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!

DAY 4 (2016/03/22, Tuesday): Today waking up at 7:30 felt like a horse-kick right in the face, but I did it nonetheless. Today the gym is almost empty, this must be because the Easter holidays (I hope that's the name). Well, it's nice and quiet here, I like it. My dear neighbour has decided that today is a great day to hammer the walls of his house (which is right above mine). I will pick one of my textbooks and seek refuge in the library, or maybe I'll go read it in the park. Today I've spent almost all day away from home, wandering the city with my girlfriend and dining outside. I've got a lot of time to read on the public transport, though. I've been with "Buddhism without Beliefs". Many of what I've read in this book I find very relatable with my current state, for example: “It is said that until Siddhartha Gautama was in his late twenties, his father, King Suddhodana, kept him immured within palaces. Suddhodana did not wish his son to be distracted from his duty by the disquiet that reigned beyond the palace walls. The young man became restless in his incarceration and longed to go out. Suddhodana arranged tours of the town and countryside, making sure everything was perfectly arranged and nothing distressing passed before the boy’s eyes. Despite these precautions, Siddhartha chanced upon a person disfigured by disease, another crippled by age, a corpse, and a wandering monk. He became uneasy upon returning to the comforts of home. One night he stole away. For six years he drifted around the land, studying, meditating, subjecting himself to punishing ascetic rigors. The conventional options exhausted, he sat down at the foot of a tree. Seven days later he had an awakening in which he understood the nature of anguish, let go of its origins, realized its cessation, and brought into being a way of life. Prince Siddhartha’s dilemma still faces us today. We too immure ourselves in the “palaces” of what is familiar and secure. We too sense that there is more to life than indulging desires and warding off fears. We too feel anguish most acutely when we break out of our habitual routines and witness ourselves hovering between birth and death –our birth and death.” It's 0:00... Well, we will see if tomorrow is possible to wake up without excessive suffering.

DAY 3 (2016/03/21, Monday): Success! I woke up at 7:30! It's 8:45, I’ve done all the chores and now I wanted go to the gym, but it's not open yet. I think this never happened before. Let's see how does it feel to go to the gym this early. It's 10:15, the house is clean and the gym has already been attended. Wow, there are still 12 hours and 45 minutes in the day!! The task of being productive and away from video games all this time seems daunting. I’ve been writing a bit on the reddit page, I’m glad that all this is in English, this way I can learn how to correct this unfortunate tendency while I practise my English writing (something that was in desperate need of improvement). I've been about an hour working on a college essay, it hasn't been very productive, but there is still a good part of the day left. I've been reading a bit more of The Selfish Gene. I'm liking the book, but because what Dawkins wrote in 1976 has become part of the "orthodox" paradigm in Evolutionary Biology (one of my favourite subjects) I'm already familiar with what I'm reading. I think I need another book, more variability (and a little spark of novelty). One of the things I liked the most of WoW was it's lore: I spent way too much time working on the "loremaster" achievement and I read all the books. Why not delve a little in the "lore" of the real world? Let's see what I can find. I've been studying intermittently for almost two hours. This isn't the most thrilling subject in the world, but the attention span definitely needs improvement. I went to the library to see if I could find some new book (and to go out of the house). I found a volume with the eye-catching title "Buddhism without Beliefs". Wasn't Buddhism a religion? I admit that almost all I know about Buddhism is that they have doctrines about reincarnation, but imagine a book titled "Christianity without beliefs". It sounds like an oxymoron. I think this will be my new book for now. I feel very tired now. But I refuse to go to sleep before 23:00. Body, if you could get used to stay sitting motionless for hours during a significant part of the last years you surely can get used to this new sleep cycle. There will be no mercy. Today I heard a sentence in a song called Viene y va ("it comes and goes") that struck me: “De tanto hacerlo sin parar me acostumbré a respirar y a derrochar el aire fresco”, which roughly translates to “In doing so repeatedly I got used to breathe and to waste fresh air”. Isn't this precisely what I've been doing with my time?

Thank you all for your comments! It's very nice to read people supporting you! DAY 2 (2016/03/20, Sunday): My idea of waking up at 7:30 has been a failure. As soon as the alarm rang I woke up, put it off and went back to bed. But at least it has been a failure in the right direction: I was up at 9:30, which is a lot sooner than my usual 11:30 - 12:00. Yesterday I wanted to get rid of video games for good. But, are video games all that is preventing me of achieving my goals? No, I also spend a lot of time watching silly posts on Facebook and following silly "twitstars" on Twitter. Why not get rid of these distractions too? I don't want to quit these websites altogether, I follow some Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that genuinely add value to my life, particularly those related to my interest in biology. I'll unfollow all the extra trash and start from scratch. I've relocated almost all of my items in the room, I wanted to make it look different (new life new room, I guess). I took all physical video games, put them in a disc container (which I later buried in the depths of a drawer) and thrown away the boxes: I don't want to have anything in sight that could trigger some urge to play. In addition, for now on I will wear pajamas for the sole purpose of sleeping. I refuse to wear them all day long, like if I was hospitalized or something. I've been trying to study a particularly mind numbing chapter, but after 40 minutes or so I noticed that I wasn't paying attention to what I was reading. Well, at least I sat and tried for a while. Tomorrow I will surpass that number! Around 15:00 I started to watch a lot of videos on YouTube. They were mainly from the Game Quitters channel, but I was glued to the screen for two hours. I will attribute this to the fact that all of this is new and I want to learn as much as possible, but I will keep an eye on this behaviour. I don't want to exchange 6 hours a day playing for 6 hours a day watching YouTube, whatever the contents of the videos: the idea is to liberate all that time and put it into good use. The effects of the lesser amount of sleep blended with those of the brain frying chapter and those of having eaten a heavy meal. It was clear that if I didn't do something I would fall asleep, and my sleep cycle did not desire that. I took my kindle with the Selfish Gene on it and went out. I went for a walk and, fully awake again, went into a train to go see my girlfriend. It's an hour and a half trip, so I spent all that time reading. Once there we took a lovely walk, around a small lake with stunning views to the mountains. It has been a beautiful day. On the hour and a half trip back home I tried to read a bit, but soon I found myself peering through the window. I surrendered to the inevitable and spent the rest of the time looking through it. I'm tired, but it has been a great day. While I write this it's 22:10, I intend to stay awake until 23:00 and then go to sleep, so that tomorrow I can wake up at 7:30 without much suffering. I think I will watch some interview on YouTube or something like that.

