My relapse story

Hello all, just wanted to share my relapse story.

I played League from 2013-2020 and tried to quit every year but always found a reason to go back playing. In May 2020, I sent a ticket to Riot support to deactivate my account to quit for good because I felt worthless IRL and hated myself. I blocked all League-related content on YouTube and Instagram. It was extremely hard the first few weeks. In late 2023, my friend invited me to play Wild Rift and I declined. I knew if I started playing again I wouldn’t be able to stop. I got to celebrate my fourth “soberversary” in 2024 and felt awesome. Life truly got so much better during those years.

The I watched Arcane season 2 and got super excited. I had conflicted feelings but eventually I lost my inner battle. I began with downloading Wild Rift. I didn’t like playing with my thumbs. So I emailed Support and asked for my account to be reactivated. I logged into my account and felt all nostalgic. I felt giddy. I tried playing one ARAM game. It was fun. I was amazed at my muscle memory, and how I still remembered item names and their functions. I played another game, and that was it for the day.

At first I was like, “oh OK I didn’t get the desire to play so badly like before”. But man was that a lie. I started having the feeling like if I didn’t play for at least once a day, my day didn’t go well or something was missing. The itch would always be there bugging my mind. It quickly became 3 games/day, then 5 games/day, then 10 games/day and my worst of all time was 18 games/day. I spent on average 6-8 hours/day playing ARAM. I could quite literally spend more time if I didn’t have other responsibilities to attend to.

Suffice to say, I was terrified at how my League addiction still has the same effects on me. I guess the only difference is that I no longer shame myself for being addicted to it. This time, I can treat myself with compassion. Last night, I had the courage to uninstall the game. I wrote a note to myself to read in the morning in case I wanted to play again. But no, I didn’t even need to read the note. I woke up and went about my day with zero desire to play. It’s almost like magic how the desire is gone when the game is gone. 

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Thank you for reading my experience! Wishing you the best of luck in your quitting journey 🙂

I’d just like to end the post with a quote from James Clear (author of ‘Atomic Habits’): “Before you try to increase your willpower, try to decrease the friction in your environment”