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obelix_mtg

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  1. Thank you, @Fagus, your post was truly insightful. I am definitely struggling with myself, torn between what I consciously want to do and an unconscious impulse for self-destruction. I not only want to want to quit gaming, I want to enable myself to feel proud and to enjoy my life. Obsessive gaming is rewarding at first, but then it makes me feel shame, anger and disappointment in myself. It's scary to take steps, definitely, but I truly want to become a better version of myself.
  2. The one correction I would make is that my relationship with my wife has indeed improved a lot. She's generally sad and pissed at her professional situation, but instead of all that rage leading to us fighting I feel like we are much closer together since I stopped gaming. Having said that, you hit the nail in the head with the rollercoaster image: I go from pride to grief and back quite a bit. I really don't want to go back to playing anymore. To raise the stakes in this journey, I have also committed to writing to my parents to tell them about my addiction as well. I started three days ago, and have written 2 lines, but I have promised myself it will be done by the end of this month, so I really need to push myself this week. How did you break out of this rollercoaster cycle? Was it a natural thing that just happened over time or did you change something else proactively to get out of it?
  3. On getting rid of cards, I am selling them to a buylist, but encountering some hurdles (i.e., they don't take cards in exotic languages)
  4. Congrats! That step helped me a lot! As @Marek said, if you think committing to never gaming again is the choice you want to make, I would also advise to fully wipe your accounts. It was brutally painful for me but I feel like it's been such an important step to take.
  5. @Fagus asked me in another thread, I will try to expand here on what were the triggers that got me to this relapse. I have been really happy for the most part the last few weeks, I am a lot prouder of myself since I admitted out loud to myself, my therapist and my wife that I am a video game addict. I am getting to do things I wanted to do but that I never had time for, and I am also doing things I needed to do but that were not that exciting and for which I never quite seemed to start. However, the good feeling of pride that comes after doing them is sometimes not enough of an incentive to get started. On Thursday, which was a day off here, I had a very low energy day and, since I didn't have work I found myself with too much time to kill in the afternoon. Rather than find something else to do with that time, I started browsing the internet and, lo and behold, ended up with a stupid browser game. It was a mindless game that made me feel horrible about myself later, but had progression and things to achieve and it killed a couple hours of my afternoon on Thursday and hooked me to also spend like 4 more hours on it Friday. I think it was a combination of boredom and escapism that brought me to the game first, and the progression and immediate gratification feeling were what hooked me. I need to be more accepting of boredom for this to work
  6. Hey, Chili, I've been reading your posts for a bit, and would like to throw an idea at you: I feel like the day-trading stuff is super interesting, and your experience might be very valuable for many people. Why don't you write an article with your experiences so far? Those mistakes you listed could easily turn into a Medium or LinkedIn post that might bring you some recognition and maybe get you in touch with people who could have valuable advice. All the best, and stay strong!
  7. Good news: My Blizzard account is no more, I lost all progress that I dedicated years to. Bad news: My reaction to this has been to relapse, I have wasted like 6 hours this week playing stupid mindless defense tower browser games. When I first read that recovery is not a straight line I thought to myself "that's for weak people, of course I can do this straight up", but then I obviously went and fell on my face. I am standing up again. Today is day 1, I have deleted my account in the browser games website. I am playing tennis today, weather permitting, which I have been looking forward to all week, so that's good. I also turned a significant amount of my procrastination tendency towards doing stuff I had been postponing for months: I cleared my "pending paperwork" folder (I live in Germany, so not a small feat), and prepared my 2019 taxes. I'm also gradually discovering which activities are more engaging for me: I spent the full Tuesday afternoon writing a Medium and LinkedIn post about the discrimination women suffer in the professional world, which I then posted and has generated some discussion, and I have been researching a business idea of something my wife and I have been talking about building together. I am, on the other hand, struggling a bit with my screenplay writing: I find it really hard to have a direction with the story I am trying to tell, and can't really make up my mind what is it that I want to say with it all. It's mixing elements of video game addiction, social isolation and coming of age by making own decisions rather than following your parents', but it's a little bit of a hot mess of them all and I am lacking a clear vision, plus it's really hard for me to really create the mental space it takes me to abstract and reflect on this.
  8. I have now made a full calendar for next week, with a lot more explicit timeslot allocations for things I have been procrastinating on. Will be writing here every other day or so to report on my progress, hopefully it will make it harder for me to fall down the rabbit hole of firing up YT or going back to reddit forums to read about the latest strategy tip for a certain game. Today, craving is quite painful. I read a few ideas for decks in reddit for hearthstone and felt really tempted to log in and prove all those noobs I know better. I was in the shower literally daydreaming about the games I would play, and when I snapped back and remembered I have flagged my blizzard account for complete removal and that if I don't do anything about it over the next couple of days it will all be wiped forever, a few thousand euros and a few thousand hours gone forever with no trace, I almost cried. I am proud to say I managed to go through it and didn't cancel the account removal, which means in a few more days blizzard will complete the process, and I guess I am writing here because it was hard and now I kinda need to hear from this community that you guys are also proud of me, as ridiculous as that sounds given I don't know any of you.
