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Hey @Theresa, good that you could stop yourself.It payed off that you deleted everything in the past and set-up this barrier. It is fantastic that you recognize the pattern. Now you should think about how you want to handle a similar situation in the future. Because these emotional reactions and stresses will occur again and again. But you can choose how you want to react to these feelings. It helps if you prepared a strategy beforehand to not fall into old patterns again. Ideas to handle the situation in a healthy way: Call a friend, go for a jog, listen to some loud music, journal about your emotions, eat a batch of ice cream, do any combination of this suggestions 😉 I am rooting for you too!

2021-04-08 Everything is good right now. Some challenges at home and at work, but I feel on top of things, which is nice 🙂 I am pleased to start the shaving routine. This was bothering me for longer than I want to admit.

@Zeno It is a first world problem but it is a problem. I think it is a good measure of your life quality how good/bad your problems are. I.e. if your problems are existential nature, like how can I feed my family this month your quality of life is most of the time more problematic then if your problem is. Noone is forcing me to work, but it kinda feels bad and isn't good for my mental health, so I should push myself more 😉 I am thankful to be in this position.

I agree that your actions are bound by your perceived identity. But it also works the other way around. If you do something else then gaming for awhile it changes your identity towards the other thing. For some people 90days are enough to Go through that Change. Others need more time. It is key to find a desirable version of yourself and work towards that version. One little action after another

2021-04-07 I actually had a little video watching relapse yesterday because my elaborate setup didn't block YouTube on Firefox mobile. That in one way good because it is sometimes a really useful thing to be able to distract my older son if he has to endure long drives or similar stresses, but it is bad that I have it available. I have chosen to live with the hole and talk about it if I should relapse. I watched an Aprils fools video form Kripparian and was bored and moved away. Work is going well. My deadline and my time booking seems at first glance to only be interesting to me, so nobody noticed how less I managed to achieve. Guess that is a benefit of being a 1man team and good at self-promotion. But the missing punishment for my "bad" behavior is also dangerous. Because if no one corrects me, I have to do it myself. The flexibility is great but also challenging. But so far, everything is going well, and I feel actually supported and validated at work and at home. Now it is my turn not to fuck it up basically. If I manage to get in a controlled workflow at work and at home and everything looks stable/good. Then I will be able to be ambitious again. But right now I need to stop overloading myself and deliver on the things which are on my plate all ready. Shaving continues and feels good. I also find some holes in the day I can spend on drawing. I started a course to learn how web applications work which is interesting and fills in some knowledge gaps which is great. Not only that, but I can also book it under training on the job which is even better. I am feeling right now liek I improve 1% instead of declining 1% a day. Now its time to keep course.

I wish you success in the exam and the detox!

okay finished my booking tasks. Now I have like 5 hours of sleep left before the first kid awakens. Still good to be done with this.

05-04-2021 After a full Easter weekend I spent the evening booking time based on my calendar, taking around an hour of time per 2 weeks. I am writing this in a short break (2 weeks to go). I will book another week and then go to sleep because it is to fucking late. As always there is a lot to do. I could stick to my commitments to personal hygiene drawing and time logging this week. @Pochatok and @Jason70, thank you both for checking out my sketches. I will work on copying a picture of myself until it is good enough to be used as a profile picture. It's really hard to get the proportions right. The second face looks at least similar enough to my picture and me that my son (3,5years) could identify that I was trying to draw myself 😄

I am glad my recommendation helps you a bit😁

😁 Loving programming wir Scratch. Awesome Project!

Yeah, LOL is draining a lot of energy if you immerse yourself in it. I think it's just hard for our brain to take in all these sensorial data and warp it into a strategy while still reacting at the moment. It is a very immediate feedback game. You run a little to far in and your dead and have to work with the disadvantage. I think this also why it is so addicting. I will never ever play LOL again. I lost too much life in this one. And it was too hard to get away. But cool that you can use games in this way. I remember playing as I was sick or after teeth operations and the distraction helped me a lot with pain and weakness. So I think that is actually a valid strategy if your not addicted.

