dirac

That is something I really dont want to do for instance. Mostly because I think it wouldnt do anything for me. I could just make a new steam account and download dota 2 again because its all free. I would just lose tons of money that I already invested in steam. And I dont know if I want to quit games forever. I just want to do this 90 day detox for now and see how it feels. Day 10 -> success Was quite productive today, did almost everything I wanted to but that two anime limit didnt work out that well 😄 because I was done with everything at around 8 I didnt really know what to do with myself so just watched anime for 4 hours hehe. Its not ideal but as I got my work done I dont mind it too much. I just have to find an activity that I can do in the evening, something to wind down. The only thing I can think of at the moment is reading but its still hard for me to read if I could also do something else. I think I will try to implement a reading habit next. Like read as much as I like before I start watching anything. Tomorrow should also be a busy day , lets see!

Conscious Substitutions Day 9 did go well indeed if you just look at the fact that I didnt play any games. However I was watching anime for like 6 hours straight. I believe the problem is a bit more fundamental than just gaming itself. I still think that watching anime is better than playing competitive online games like dota but to be honest I think there is not much of a difference between playing skyrim or watching netflix all day. Its so easy to just substitute one addiction with another and its a trap that is very easy to fall into. But I dont think the solution is to forbid yourself everything until all you can do is reading and uni stuff. Thats why its so important to make concious substitutions and not let your brain come up with stuff on the spot. Because in the end your brain will always just pick the highest dopamin activities possible. That will be gaming, porn, netflix, youtube or whatever but its not gonna be a book about finance. Luckily my job and my lab work starts this week so there is less free time that I have to find things to do with. But I will put more effort into that now. I set myself a two episode per day limit for anime. I am confident that I am able to stick with this. Today I have a lot on my plate lets see if I can get everything done.

Day 9 -> success! I actually have a lot to say but its late so I will post tomorrow morning :)

Day 5,6,7,8 ->> huge success! I came back from my hiking trip today and I stayed clean through the whole time 🙂 Of course it is easier when you arent home but I definitely had to fight some mobile game urges on the way back! I honestly dont have that much to say because nothing noteworthy happened. But I had a talk about gaming with the friend I went. He is also a gamer but has always been in control. He does occasionally play a little more but he never had any problems with it. He could not get it at all that I want to quit. He cant understand that as long as gaming is an option for me I will never be able to do things like reading or coding or basically anything. He thinks I should just try to make those things a habit which just shows that he does not grasp the problem whatsoever. But thats fine, not everyone will understand why I am quitting but I knew that from the beginning. It did not at all affect my motivation though. I am still committed to 90 days of no gaming ! Tomorrow morning I will meet my professor for my new job as a research assistant. Its only 7 hours per week but I am still a fulltime student. I am very excited though. I will also start a 3 week project for uni tomorrow. So I am gonna be more busy again which is great! Gonna post daily again from today!! Cant wait to make it to two weeks ! Only 6 days to go.

Day 4 -> success! Didnt manage to post yesterday because I traveled all day and after I had dinner I was just way too tired. But I am happy I stayed strong and didnt play any mobile games on the train 🙂 This is our balcony:

Day 3 -> success ! Today was a good day ! I did everything I wanted to and even went to the gym. I wasnt as anxious as yesterday and after the gym the anxiety was basically gone. Funny story about the job I applied to : This morning I got an email that looked like it was automatically sent out to everyone who was rejected. I was pretty sad because I felt like the job interview went really well and as I mentioned before this was kind of my dream job. But half an hour later I got a phonecall from the company. The woman who called said that they actually really wanted me for the job because they found me to be an interesting person and felt like I was definitely qualified but the executive floor canceled the job all together because of corona. However they told me that I should apply again to any other position as soon as I found one that I am interested in because they were sad that couldnt hire me. Thats also why they wanted to tell me personally. That made me really happy I have to say. I mean I didnt get the job but it was not because I was inadequate. So now I will start to work in a research group at my university. I am also excited for this! The contract will be until 14. february. I might check if by that time there might be a new application for the company that canceled the job. Because I dont give up that easily 🙂 The main reason why I would rather work at a company outside that university is that I can work more in the holidays. Holidays in university are usually wayyyy too long. I have had holidays this year from mid of august till november. Thats almost 3 months !!!! And without a job its just so hard to do something with that time and not falling into a gaming hole (like it happened to me the last two holidays). Good thing is that spring holidays are much short. However tomorrow I will go hiking with a friend till sunday. I will try to post daily if I manage to log in with my phone x)

