? And then I'm thinking about making sure I pay attention to them instead of actually paying attention lol. As for porn, I have been quite obsessed with it. Often watching it before going to bed every night. But I have been trying to stop watching it for quite a while, but I always slip up. I'm hoping that along with quitting games, it should make quitting porn easier too! My thoughts were always, "I suck with with women so I might as well just fap to hot women online" But at the same time I was like, " I need to get better at socialising". But it was my gaming addiction that has kept me procrastinating. Hence why I need to fix it!

Hi Simmsjt, It's great to know that other people can relate! I will definitely create a journal and continue to update. As for hobbies, I really enjoy skiing but it is rather difficult to do in the UK and plus the ski season is coming to end. However there are snowdomes that I could go to, but they can be more on the expensive side. I also recently bought a motorbike, only a 125cc so not that quick! But with the better weather coming hopefully I'll be able to go out on that more. I do enjoy playing mostsports but yeah, other than that I don't really have any other hobbies currently as my spare time did just consist of computers games. And this is part of the problem, I don't really know what I like haha - So I suppose it's just a case of trying out loads of different stuff! I haven't had chance to delete my games yet as I posted quite late and I'm currently at work. But I shall when I get home.

Hey Guys, Brad here. I've just turned 19 years old and to be honest, I feel like I have zero experience in life compared to others my age. I've been playing video games from quite a young age. Starting off with a gameboy then a ps1, ps2, ps3 and then finally computers... From like ages 4-12 I wasn't too bad. I had quite a large group of friends and did a fair amount of stuff with them from what I can remember.. I've always been a very competitive person and through-out school better than average at most of the sports I played. It was like this when it came to gaming too, when I was around 13 pretty much all of my friends had ps3's and we all owned CoD4. I was better than most of my friends and usually got the reputation of 'The guy to beat'. This continued on to Mw2 where again we were all sweating out the game, but we still did alot of stuff together in real life too. My real problem started when I discovered you could play games on computers. It started out on minecraft with my best friend, and we'd spend all day just building stuff and getting creative and fighting off our others friends who tried to destroy our stuff. It was great at the time but I was playing on my mums computer and it was so slow to play on. This lead to me saving up all my money and getting my own laptop. And oh man my life just went down hill at the point BUT I never really realized the impact it was having. I downloaded an old favorite from my ps2 days, GTA San Andreas. I got it on my laptop and found a roleplay server where I could play with 500+ other people. I became so addicted to this server that i'd spend literally all weekend playing it. Waking up at 10AM and playing through till 4AM the next day. Rinse and repeat until school, as soon as school finished i'd play until late. I was playing with my best friend too at the start. After a while he started to get bored so I went at it alone and racked up so many hours on the game. I believe my total hours on that game alone was like 2600 hours or something. The server began to die out and I found out about League Of Legends. And I began playing this all day, getting pretty good at it, then CSGO, then Rocket league and then Overwatch. As you can see all of these games were competitive and I just wanted to be the best at all of them which led me to pouring in so many hours. Even the roleplay server was competitive because I was part of a racing faction. So the reason I now feel like I have zero experience in life, well mainly is because I've never had a girlfriend. Never been with a girl, never kissed a girl other than a friendly peck on the cheek from a drunk girl lol. My social skills also suck, but if you actually came across me in real life you probably wouldn't think I suck at socializing at first due to my posture and the way I present myself. I can speak quite confidently when in a serious conversation or in 1 on 1 situations but put me in a group of people and i'll hardly say a word. I feel that this is due to me gaming and secluding myself from the real world meaning I don't have much to talk about because I just don't know much about the world. I also feel like I just have no real skills in life, I mean I can still play sports to a pretty good standard but nothing amazing like I could have done if I practiced sports like I did my gaming. SO, I have decided to quit gaming for good as there is so much more for me to experience compared to sitting in my bedroom all day playing video games. To be honest, I'm no where near as bad as I was a year ago. I now have a job, working as a CAD designer at Triumph Motorcycles for the past 6 months. And I have been hitting the gym at least 3 times a week for the past 6 months too. But I still game so much and when I look at my facebook and instagram and see all my old friends with their girlfriends and stuff it really depresses me. I always say i'm going to make a change but I never do, I procrastinate! I'm sick of it! So yeah, I found out about Cam and GameQuitters and decided this is exactly what I need! I know this has been quite a long introduction and probably most of you have not read it but I do thank you if you have! I just kinda felt like blurting out all of my thoughts and regrets haha. Here is the start to a more fulfilling life! - Brad.