QuercusIlexBallota

Hello everyone! I just wanted to tell you. At the beginning of this year I was facing 4 failed subjects, 2 huge assignments at college and a terribly clouded mind with which to face them: I couldn’t muster enough concentration to work on my schoolyear but I had a couple of max level characters on World of Warcraft with tons of gold! One day, while farming something to sell on the game auction house, I decided to listen to a new podcast: The Minimalists. This guys were talking about things they were doing to improve their lives… and there I was in the meanwhile, slaughtering virtual beings to gather virtual resources to sell to get virtual money, great! I decided that that needed to stop: I should spend my time improving my life, and videogames where clearly on the way. At mid-March I discovered the existence of r/stopgaming and started the detox right away. Doing this I realised how diminished my attention span was: I wasn’t able to read a book for more than 20 minutes. How could I possibly save the semester with that? Sadly, half a month later I relapsed due to problems at home. I sought refuge on videogames, playing them almost all my waking hours during three weeks. Things at home went back to their normal state and I discovered with terror that I was in the same place I was at new year, but the exams and assignments where only at 2 months distance. 27/08/2016 I started the second detox. I discovered a bunch of channels on youtube, like Thomas Frank (English), Mariana (English) or Valentí Sanjuan(Spanish), that have been a huge source of motivation and a reminder of what I wanted to do with this two months. I purged any videogame related thing from my computer and my room, to avoid as many triggers as possible. It’s been a stressful journey, but today I ended it: I have successfully graduated college!

21 DAYS REPORT! Hi, it's been awhile! It's been three weeks. It's funny, I wasn't actively counting the days. I wanted to tell you how I'm doing and I went to the reddit bot... and it seems it's been this long. I may have not written as much as I should, but I wanted to tell you that I'm still game-free since april 28th. I've taken a rather different approach than last time. In my first attempt with the detox I thought about it every day, multiple times an hour. It wasn't a bad thing, I was on my way to achieve this new objective. This second try is being different. After my first failure I told you that "I wanted to start anew", and so I did. I stopped gaming and started to hit the gym and the college stuff, and I didn't thought much about the detox. I didn't write anything here. When I had urges to play I quietly ignored them and went on with what I was doing at the time. Today I was thinking that I've done more in the last couple of months than I would have thought possible before finding this page (well, it's subreddit). I put myself in the skin of someone new who finds this journal and the only thing that comes to my mind is "this guy tried, failed, claimed he was going to try once more and was never seen again". I wanted to say thanks to you all, for existing, for posing this task (this detox), for your support and for being willing to help people improve their lives. And if someone new over here is reading this, I encourage you to try with all your hearth. It's amazing the ammount of time that one has when he frees himself of this kind of behavior. Time to improve one's relationships with his loved ones, time to improve one's body and health, time to improve one's career... time to serve a better purpose. To end, I wanted to share a quote I read in a motivational board in the gym: "discipline is doing what needs to be done, even if you don't want to do it"

DEFEAT (THIS IS MERELY A SETBACK!) A couple of weeks ago I failed my detox. The situation at home was becoming increasingly unbearable and I sank into Azeroth running away from reality. I want to start anew but I have one question. I signed up for the detox study, in the last survey I informed that I relapsed and was playing about 6 hours a day (I think). I'm curious, when the next survey comes up will there be an option for "failed the detox and started anew"? If not, telling the survey that I'm currently playing 0 hours a day will do the trick? Thank you!

DAY 16 (2016/04/03, Sunday): These past days I've been listening to some talks by Thich Nhat Hanh (his book The Miracle of Mindfulness was amazing! I’m halfway No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering right now and that one is also amazing!) and I believe this sentence of his sits perfectly with this website's purpose: “When you spend three hours with your computer you completely forget that you have a body, and when the mind is not with the body you are not truly alive.” (Link here: https://youtu.be/RVYnN8mBejY?t=2567). It's been an acceptable day. Now I will make a cup of green tea and enjoy it calmly. Thank you all!

DAY 13 (2016/03/31, Thursday): - DAY 14 (2016/04/01, Friday): - DAY 15 (2016/04/02, Saturday): I've been having some family... "disagreements"... lately. More reason to find a job soon. I'm starting to think that nurturing some savings is the wisest thing I can do now. No games played, though!

DAY 12 (2016/03/30, Wednesday): Today I spent the morning looking for a job and the afternoon studying. Not bad.

DAY 11 (2016/03/29, Tuesday): Today I had decided that I need a job! I spent the whole morning working with university stuff, a quite productive morning. I had time to go to the gym, read and see my gf. And yet there still was a good amount of time untouched! I have created accounts in three job-hunting websites and designed the best CV I could. Tomorrow I will print a few copies and try my luck with the local businesses. Let's farm some real life gold! (hopefully) Wow, I just realized I'm already at day 11. This is going on more smoothly than I thought.