Day 2 -> success! Today I didnt game again. I also didnt really experience any cravings which is nice. My mind was way to focused on that job interview. I would say the interview went quite well but it was a little odd. It was a phone call because the person who organized it failed around a little. But they two people I talked to were really nice and they said they would tell me if I got the job by next monday. So now all I can do is wait. I also went to my jujutsu training and it was quite fun. We have lots of new people there and at the moment I am a bit confused how to train with them. Because many of them are much weaker than me physically and when you are doing wrestling this matters a lot. I will put some more thougt into that. I think the best way I see for myself now is to train certain techniques by leading into a certain position so I can train from there. I will try that out. In general I felt a bit anxious today. Didnt feel like that in a long time I have to say. Might have also come from the job interview. But it didnt get any better after it. Maybe its also the no game but I will stay strong. I think my body might suffer a bit from the fact that I kind of starve it of dopamin at the moment. I am not eating any sweets, I am doing no fap, no game and I quit coffee. But I feel like I am on the right track. Tomorrow I have quite some errands to run. Get my bike fixed, go to the gym, meet with a friend at night and pack my stuff for the hiking trip that starts on wednesday.

Just a quick check in. Day 2 is going well so far but I have my job interview in 2 hours and I am basically dying from excitement and nervousness. This is basically my dream job I am so scared of not being qualified enough or whatever. Gonna write again as soon as its over.

@royal panda thank you for the kind words 🙂 I will definitely post how that interview went! Day 1 - success I did it ! I made it through the first day. After the craving I had during breakfast I was perfectly fine for the rest of the day. Reading in the celebrate part of the forum definitely helped. I also talked to one of my best friends about addiction because he has struggled with porn for a long time. We promised each other to shoot for the 90 days together. He in no porn and me in no game. It really helps to have someone close to you to talk about that kind of stuff. Because none of my other friends have any problems with addiction as far as I know. As I mentioned earlier I helped my friend to move some boxes. This took about 2 hours and then I walked home for an hour. That walk home was really nice and refreshing. I have been thinking a lot about my gaming problem today. And about my life in general. I have to say I have been doing quite well in the past couple of years and I feel proud of what I achieved in university so far. Especially because I did all that fighting a gaming addiction. Now I have been thinking how well I could be doing without that. And this thougt really intrigues me. How much undiscovered potential might be there. I also watched a video about dopamin today and how it affects your life. I think to be a better me I need to practice a more minimalistic lifestyle when it comes to entertainment. I mean how would I ever convince my brain to pick up a book where it actually has to work to be entertained via using imagination if I could just play games or watch netflix or porn. I think by living a life where those high dopamin activities are not an option you will have so much more joy in your daily life. My longest time without gaming was in 11th grade when I spent 6 months in new zealand as an exchange student. I was so happy with life there. I was happy walking around a forest or just hanging out with friends. I didnt care what I would do with my friends as long as we just spent time together. I was happy sitting at the beach or reading a book or training martial arts in the garden. When I came back home I instantly fell back into gaming and all those feelings were gone. I only met with friends for drinking or smoking weed. I never met friends to just hang out because this didnt give enough of a kick. I also never took walks anymore. And I couldnt focus on things like reading anymore. I always think that my gaming problem is not as severe as that of many other people because I dont play "that much". But it affected my life so much over the years. I mean I am 26 years and I think I had a problem with gaming since I got my gameboy color and pokemon crystal on my 6th birthday. I have been gaming 20 out of 26 years. And the insane problems I had the last week with quitting just shows me that its actually much more severe than I act like. I feel like an anime character that always was considered weaker than his peers and then suddenly he realised that he has been poisened ages ago. And I really want to know what my life could be like once I remove that poison. 89 days to go lets do this !

Ok so a quick check in because I felt like it. I woke up well rested and made myself a nice breakfast. During breakfast I experienced such strong urges. Like all I could think about was downloading skyrim again and playing as much as I can. But then I took a shower and cleaned the flat a little and now I am fine again. The craving is gone. Instead I checked the celebrate part of the forum and found some very inspiring stories. I am committed to the 90 days. Also because I really want to be able to make a post to this forum!! In about an hour I will help a friend carrying some boxes out of his flat and I decided to take my longboard which means the trip will be a bit longer, so I can spend some time outside 🙂 Later I want to inform myself about a company where I have a job interview tomorrow, so I can be as prepared as possible. The evening I will spend with my girlfriend.