  9. Not only, I'm also kinda wasting time watching stand-up comedy and the like, but a bunch of it is.
  10. I haven't written in a few days but I'm back here. The last few days have not been easy: my wife is getting increasingly depressed with her professional situation (she's been job hunting as a data scientist for a few months without success and when covid hit things got way worse), and she's crying or yelling most of the time. I have been really tempted to go back to gaming, which I have managed not to do, but I have fallen back to mindless browsing / youtubing way too much. This is frustrating because I have the feeling I am not really making progress on quitting gaming. I have a list of activities that I am trying to get into, which is proving hard because I always find some work-related thing to do instead. To create more mental space for myself I will be working only 9-13h for the next couple of weeks to really force myself to commit. I haven't really filled a calendar with exact activities on specific time slots, do you guys think that would help? Playing tennis once a week (I am starting today, really excited about this one) Write a short excerpt every day about whatever netflix thing we watched the night before Continue writing my screenplay, with the goal of advancing at least 5 pages a week (I have not touched it since last Sunday when I posted last time) Work together with my wife in a business model that I think could work as a company we would build together.
  11. One of the activities I am trying to pick up (which, to be frank, I was timidly attempting before quitting games as a way to get closer to my wife) is writing some kind of literature, more specifically a screenplay. I have made some progress on it over the weekend, but it's now 6pm and I'm kinda bored and tired and deflated and don't really wanna keep writing. I really appreciate having this forum now, writing this post is in a way procrastination but it doesn't feel as bad. Apologies for the somewhat incoherent rumble, pretty much direct stream of thought here.
  12. Today is day 6. I went through Module 2. I have reached out to a couple physical gaming stores to sell my full Magic The Gathering collection (slow progress here, I should probably follow-up) I have sent a request to Blizzard to fully delete my accounts, which will erase forever my WoW and Hearthstone progress (this one was not easy, proud of it) I have installed and activated Cold turkey for a couple days - which is helping a lot with avoiding side distractions like consuming content about the game. I will reactivate Amazon, Netflix and Youtube, though, and I must remain careful not to find gaming videos. I also went through Modules 3 and 4, but I am yet to complete my worksheet for new activities. That last part is proving difficult for me to do, because part of me is struggling to completely give up games, I miss them and they do feel more interesting than other activities I can undertake. I know it's a very important step, and I will get to it soon.
  13. On the anonymity point, I think it's due to two things: on one side, I feel embarrassment about having let video games take so much control of my life. I have always portrayed myself as successful towards my parents, friends, etc., and I fear they might be disappointed by finding out. I have only discussed this with my wife and with my therapist. On the other side, somewhat related, I fear it could have a negative impact in my professional life. I am a senior executive in a startup with hundreds of employees, and I fear if my challenges were known it might impact my career.
  14. Day 3, things have become a little harder. I still haven't found any other activity that excites me as much as gaming. So far, I've been focusing mostly on work, which has felt good because I do see my productivity going up, but I'm worried about the 3-day weekend that is coming up. Did you guys need to force yourselves to get interested into non-gaming stuff? I'm struggling with this. I also had a not so great experience today during working hours: I finished a meeting early, and fired a youtube video of a streamer I like playing Magic. It was only 20 minutes, but I feel bad about them now, and it was kinda hard to stop watching it, so much that I made it late to the meeting after. It's not like gaming directly, but it made me want to game pretty bad, so I think I need to steer clear of gaming-related content for now.
  15. Thanks, BooksandTrees! I have started the book and will be gradually filling in the worksheets in this journal as well. To begin with, here are my reasons to play games: They give me a sense of progress. I some games, like WoW, I am mostly a collector, and "achievement hunter". It feels incredibly good to have that exclusive "badge" finally reached. The chase of "100%" completion also hooked me to games like Final Fantasy. They provide massive instant gratification. Beyond WoW, the games that I have gone deepest in are Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone: card games where you make design decisions and gameplay decisions. They are not so much about instant coordination, but more towards strategic thinking, and I am very good at it. Winning makes me feel good and want to continue, losing makes me feel like it was a glitch that needs to be corrected by playing more. The combination of both: lately, I've been obsessing with Hearthstone as I was chasing Rank 1 in Europe (literally, top player in Europe) rating. It provided a clear goal and massive incentive. Escaping: I have noticed I tend to hide myself in gaming when other parts of my life feel scary. Whether it is a fight with my wife, a problem at work or, when I was younger, at school or with my parents, gaming has always felt like a safe haven. I think this behavior got massively reinforced when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 17 (I'm 35 now). I spent a full year in hospital undergoing chemo and radiotherapy, and the only thing that could take me out of that horrible world around me was video games. And this is why I want to stop: Video games make me numb to everything else: I have an amazing wife, a good job with nice colleagues and live in Berlin, one of the most exciting cities in the world. However, all I can think about is being alone to be able to play again. Video games are risking my job: My addiction has gotten worse lately and, when working remotely, I have been doing a worse and worse job because I've been gaming during the day as well. Video games are risking my relationship: My wife didn't know I was gaming, as I was hiding it from her all the time, but she's been more and more pissed with me about my lack of involvement with her and my complete inability to bring anything new, interesting or challenging to her life. My mind is in the game all the time, so I've basically been a zombie around her.
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