Fed Up With Gaming

[cjdecker2002]

My name is Curtis, I am 21 years old from The Bronx, NY, and I plan to quit gaming forever.

I have been gaming since I was about 13 years old, and throughout high school and a lot of college it had quite a grip on my life so that it was always the thing I wanted to be doing.  I played mostly sports games like FIFA and MLB the Show, but later got into Age of Empires II (the game I became most addicted to), Starcraft II, and racing games like F1 and GT7.  

Now, 8 years later, I'm fed up. Over the last 12 months or so, I've realized just how addicted I am because I will sit down at my PS5 and play 6 different games for about 10 minutes each trying to find one that is fun but they all seem boring to me.  But despite that, I still continue wanting to play a game because I think it will be fulfilling, and often this drives me to the PS Store and considering buying another game and wasting more money on this pointless "hobby".  Basically, I don't enjoy gaming anymore but my brain craves the dopamine so much that I waste hours on it anyway.  

Another factor is that I believe that gaming addiction has led to an addiction to masturbation and pornography.  Research has shown a significant link between a gaming addiction and a sex addiction, and I believe I have fallen into both these traps.  Over the last 6 months of trying to quit PMO, I have struggled a lot, but the time I found the most success was when I previously quit gaming but only managed to stay game-free for about a month and a half.  And only about a month later, I fell back into the sexual temptations I wanted to be free from, and I believe these two things are linked.  

 

So my main goals now are to fill my life instead with more fulfilling activities, like practicing coding (I just graduated college with a CS degree), strengthening my relationship with my fiancee, reading books I've been meaning to read for years, getting back into piano, and playing sports.  My other main goal is, like I said before, to alongside this quit my sex addiction and be free from that bondage. 

I'd appreciate any prayers, well-wishes, and encouragement along the way, and if anyone can relate to anything that I've said, I'd love to hear your story.

[zehuntar]

Hey Curtis, 

This was the first post I've read on this forum and so I decided to create an account to reply.

I have also been struggling with porn and masturbation addiction for a while, and I really suggest you focus on that rather than game addiction. I read a lot of old esoteric scientific books about the disastrous effects of masturbation and as much as they were insightful, it didn't completely curb out my addiction. So recently, I have been reading Hindu texts about celibacy and sexual continence and they have really inspired me to quit this habit once and for all. 

It used to be common knowledge that ejaculation in all its forms weakens the male greatly, but this knowledge has been lost and actually know the opposite is common knowledge, you've abstained in the past and you must have felt the mental and physical benefits of abstaining. Right now I'm abstaining and I just feel like a new person, I'm able to hit the gym and gain strength, my sleeping pattern is more aligned with sunlight and I wake up more refreshed, and on top of that it has allowed me to do other things than game all day, I'm also a CS graduate and so I have more mental energy to focus on learning about mobile app development and reading books that interest me.

I'd suggest you stay away from the nofap Subreddits and chose to read more about it on the semenretention subreddit as the conversations are a bit more mature but I warn you there is a strong spiritual aspect to this practice.

 

[Wildermyth]

The topic of pornography and its affect on the human mind are not brought up enough in discussions. I myself have struggled with food, gaming and porn addiction. Whenever I've altered one of those three the remaining ones have been more exaggerated. I recently relapsed with my gaming addiction and not only did I game every day for several hours, but I was also hyper-sensitive to sexual stimulation and constantly eating sugary foods. It all boils down to a compulsive behaviour where your brain has been shaped over the years to act fast and direct whenever it wants to cope with some sort of obstacle. The brain knows that it has instant access to a powerful release of endorphines and dopamine and it cannot decide if it's truly healthy or not. The mind simply isn't build for the hyper-stimulation that is so common in modern society, which leads to use being hugely responsible for keeping track of the red flags ourselves. It's an exhausting process and probably the main cause for people who decide to move away from cities... there's just too many impressions to take in.

The first step then is to admit that you have a problem so I believe you're on the right path now! I hope we guys can open up more about our porn use, not only on the web, but also in real life. So many of us suffer from this addiction and since it's still a bit shameful to talk about many sit and suffer in silence. Or worse yet, they don't understand that they have a problem since it's never brought up with the correct perspective. Hopefully this will change in the future and we can all deal with this more effectively together.