Ah amazing, thats exactly what I've been looking for !

The last two days were also very unsuccessful 🙂 Friday I was atleast trying to do some other stuff but after those 3 or 4 activities I just went straight back to gaming. I basically gamed the whole friday until like 7pm and then I went on a goodbye party to a good friend of mine. He also just finished his physics bachelor with me and is now traveling the world with his boyfriend. I had quite a few drinks and stayed till 3 am. But I have to say it was a really cool evening! Today I woke up at 12:30 and slightly hungover. I made myself a nice breakfast and the again I gamed all day. I still feel quite lost in my journey to stop gaming mostly because at the moment I dont even know why I want to stop and what I would do with my time then. I might just read the respawn guide again to get inspired..

Ok so another unsuccessful day. I woke up had breakfast and then a productive meeting for about 2 hours. I felt motivated and I was interested and participated. Then after I was done I layed down on the couch and was thinking "ok what now?". I had literally no motivation or pull for anything. I didnt feel like reading, cooking, going outside, programming etc. The only thing I felt like doing was staring at my phone. After like 10 or 20 minutes I just gave up and went back to gaming. I even played dota instead of skyrim which I still consider the worse option. But to be honest I didnt enjoy the gaming either. I just played to "kill time". I actually wanted to go to the gym but I didnt. One reason for why I am a little unmotivated is that my bike is broken and I cant really use it anymore and public transport just sucks a lot. I have been wanting to repair my bike since two weeks but I didnt do it yet. Tomorrow I will call my bike shop and ask for a repair appointment (yes you have to make an appointment now because of corona). If I am lucky I will get an appointment next monday/tuesday because I am going hiking with a friend from wednesday till sunday. Regarding my plans on how to proceed: I think I cant just wait for myself to be motivated to do stuff that is apparently not gonna work. I will just tell myself what I am gonna do now. Even if this might mean planning every hour of my day so I dont even have the choice to game. From experience I know that motivation usually comes with the activity itself so if I force myself for a couple of days motivation should take over. Man quitting gaming is really hard but through this forum and the daily journaling I feel like I am really getting behind my addiction. I already know so much more about myself and how my brain works than three weeks ago. Now I will clean up my desk and prepare a little so tomorrow goes smooth 🙂

I have to carefully say yes here. As you can see basically comments above say you cant do it but I have been doing it for quite a while. I mean I have not been very successful at no game so far but I will just tell you what I am doing. So first of all I hate playing league of legends. It makes me furious and most of the time I am playing I am like "wow dota is so much better why am I even playing this dumb game". But I love watching league esports. Two of my favorite youtubers mostly post league content. But because I genuinely hate playing the game it never triggered me to relapse.

Hi James, how did you manage to do 9 months? And why did you go back to gaming then? I never made it that far 😅

Ok time for another post. Sadly I didnt manage to post yesterday. Well I decided to change my previous approach because apparently I deluded myself again 🙂 Believing that only online games like dota are a problem for me, I bought a singleplayer game. And it was fine. I played mostly on the evenings for about 2 hours. But then I decided to get the skyrim special edition (I already owned and played the normal one). With better graphics etc. because why not? And here I am with 30 hours on the skyrim special edition just 3 days after I bought it hehe. So who would have thougt, its not just about dota or online competitive games. Its about all games. But as I am learning and open to my own fallacies I will accept this and continue. So no more games at all from now on. Iam also starting to use an app that counts my days of abstinence. I also realised that my approach was not working in general. The main reason why I want to stop games is to be more productive. But in the end I have to acknowledge that one of the reasons why I play games in the first place is to not be productive. To escape, to procrastinate, to do something that just makes the monkey inside my head smash his cymbals together and produce some damn endorphines and dopamine and whatever else my brain enjoys. If I want to stop gaming I have to find some of those activities as well. Something that is purely for entertainment purposes. To be honest I have no idea what that could be but I will keep looking and find it. Maybe sport will do the trick already? For the rest of october my main goal is to stop gaming. Doesnt matter if I am productive or not. Of course I will also not binge netflix/youtube or spend too much time on my phone because I feel like its the same thing and will just make my recovery take even longer. I have been thinking about entertainment in general. When I look at different people in my life I feel like they all have a very different need for entertainment. One friend of mine who also studies physics with me for example: he basically works on computer science projects or physics related stuff all day. Sometimes more than 10-12 hours and hes happy with it. He doesnt game or watch netflix. He goes to sport about 2 times a week and hes really happy with everything. I just dont know how he does it. I wish I could spend this much time on uni stuff or private projects in that sector. But even though I really enjoy working on all of that, at the end of the day I just have such a longing for games or netflix or whatever. Its the same with me and candy. I either eat a whole bar of chocolate or I despise sweets because I want to be healthy. My mother for example worked from 8 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon while I was in school. Then she would come home and take care of all the housework. Cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, buying groceries. I never saw her even once procrastinating on household duties or basically anything. In the evening she would watch one show that went for about 90 minutes. Then she went to bed and read a little. I once asked here (after I already moved out) how she always took care of a household while still having a job and why she didnt just skip it sometimes. She said because it needed to be done so she did it. I admire her so much for that. Taking care of two people and a cat and a house all by herself while working. I often struggle to take care of myself in a way. I cant count the amount of times I didnt have any clothes left because I put off washing for several days. Or that I couldnt eat because I forgot to wash the dishes. I really hope that if I quit gaming that at some point I might be able to be satisfied with less entertainment in my life. To not feel a need to binge on everything. That I could just work a whole day, come home do housework and go to bed, without feeling entitled to be entertained. I mean my grandparents didnt have any kind of technology and they made it through their twenties. I mean I am not unhappy or depressed or anything. I like life. But I am really scared that I will just be depressed if I dont game. That I might find out that this incredibly strong need for entertainment, especially technological entertainment, is something that I will always have to live with. But I guess I will find out now.