It does, let's see if it can be sustained in time

DAY 10 (2016/03/28, Monday): Today's been a productive day, I ended a project that's been lurking in the shadows for all the holidays and advanced a bit with my end of degree dissertation. Tomorrow the gym opens its gates once more, time to restart the early rising. I've been reading "Mindfulness for beginners", it seems to be a quite short book. Each "chapter" takes about 2 minutes to read! I'm liking it, though. Each chapter gives you something to wonder about, which is great. I can't wait to hit the gym tomorrow again!

DAY 9 (2016/03/27, Sunday): Nothing special today. Back home after eating a delicious pizza.

DAY 8 (2016/03/26, Saturday): Today has been weird, I woke up full of apathy. "Why?" I asked myself. Perhaps I’m still tired from yesterday's hike (but I don't have the slightest soreness), perhaps having ended the book caused me a feeling of loss (but why? there are more books in the world than can ever be read), perhaps... I don't know. I spent the whole morning doing nothing. Correction: I spent the whole morning unsuccessfully looking for something appealing to read. Luckily I went off with my girlfriend after eating. Had I stayed at home I may had ended up again watching shit on YouTube (I don't think I would have relapsed, too much apathy to even consider reinstalling WoW). On the bus back home I was thinking about what could I read now. Perhaps a book on fitness? I took a look on the web but none of the books I found seemed especially interesting. Then a curious idea appeared: "I've just read a book on secular Buddhism in which the word meditation appeared quite frequently and, on the light of what I've read, it doesn't have anything to do with reuniting my immortal soul with God or something so, what is this thing about?" I found something to start with on the StopGaming reddit, this post by SirIssacMath: https://www.reddit.com/r/StopGaming/comments/2xxdzl/meditation_will_improve_your_life/ I wanted a book though! On the meditation subreddit they recommend a book titled "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a buddhist monk since age 12. I've never read a book on this subject, and I didn't feel very happy about starting with a book wrote by a monk. Nothing against monks, but I preferred something more secular (if I find all this meditation thing interesting I will most probably read it next, it must be good if the people in that subreddit recommend it). On the website of the Secular Buddhist Association (whose existence I just discovered) they recommend a book titled "Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment-and Your Life" by Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph.D. It looks promising, I'll give it a try. The review is here: http://secularbuddhism.org/2012/04/26/mindfulness-for-beginners-and-secularists/ I'm grateful for the existence of Game Quitters, this place is a great source of motivation!

It certainly is I never thought I would ever say such a thing of a book about one of the "ism" words. But it doesn't feel like a religion book at all! When he says something about gods, rebirth or any other metaphysical silliness is to dismiss it rather than to convince the reader of its existence. (The sad fact is that the copy I found is a Spanish translation, and the translator found it appropriate to use overly complex words even though there were other, more simple and pleasing, words available). DAY 7 (2016/03/25, Friday): The mountains are amazing! I don't even remember the last time I saw so much snow (if ever)! I just arrived and I'm terribly tired. I just want to lie on my bed and watch the last episode of Vikings, so this entry will be brief. I found this little one along the way: It seems that little pines can get buried by a huge, cold-feeling, overwhelming phenomenon. It also seems that, with persistence and a powerful desire to improve their current condition, they are perfectly able to overcome it and achieve huge growth: There may be something worth imitating in these beautiful trees

DAY 6 (2016/03/24, Thursday): One of my friends got a huge cold and we cancelled the hike. Tomorrow I'll go with my parents to the mountains anyway, so it's not that great of a loss. I spent all the morning doing college stuff and it was fairly productive. I've reached the equator of the book "Buddhism without beliefs" and it is fascinating. Stripped of all the mumbo-jumbo it feels more like philosophy. I googled the author, Stephen Batchelor, and I've been listening to some talks he gave. He has a very pragmatic approach. All the focus of being in the here and the now paying attention to what we are seeing, hearing, doing, saying or thinking (instead of ruminating irrelevant, often harmful, thoughts), all the emphasis on training mental skills such as concentration and attention and, essentially, putting effort to improve one's life sounds very synergic with this 90 day detox, which in many ways is more about assessing our reality and take action to improve it than just about stopping playing video games. Apparently tomorrow there will be snow, which is great. In all this winter I haven't seen a single snowflake. I'm thrilled!

DAY 5 (2016/03/23, Wednesday): Today I had a weird dream in which Cenarius, the Azerothian Lord of the Forest and patron god of all druids regardless of race (according to wowwiki), was reading my journal on Game Quitters. A fictional stag-like demigod which power over Nature surfing the web through a laptop in the middle of the forest. “I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.” -Rene Descartes. Tomorrow I'm going hiking to the mountains with some buddies. I feel exhausted from all this sleep cycle readjusting, today will be a relax day. I don't want to be a zombie walking through the woods tomorrow. I've decided to not touch anything from college, nor to watch anything on the computer or TV. Today will be a reading day and, if attention fails, of staring to the ceiling. On the afternoon I've tickets to a stage play with my family. Until then, relaxation is the only priority. Surely a nap will be in order.

Quite pleasant. Is therapeutic not to be in the same room with the PC. Thanks!