Hello everyone, First of all I'd like to thank Cam for starting this forum and everyone else whose been part of it. I'm Avinash from Bangalore, India and I'm 27 years old. I started gaming since I was maybe 6 on the some of the old computer systems. When I first started to use the PC I was really fascinated by what this machine was and I wanted to learn more about what it was and I loved the strange looking parts, noises and lights that came from it. This started my passion for making sense of how computers work. It wasn't long before my interest in learning about the computer changed into mostly focusing on gaming. Like many gamers I was an introvert who used gaming as an outlet. I found many friends who shared my interest and it was great. We played console games, pc games, arcade machines and whatever we could get our hands on with whatever little money our parents gave us. During my teenage years I started to explore Counter strike and started visiting cafes and then found a lot of people who played as much or more then I did. It was great. The internet was just starting to spread back then and it was so amazing that I could sit in my room and play with someone across the world. I played cs 1.6 mostly, some console gaming and spend a lot of time outside cafes talking games day in and day out. As I got better my love for it grew. Professional gaming was something I was starting to consider. Long story short, I stopped playing cs 1.6 like many of my friends and we then moved on to online games like Ragnarok Online and World of Worldcraft. This was when my gaming life took a whole new turn. My grades and interest in school and college dropped dramatically. I was skipping classes spend all the money I had playing video games. I had started to drink and smoke cigarettes. Playing world of warcraft all night , getting drunk and smoking pack after pack felt good for a short period of time. Soon the smoking and drinking started to affect me to the point I wasn't able to sleep at night because I'd just be coughing up stuff all night, barely getting sleep, often thinking to myself - "Why am I doing this to myself? This has got to change", only to wake the next day and repeat the entire cycle. Eventually my respiratory system started to get affected so much that I woke up one day with an Orbital cellulitis and was hospitalized for a week. After going through surgery, I decided this was it, I was going to live healthier and make changes in my habits. I was successful at trying to live healthier for a short period of time before giving up and repeating the cycle all over. I was back to smoking upto 20 cigarettes or more a day, getting wasted and PvPing all night long on WoW. Almost everyday I kept telling myself that I should reconsider my habits. But it continued for a atleast 2 years. Eventually I stopped playing WoW because many of my friends quit. I then started to meet other friends , some of which were non gamers. We spent a lot of time getting drunk. I started to drink more and more - to a point when there was a whisky bottle at my desk almost all the time. Over the years, after attempting to quit smoking and drinking multiple times, I finally succeeded. Its been almost 3 years since I put a cigarette in my mouth or had a drink. Doing so made me realize - If I can put my mind to giving up alcohol and cigarettes (Something that a huge part of the world has a tough time with), what else could I accomplish with a determined will? I started to learn to play guitar and code HTML, CSS and PHP (Hoping to resume my passion for learning about computers). I worked on maybe 25 websites so far and then started to miss gaming because I had given up my vices and felt like revisiting that feeling. I thought since I don't drink or smoke cigarettes , gaming would be alright. I started playing a bit of cs 1.6 , cs:go and then moved on to League of Legends. I played it for a few months, many days in excess of 10+ hours. I was getting a bit of exercise on some days. But once again, there was a part of me that wasn't happy with the choices I was making. I ignored that part of me and continued. In the recent times, I had put more conscious effort into quitting it, many times uninstalling and reinstalling it again. I felt like the pattern from my teenage days was starting to begin. Last week I decided that it was starting to affect my health and motivation to do other activities that I had been procrastinating about for weeks. People had been waiting on me for weeks to get back to them about web projects because I got too caught up in playing LoL all night and day long. After going a few days without it, I realized how much more peaceful and calm not gaming was, and also how my whole life my brain had been wired to revolve around gaming. I have had my moments of "hmm maybe just a few games with a different attitude" , but that approach has always ended in a relapse so far. Yesterday , I reinstalled the game (after a few days of not playing), tried playing two games and then proceeded to uninstall it with a smile on my face, because I had seen the other side. Playing LoL taught me a lot about team work and working towards objectives. I used to play mostly a support character and I liked to be the guy that supported the team. But in the bigger picture I felt like I was still constantly engaging myself in a system that was rooted in conflict and battle. Not very spiritually satisfying to me. I realized that I could take my desire to help people with other activities. Today marks day 1 of gaming abstinence. I'm going to pay close attention to anything resembling withdrawal symptoms. I've decided to put more time into pursuing my interests of exploring astral projections, lucid dreaming and learning code. Getting more physical exercise is something I am really looking forward to. I hope doing so will accelerate my restoration of dopamine levels to more or less normal. Improving my breathing techniques was also something I have been focusing on since I was mouth breather for as long as I can remember, which happens to be one of the reasons that I used to play games and drink and smoke a lot (From my understanding and experience it seems like mouth breathing can result in lower oxygen levels leading to more anxiety and/or restlessness and that making me want to seek activities that I think might provide relief like gaming or drinking or smoking). I've also decided to get more veggies and fruits and avoid added sugar from my diet aswell. Thanks for reading and if I can help you out in some way, let me know