I have been browsing the forum a little and so far I didnt find any post where people would just post their success stories. I right now could really use some stories that would show me that it can be done and that its worth doing it!

Day 5 of no dota Today I woke up quite tired. I just need my 8 hours of sleep to fully function. Did 1 coding challenge and worked with a collegue on something for about 2 hours. The rest of the day I wasnt really productive. I played quite a bit some skyrim but I dont regret it. I have to get a better sleeping rythm though. Would rather wake up at 8 instead of 9/9:30. Not much else to say just a quick post.

Day 4 of no dota Today was a bit odd, I slept way too long as I mentioned in my post this morning. This always makes me feel like the day was unproductive but I think I made the best out of it. I read my machine learning book, I went to the gym and had a nice and long workout and I successfully did two coding challenges. I think the day also suffered a little because I didnt plan it in advance. Because its hard to come up with productive stuff on the spot. For me atleast. I also played some singleplayer stuff today but not for too long and I really enjoyed it. I also realized that I should cut down on my small term goals a little. My to do lists for the last days always were way too long with too many different goals. Even on thursday which was an insanely productive and awesome day, I only met 2/3 of my planned activities. And especially in science there is a big need for long and deep work. Doing 6 things for 1 hour each will not bear too many fruits. So I will try to do 2 things for 3 hours each instead. I have to add that I am very proud and happy that I went to the gym because I actually felt more like staying at home. But I went and it was a great workout. Definitely was a good day !

@WhoCares Thats a funny idea I think I will do that. I actually used to have that a couple of years ago but didnt download the app again when I bought a new phone. I think its nice to start your day with some math 🙂

Just a quick check in. I woke up quite late and had a slow morning. I just finished breakfast like half an hour ago and had a coffee now. I really want to shift my sleeping rythm a little. I would rather wake up at 8 or even 7. I feel like when you get up early the day can be so much more productive. Especially because I dont like to work late. Another thing I noticed is that I really need to plan my days in advance. I did that the last couple of days and it was much easier to be productive because I already knew what I was going to do. Today it takes quite some willpower to do productive stuff instead of just hanging around. Lets see how this day will go though.

