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fanzio

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Am on day 8, still have big urges but did not game, just been going to fan sites quite quickly.

The first have been great, particularly since my girlfriend joined me since a week. I told her about my addiction and now my quit. She supportive in a very cool way.

But yesterday, had a bigger urge. Nearly reinstalled the game. And no specific event/sadness happened to provoque that though. I think it's a pure missing gaming. Can that be ?

 

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Am on day 8, still have big urges but did not game, just been going to fan sites quite quickly.

The first have been great, particularly since my girlfriend joined me since a week. I told her about my addiction and now my quit. She supportive in a very cool way.

But yesterday, had a bigger urge. Nearly reinstalled the game. And no specific event/sadness happened to provoque that though. I think it's a pure missing gaming. Can that be ?

 

Good job on still going strong! I only have to watch something on the TV and I get the urge to play a certain game haha. It's great that your girlfriend is supportive. :) My main trigger, was boredom though...are you sure you aren't just bored?

Keep up the good work. :)

 

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Am on day 8, still have big urges but did not game, just been going to fan sites quite quickly.

The first have been great, particularly since my girlfriend joined me since a week. I told her about my addiction and now my quit. She supportive in a very cool way.

But yesterday, had a bigger urge. Nearly reinstalled the game. And no specific event/sadness happened to provoque that though. I think it's a pure missing gaming. Can that be ?

 

Good job on still going strong! I only have to watch something on the TV and I get the urge to play a certain game haha. It's great that your girlfriend is supportive. :) My main trigger, was boredom though...are you sure you aren't just bored?

Keep up the good work. :)

 

Thanks Falky ! It's something very similar to cigarette when I was smoking (stopped a year ago successfuly)... don't think it's to do with being bored in this case. Will tell more when in few hours. In between, I completely erased the begining of the installation !

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Hi Fanzio, I'm reading your journal and it looks like you've shown great courage to get through quitting gaming so far.

I've almost finished my 90 day detox, but it's actually my third attempt at it. The main thing holding me back was that I didn't replace gaming with other activities that fulfilled the needs that gaming did for me. I'd recommend you reflect on what needs gaming fulfilled for you, and outline some activities you can do to meet these needs. For me, these were things like being engaged, feeling a sense of accomplishment, being in control of something important, and a few others.

I hope this helps and the best of luck on your journey to becoming a better person!

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  • 4 weeks later...

I have to say I could only make 13 days... after that, my girlfriend went on a trip and I had big stress cause of that terror attacks (i live in Brussels). So I reinstalled that wow shit.

As I play mainly "free-to-play" (i enjoy more that high level), no need to say that my efforts to erase my characters/account were useless to start playing again. On top of that, I realized that my graphic card had never had never worked at all, or maybe just few weeks. So when I updated the divers again with the correct ones, I discovered a completely new game (I could make precise movements and react 10 times faster).

Now it has been 3 weeks relapsed, playing not everyday as I had a lot of work and friends around, but still too much when I was alone (some 5-8 hours a day, with a pick at 19h !).

There is something I would like to understand, but still do not find the solution: I managed to completely quit smoking some years ago after many tries. That last stop, it had been no effort. I had been disgusted by myself, the way my voice was when I was talking to people. And that had been enough but go from 2 packs to 0 cigarettes in one day, without any help, and never relapsed since years.

For games, I have the feeling it's the same addictive behaviour, I feel that I have even more reasons to be disgusted my myself (cancelling parties, even vacations, screwing work), but still I can do it "one last time" (which is never just one hour game).

And it's not a matter of being bored. I am having a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, doing what I want in life (am live artist), am cooking pretty well and very healthy. The gaming compulsion is coming in stress situations : "to make all stressful ideas vanish instantly when I am waiting for the begining of a bg or a raid, whatever shity atmosphere can be". Or after a performance- even after happy parties that usually follow - to evacuate all the tensions that were during the preparation. Of course, like cigarettes, it does not help ;-) I know that, but can not help.

I don't know if I should look for a game overdose. I feel I already lived these 5 no-life months and it did not really work to help me stop as it worked for Cam. It just destroyed part of my being.