Hey @Zeno of Elea, actually, never heard of Zeno, but interesting figure! I used games not as a measure to stop change but to escape/don't have to deal with bad things in my life. I think it is often the case that gaming is a learned strategy (which works in the short run) to deal with emotions. Where we never learned how to deal with these emotions in a healthy way we just adopted the first thing which consistently worked. It seems like you avoiding sadness. I recently read that sadness actually is necessary for acceptance. If you are sad that something is gone you accept that you can't change it and that it is okay this way. Without going through this emotional states feeling it on some level you can never accept and never move on. For me, the bad emotion triggering gaming is guilt/shame. The feeling of being inadequate. Instead, I should take it as a warning that either my self expectations or other peoples expectations are twisted in some way. And exploring if I actually am wrong and changing it or if the other people judging me wrong. This would enable me to be sad and accepting it or to get angry and changing something. Escapism does neither. It only stops the bad feeling until it gets to much. Best of luck at your detox 🙂

Welcome @ILoveBirds, It is a great start to list down why you came to this decision. I would advise you to start a daily journal and do commit to the 90 days of not gaming (even if you write you want to stop completely). There you can reflect daily on your feelings/cravings/problems and other like-minded people will give you advice. It is important to set up a system which helps you to stay consistent with it. And to commit to such a system is way easier if you commit for 90days instead for eternity. After this detox you'll be able to see clearer and decide again against gaming if you still like. But to commit to do something which is hard (and it is hard to stop gaming for 90days if you are addicted) and going through with it is worth the experience even if you should decide to play later on again. Best of luck!

2021-04-01 I am still awake at almost 23:00 and doing some work because it took a freaking long time for me to find the discipline to spent time working in the evening. I had a short day today because I helped my wife with the kids as she was exhausted. But I did not spend enough time this evening on work to be able to book 8 hours. But I wrote a LinkedIn article about the digital detox I am doing. Because its LinkedIn I dialed the drama down and neither named porn nor gaming at work but just wrote that I want to block feed media and YouTube (which I do). Let's see if anyone is reading it. But I felt like a blogger for a moment there. Tomorrow I plan on working directly at 8am and have an appointment with a colleague at this time. I wasn't able today to book my times, because of a technical problem at first and then getting distracted by other tasks. I think I have to work at Easter to get the things done I said I get done. That's annoying, but I guess I had it coming. I hinted so much at my wife already, but I'll try to do the work in the evenings if she has to be with my younger son anyway (because he can't sleep alone and is breastfeeding every half hour in the evening), and the older one is already sleeping. I think I'll challenge myself to draw a profile picture of my face this month and add this to my LinkedIn Account. That would be a tangible challenge. But right now I am going to sleep. I hope you have a good 1.April!

Interesting Chart. You seem to reach your fitness goals. Food expenses as a measure are kind of a funny way to display it, though. Regardless of the reason I think quality food is an excellent thing to spent your money on 🙂

Hey Theresa, If your not overweight be careful about setting goals regarding loosing weight. Especially for women (which get so much societal pressure to be unhealthy thin) this can lead in a bad spiral. Maybe set fitness goals instead? Like running longer distances or at a faster time? Fitness is the goal, not a low body weight. Other goals in the same direction would be a certain number of push-ups or being able to do a pull-up. If you are interested in body weight training, I can recommend you https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine. There is a lot of good information in this Subreddit. If you miss chatting on discord maybe set up a zoom/WhatsApp call with family/friends? This always makes me feel better and more socially connected.

Hope this reaction went down fast. It sucks if you can't eat things you like. Especially if you don't have anything other in the house at the moment.

2021-03-31 Yesterday I felt better with everything blocked. Cleared my browser history to not get reminded at all these YouTube videos about hearthstone content. I was semi-productive at work, taking long breaks to listen to a podcast I found @dirac Journal. Still better than gaming, I guess. And it reminded me about responsibility and how it frees me. It's a strong concept which took me a long time to understand. But lately, I didn't incorporate it into my life. Escaping the hard things instead of embracing them as they come. But that is what I should do embrace the things that are hard, take responsibility for people surrounding me (especially my family) and find meaning in taking care of myself and others. I know that to marry and have a family at a relatively young age (became father with 27) was the best decision exactly out of this reason. Beforehand I drifted through life. Since then, I quit gaming, found a lateral entry in the IT-Industry which I love and became way more responsible in general. This helped my self-confidence. Lately, I lost all of that confidence and felt burdened by all the things I need to take care of. Overwhelmed and didn't take care for me. That's why shaving every morning is on my habit list. I want to ingrain in myself that I am important too. That it is okay to do more than the necessary for my body and my mind. In that spirit I will start the day by faking my time bookings for the month in a way that I don't get fired. It is time to get over with this, to have a new start. Thanks for reading 🙂

@dirac I read his first book "Models" and his second one, "The Subtle Art of not giving a Fuck". I enjoyed both content wise. But I also like his style. He is a funny dude. I can highly recommend his blog "https://markmanson.net/best-articles". Maybe you could start there to get a sense if he is for you. The books are similar to his blog posts but obviously bigger in scope.

Hey@Code, It is that you feel like you controlling your life again and work towards the things you aspire. I wish you it stays the way and if not, you find other ways that work for you. Best of luck with your company 🙂

Thanks for the link. Mark Manson is one of my favorite bloggers and I like how Peterson approaches self development 😄 Interesting Cast. Looking forward to listen to them