Lampshade

Anxiety is a huge problem of mine as well. I think you're right about how effective games are at avoiding it. Part of what makes it so dangerous for me is that I can think about them even when I'm not playing. So when I switched to single player games even though it looked like I had it more under control from the outside, the reality was I may as well have been playing it with how often I thought about it rather than being present. I'd be interested in hearing how you've been managing your anxiety. Things with the wife have improved but we are not at that easy place where we once were. Really, we haven't been for years. I'd say we're heading in the right direction. Things still feel a little forced, largely because I am still not fully present in the moment very often. I feel like I've been distracted so long I've lost the ability to focus on her as much as I'd like. I've tried similar to what you are doing with your time, managing it more and making sure everything fits into goals and a person you want to be. I actually wrote out a schedule today to try to get back to that. A part of me resists that level of structure in my life. I really don't like seeing my full day set out for me like that, it makes me feel like I have no freedom. However, the odd couple weeks where I really nail it are so obviously better in terms of progress than those I don't. I struggle with giving up the fun impulsiveness, even if it's good for me. I really enjoy grad school. After ten years of working retail and labour jobs the freedom of getting to be responsible for my own days has been amazing. In terms of topics a lot of profs already have projects that they are looking to take a student on for. Finding a topic itself can be a form of research. If you're interested I highly recommend the book 'The Craft of Research'. Other than that I use Robert Greene's method of researching something. I'll read things often, underline interesting tidbits, go back a week or so later and write those tidbits on themed index cards. Then I go through the index cards every so often and move them around and stuff. Topics tend to jump out from connections of ideas from different sources. Anyways, thank you for the response, I appreciate it. My goal for the next little bit is to just stay away from games but it's been really interesting exploring this problem with other people. I had no idea how serious and widespread it was among adults.

Hey Sam, good luck!

Hi everybody, I'm finally ready to commit. I've left my daily journal link in my sig and I think the first post serves as a good, but long, introduction to myself and my story. Other than that I'm excited to be here and grateful for the community for providing a place where I can distract myself, reaffirm my goals, and be inspired by others. I hope for a lot of interactions and am looking to meet new people. Thanks again, and wish me luck!

