[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 11

I met with some of my friends from long ago. Video games came up and they were very understanding that I quit. It's surely unimportant as we don't meet often, but supportive nonetheless.

[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 8-10

Mostly packed days with work and socialization. Gaming thoughts became much less frequent (although I had one this morning) and easier to deal with. Rested and feeling much better now. More stuff ahead. Onwards!

[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 6–7

Two days filled with work. I think I've overworked myself and I'm very tired right now – undesirable, but observably different from the lethargy coming from boredom and no games. I notice that I now like to watch videos instead late into the night, and I will try to control that by leaving my laptop outside before sleep.

[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 5

Thanks for the support here!

Again, occupying myself with work and socializing with my friends were very helpful. I just noticed that I didn't do much outside of home last weekend; that might have contributed to my boredom. I filled my calendar this week with work and get-togethers with old friends and classmates.

[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 4

I got depressed when I resisted playing video games, and I went on a day-long quest of observing myself and diagnosing what caused it.

To bring in here some of what I learned from statistics, this is in fact an interesting causal inference problem: I am only aware of the symptoms and I have to deduce the causes. Statistics makes one wary of correlations – to oversimplify, things happening next to each other aren't necessarily causing one another. In my case, I could have attributed my lethargy to any combination of lack of caffeine, lack of exercise, yesterday's heat stroke from overexercising, and a myriad other potential causes. I don't think I'll be knowing this one for sure, but I hypothesize it was largely because of video games. I'll have to be aware of my changes and react accordingly.

Caffeine helped elevate my mood in the morning but I was feeling down after lunch. Usually I resort to playing video games when I get bored – bad mood seems to be a trigger of this habit. By now I have mostly succeeded in substituting exercising for my old gaming habits.

Onwards.

[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 3

Working and socializing seemed to curb my gaming urges.

Exercised at night and deleted remaining games in my home desktop.

[Jeff's Journal]

# Day 2

Strong urges to play video games during the day. Feelings of angst came up as I restricted myself, so I watched gaming videos (will be switched to reading books), exercised, played guitar and meditated instead. I will be more occupied in the next few days with various work, and it would be easier not to think about games.

I believe growth mindset here is important: willpower is acquired rather than inborn. Rewiring a brain likely involves exertion and effort (think about education, habit forming, motion recovery, sports learning, etc.)

Looking forward to completely quitting video games.

[Jeff's Journal]

Hi all, I'm Jeff. I'm a college student trying to improve personally. Starting today, I will stop playing video games, and I plan to journal my experience here. Cheers.

# Day 1

A few interesting observations as I break the habit of resorting to video games when I have downtime.

While this is still an insufficient sample size of observations to reach any solid conclusions, it seems that I get a sense of urgency if I plan my day in advance.

Right now, I'm trying to reform my habit of

Downtime (cue) – video game (routine) – stimulation (reward)

to

Downtime (cue) – resting/exercise (routine) – refreshment (reward).

There might be other triggering scenarios like stress and procrastination, and I am finding a replacement routine for them. Meditating is a promising option – I have been doing it occasionally and I plan to commit more.