Day 3 of no dota Today was interesting. Especially in contrast to yesterday. I started the day with my daily coding challenge, it was a very difficult problem (atleast for me) and I spend like 2-3 hours on it and wasnt really able to solve it in the end. I stopped eventually because my girlfriend and I wanted to clean our flat but I also stopped because I got really frustrated. If I want to make this a habit I have to set myself a time limit like somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes. Otherwise it takes way too much time and I will just get frustrated eventually. And once I get frustrated I also get demotivated quite a bit. Which definitely happened today. Because after cleaning the flat and having lunch it was already like 5pm and I basically crossed of nothing on my to do list. I still continued to work on my to do list and read a bit and even did another daily coding challenge which I managed to succeed at. Even though I struggled a bit because I was already quite tired or mentally exhausted however you want to call it. I think tomorrow I will have another coffee at around 4pm to keep myself awake and my mind a little sharper. Today I also questioned my approach towards arduino and coding and machine learning. Because write now Iam basically trying to do everything at once. I feel like this approach is not working that well because I cant really get into any of it if I want to do all of it everyday. I think it will be more beneficial if I focuss myself on one or two things per day (or week?). Because otherwise I wont get deep enough into it. And I decided to put arduino at the bottom of the list for now. Its actually the thing I want to do most but I am very specific about what projects I actually want to do and which not. Because I want to build something that can move and this is basically impossible without the right materials. Ive tied servo motors to a piece of cardboard using a wire and this just doesnt hold at all and dont even get me started on the "legs" I am making. If I want to have fun doing that I will need to be able to make things in the shapes I want which will have to wait until I actually got a 3d printer. There might be some other projects that I can do where I will not need any kind of material and I will look into that a little more. But I am less motivated to do those I think. But lets see I might come up with something. I think I will focuss a little more on machine learning the next days. I will read the book in the morning and afternoon and think about a project I want to do. All in all it was still a good day but I guess my expectations were a little high after yesterday. But who cares, tomorrow will be awesome again!

@WhoCares oh that book really sounds good! I think a 3d printer is a really good idea, I will look a bit more into that. I am about to get a job in the next two weeks, I think I might buy a printer from my first salary then. Not an expensive one because its just a small job as well.

Day 2 of no dota Man this was a 100 day. It was really awesome. I started my day with an exercise from the daily coding challenge and I vowed to do all challenges in c++ from now on because I wanna get better at it and I am way more proficient in python anyways. The exercise is pretty tough for me and I spend about 3 hours on it but finally managed to do it. That made me really happy and gave me quite a boost. After that I cooked a nice lunch for me and my girlfriend and we ate lunch together. Here I want to insert that this is actually a new thing. We often just ate lunch in front of the tv and watched a netflix show or smth but since we moved in together a month ago, we vowed to always eat together at the table and so far its been really nice. Its quality time and I also think its nice to take a break from the screen, doesnt matter if I was coding or doing anything else. After lunch I wanted to follow some more basic Arduino projects but realized that I just wanna do something by myself and learn along the way. This is more fun and also more useful I believe. I did that for a couple of hours and then I did another coding exercise which only took like half an hour though because it was an easier one. After that I read a little more in the Respawn guide. The part I read entailed a passage about the three kind of activities you need to replace gaming. First you need mentally challenging activities then you need activities to relax/escape and last but not least you need social activities. With the mentally challenging activities I am already doing quite well as I code, started arduino and will begin my master in physics next month. The relax/escape activities I find extremely challenging because this is mostly about stuff you would when you are to exhausted/tired for most other things. I think I will give reading fiction another shot because I think this could really be a good way to find an escape while also having some benefits for my ability to concentrate and stuff. Cam said that listening to podcasts/audiobooks might also be a good idea, which is something I never did by itself. I always listen to stuff while on the bus or cleaning or riding my bike. It feels a little odd to do that without another activity but I will try it anyways. For the social stuff I will just do stuff with my friends and go to my martial arts class. I found this concept pretty interesting because I always struggled quite a bit with mentally challenging activities. Because I always had some problems with anxiety if I didnt game while I was still in school. They completely disappeared since I started studying physics so I kind of see a connection there. I have a very active brain in general and I think if I dont tell it what to focus on it will just focus on bad things after a while. After reading the respawn guide I read a chapter in my book about machine learning which was also really nice and inspiring. To finish up the day I played my singleplayer game for about 90 minutes. I actually made a goal/plan for october and I wrote down that I will allow myself to play 20 hours of this singleplayer game in total but not a minute of any online games. I will write down every hour I spend on it so I keep track of my plan. All in all this day was amazing and I feel great ! Cant wait to get tomorrow started!

@WhoCares I would definitely like to know the title of the book! But I dont think I will look at it before next february or so 😄 I also realised today that I will learn the most and have to most fun by doing my own projects. Because if I just copy and follow tutorials I dont really learn anything and its neither fun nor engaging in any way. I think ideas might just come along the way but I am mostly interested in building some sort of robot. I think I will first focus on ways of movement. Do you have any idea how to get plastic parts to build certain things? Like if I want to make an arduino car for example I would something where I would put wheels in. I was hoping to just find some sort of plastic on amazon that I could cut correctly but that seems a little more difficult than expected. I will also think about it a little more. We also have like a hardware store nearby, maybe I can find some stuff there. Yeah I know that also happened to me quite often but I am being careful!