First ever public journal, here we go. I've been an addict my entire life to different things. Drugs, games, sex, work. With games it started when I was young growing up in the country. Morrowind came out and I stopped going outside. Later, WoW came out and I stopped living real life. 12+ hours a day as a 14-16 year old. I stopped being a good kid at school. Got involved with the wrong people. My relationship with my family disintegrated (and hasn't ever full recovered 15 years later). I moved out at 16, which went about as well as you would expect, and dropped out of high school. The one benefit was that I had to sell my WoW account to pay rent. Things were better for a while. I went back to school, met the woman at 18 who would become my wife. She went to the one class I needed to graduate with me so that I got my degree, and then we had some adventures. We got a couple dogs and traveled across Canada for a couple years. We moved back to our home province at 20 and I felt like it was time to get a carreer. We wanted our own house. So I got a Class 1 license and moved tractor trailers around a yard, covering the loads with heavy ass tarps for up to 16 hours a day for three years. I was a 21 year old supervisor in my first real job and had no supervision myself, so that again went about as well as you would expect. I was fired after 2.5 years, but that was thankfully the month after we had saved enough to put the downpayment on a 700sq. ft home on 2 acres in the woods. I bounced to a couple of garages for work but decided to go back to university for a BSc., and my wife once again went with me. Along the way, though, I had to buy a laptop. With the laptop came games. Someone I worked with introduced me to Civ and I played that more than I wanted to. Between Civs 4-6 I must have nearly 400 hours logged. Then I reconnected with my best friend from school and he reintroduced me to WoW. WoW is the perfect game for me. I played basketball competitively. I was good, and have a few national-level awards (Canada, but still!) up until I stopped playing because of feeling like I needed to focus on work. WoW gave me back that feeling of competitive focus especially as I started getting good again. I have so many memories of clutch plays and feelings of flow. Going into a bg or arena gave me that sense of confidence knowing that I was probably going to beat the person I was going against, and if I didn't it was going to be a good fight. I loved that feeling so much that I played with 700ms lag and still hit 1800 in arena in 2s and 3s on priest, hunter, and warlock. All that fell apart when my wife and I were hit in the face with the fact that she didn't know me anymore. I've never seen her so hurt. I honestly feel like I lost a part of our relationship then that I will never get back. We are each other's only real friends and have been together for 12 years now, 18-30. Before our worlds were intertwined. Now it's like that moment was an asteroid that hit us, splitting apart and sending our trajectories in different directions. I quit WoW. Things were better and I recommitted myself to her. Then Kobe died, and this is going to sound ridiculous compared to the gravity of the rest of this story, but that affected me pretty big. He was my guy, my mentor. I'm not sure he's ever given an interview that I haven't seen. His death recommitted me to my work. For reference, during the beginning of my MSC. I was smoking weed and playing WoW, and had to do a proposal presentation. The whole time leading up to it I had this fake confidence where I was refusing to admit to myself and everyone around me that my head was not in it. It went okay, but not very well. Everyone knew it, and I knew it myself. Then, about a year later, 6 months after I recommitted, I had to defend the Msc. The feeling of leaving the house to do each of those two presentations was night and day. My proposal I maybe practiced 3 times. I had practiced my defense 2-3 times/day for 2 weeks leading up to it. I had done everything I could in that last bit and it made me absolutely okay with any outcome. A real form of confidence. Things were good for a bit. I set out to start a PhD in Jan. 2021, which gave me 6 months where my savings and misc. grants would cover me and I would just write papers to get my publication numbers up work on some home repairs that have been needed to be done, and develop some skills. I had a decent routine but I was still playing 2-3 hours of DOS2 every day. That itself wasn't a problem, but it was like keeping a monster in the room on a short leash. It was just waiting for my attention to get pulled and it would break free. One of my dogs got very sick about a month ago. He is old and has Lyme, so his immune system is poor and when things happen they happen quick. Still, I didn't notice something obviously wrong 2-3 days later than I would have if my attention hadn't been more on video games and work than everyday life. DOS2 made it so that my attention was always either on work or the game. I stopped my research and focused on taking care of him. Things weren't working though, and his problems were getting worse. I blamed myself for only half-heartedly doing 1/3 of the applications of his treatment because my mind was just not used to dealing with real life problems. Half-hearted efforts are rewarded in games, but straight up don't work in biology. Instead of the dopamine hit I was used to getting from games, I was told that we would have to try a harsher medication, the application of which he might not survive. I went full effort, treating his care like a project. Cleaning his wounds over and over has been one of the hardest things I've ever done (emotionally). Being so up close with the mortality of something I care deeply for and not being able to save him. I did end up making enough progress to hold off on the harsher medication for another 2 weeks (recheck Oct. 22). However, at that point I was severely depressed. That victory and the release of Baldur's Gate 3 coincided. I spent the $80 I don't have without hesitation, bought a bunch of weed, and binged for 3 days. It gotrid of the feeling of depression and anxiety and replaced it with adventure. My character was wise, capable, honest. I was not. Guess who I preferred to be? I never started back up with work and began playing during the day. It's been 2 weeks. Where before I was feeling like I was proud of how I was living my life, now I feel behind again and afraid to start, because then I'll have to face that fact and deal with the same feeling I dealt with way back when I did my unprepared Msc. proposal. I committed to quitting games completely 2 days ago. I lasted like 22 hours before smoking weed and loading up BG3. I saw in the StopGaming discord that someone had uninstalled Steam and it was such the right move that I did it immediately. It's been 24 hours game free and my brain is an ant's nest of anxiety. I can't focus on anything wiithout second-guessing everything. But I'm here, it's a pleasure to meet anyone reading this. I already work out at least an hour everyday, sleep well, eat healthy, meditate, yoga. My challenges will be dealing with the fact that I have no real external pressure to do anything between now and Jan., but I once had a real desire to have done some things. I want to get back that desire, but this time be more present in day-to-day life, and to find some kind of joy in that. Nothing like a run-on sentence to end a long post. <3

Bird by Bird, it's on my reading list. Can't remember where I heard of it from. Just wanted to pop in and show interest. The nervous wreck thing is real. I noticed it the first time I managed to quit coffee (for like two weeks). It seemed like everybody else was on another plane of existence. It's amazing how so many people spend the morning bouncing with drug energy, and the afternoon in grumpy recovery.