I'm a biology student from Spain. I stumbled into the reddit page first, so I will copy the first message I wrote there: Hi StopGaming! I'm not a native English speaker, so I apology in advance for any grammatical atrocity I may commit in this post, sorry. I was watching a WoW guide on YouTube and suddenly a video called "The Minimalists Podcast" appeared on the recommended videos section. I was painfully bored so I gave it a try... "Let’s see what this minimalism thing is about", I said. One of their first sentences was "live a meaningful live with less", and in my mind appeared images of those people who don't want to own more than X material items. I wasn't very moved by that statement, but I went on listening anyway (I was playing it on the background while farming apexis crystals ingame, and I didn't felt like going back to youtube and look for another podcast to hear). After a while my perception of their message had changed a bit. They weren't talking about getting rid of their material possessions just for the fun of it. Their aim was to focus all their energy in what was truly important for them and not waste it mindlessly watching TV, playing videogames, browsing the internet, etc. The get-rid-of-your-things part wasn't the main point. I realised that during the last eight years I have spent a huge part of my time (almost 6 hours a day, weekends included) improving the life of a bunch of characters who doesn't even exist, in a virtual planet called Azeroth. Maybe if I had invested a little more of that time "leveling" myself or "farming" things for myself everything would be far different. Self-disgust crept up on me. How had this come to happen? I was a guy who loved to read and learn, I read a lot of books yearly, I loved the feeling of losing myself in a good novel or of being awed by the workings of nature described in biology books. But since I started playing wow the only things I had read were Icy Veins, WoW Head, MMO-Champion and every single Warcraft novel I could put my hands on. I was failing miserably at my college courses because I was too busy farming cloth, ore, leather, or whatever it was. How was it possible that I hadn't noticed this catastrophe? I needed to take the reins of my life once again. This couldn't go on like this. I stopped playing WoW on the spot. But what would I do then? I tried to read like I did before, I even signed up on the nearby gym. But every time I had some off time I felt a huge need to play, or to watch someone else play on YouTube or Twitch. Soon I noticed that my attention span had diminished horribly. I found it difficult to read for a respectable amount of time. And I realized that I was spending almost as much time watching people play WoW on youtube than what I was formerly spending playing myself. Again? Really? Had I fallen in the same trap again? I quickly googled "quit videogames". Surely someone had struggled with this issue long before me. I found the StopGaming reddit page and I started to read it, then came the Game Quitters YouTube channel. It was wonderful, this was precisely what I wanted. I made a reddit account and proceeded to drown you in this mountain of paragraphs (I'm writing this in Microsoft Word and it is already almost one full page, sorry!). I have unfollowed every single gaming channel on YouTube (my feed is so empty now...) and asked the Badge Bot for a flaming new badge. Today I start my detox. Thank you!

DAY 1 (2016/03/19, Saturday): I've introduced myself in the StopGaming reddit page, I've uninstalled World of Warcraft, every game on Steam, and Steam itself, my desktop is videogame-free now. I've unfollowed every gaming-related youtuber and "disabled" my Twitch account (I haven't been able to figure out how to permanently kill it). To fill the empty space I've been looking for more interesting channels, with content that I meaningfully want to watch (Game Quitters, The Minimalists, and Archaeosoup Productions; they are few, but I think all of them are worth watching). Next, I've acquired a kindle copy of "The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins. Some of my teachers at college have ardently recommended this book, but I never had the time to actually read it (or so I told myself). This will be the first of many, I have to make up for all that lost time. I shut down my desktop and went to see my girlfriend. We have spent a wonderful day, visited new places (the National Archaeology Museum) and eaten some delicious Ecuadorian food in a nearby restaurant. Back at home, I'm writing this journal entry and as soon as I'm done I'll continue with this Selfish Gene book, it's quite interesting. I've barely started to scratch the surface of all the information on the StopGaming reddit, but right now I want to stay away from the computer. Something I want to do is to put my sleep cycle back into reality, it's 00:32 and under normal circumstances I would stay awake for at least three more hours. I think I will do just that, but reading instead of playing and setting an alarm at 07:30. Tomorrow I'll be totally destroyed, but that is a small price to pay in exchange of getting back a normal schedule.