I think that I have identified the main situations that lead me to play, but I can not find alternatives. Duo linguo works a bit (made 30% of german in 5 weeks), but still, it's not enough. I am already a decent reader, but can not find this evacuating power, maybe because am having an already quite intellectual life - with short super intense performances moment though - and reading has a different power on me, but not to evacuate accumulated stress. Sport: I already do a bit, but never got back this sensation of "I don't want to stop running" as I could have when I was teenager.

Will write when I find something new...

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Hey seems like you got the same reasons to play as I do(escape/suppress out of stressful situations). I think mindfulness meditation helped me a lot there. I meditate every morning and I think it had an visible effect on me. Sometimes it works if I try to be mindful of the stress I go through. I try to feel what it makes with my body and what my thoughts do if I'm stressed. Just sitting it out for a few minutes and then I do something else(work-out, fiction reading, music,read and comment on gamequitters)
.

Can't say that I am able to be productive in such phases. I still have some anxiety and escape the situation in other ways(like I described in the upper paragraph). But I managed to finish the detox. And I am working on the productivity part right now.

Some more practical tips would be to use leechblock for sites where you can download or play the free games or to install linux instead of your normal OS.

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  • 1 month later...

Hey Again,

Seems it was not the right attempt. I am now again on day 8.

There are several things I should probably have mentioned when I made my introduction nearly 3 months ago, but I was to excited to skip steps!

I want to tell a bit more about my gaming life. I started around age 13. At that time, internet did not exist, and it's also around that time that I started yo have intensive work and emotions with music (2-3 hours daily practice after getting back from school. And from the beginning, these video games were the mean to quickly release the pressure my music teachers were putting on me (that's the classical music way... super old school). And also from the beginning, it has been the only reason to fight with my parents. I think it has been like that for 2 or 3 years, and then I think I played less. My computer got too old anyway and I never got another one before I turned 25.

I did some non music studies, and there were computers that we could access at night/week ends, and as I did not really like these studies and that games like doom, dune 2, wolfenstein were installed, I started playing them. Whether I played them because I had problems in my life or if I had problems in my life because I played too much, I guess this has often be very linked. And I am convinced that the fact of playing anyway then became the main problem anyway. Much more than the problems I could have had before.

Anyway, i then started a job, super interesting - but not music - and everything was fine. I had no computer at home, was travelling a lot and no possibility to install anything on work-computers. Perfect. Then, after 3 years, I felt I had nothing to do in that kind of work anymore, but could not resign because of my private life. I got a computer, and started to have time to play (evening mainly and sometimes week end when I was alone). Runescape was it. This has last maybe 3 or 4 years. I still have some very precise flash memories of some places I visited there, what radio I was listening at the same time.

Then I decided to completely change my life, prepared everything during one year and did it. hat were my most exciting years, and even if the excitation is different now, that's the best decision I ever took. No games around. Or so I thought...

After 3 years, I managed to have a quite satisfying balance in my new music life, but then arrived a super-vampire-girlfriend that successfully managed to put me in the same situations as when I was 13. I google warcraft as I saw an advertizing and installed wow (world of warcraft). 1 month later, I bought the game and 1 month of game. I was only hopping one month here and there, but I recently compared the days I started monthly subscribtions and events I could find in my emails, and it came out that I always started again as another dramatic situation happened in my couple. At that time, it was ok, I was playing, maybe 2-3 hours, and not everyday.

The situation became a higher stage in terms of fights in my couple, broke up, bought the latest extension of warcraft and started playing high level( that was something new to me). I completely facked up all the things around me, but I was living alone, nobody really noticed. For work/studies, I was less efficient, but nothing much. I was not answering phone calls/emails from my friends, they though I had a good new life. I eventually met them for some days of vacations, and I could suddenly be the happy/funny dude they knew before. Meanwhile, I was playing 12-16 hours everyday, eating 2 pieces of bread (sometimes with butter) per day, sometimes not opening the curtains, playing in the dark for several days. And this, for 9 months. I did tell my best friend I "had been" gaming. It was the first time someone would know I would play video games.

At that time, I was super slim, was lying to everyone about my "good life" (I had moved in another city, nobody could really check). Then I managed to realize I was officially depressed, took medecines. I magically completely stopped playing for 2 months, then some shadows of my vampire girlfriend came back and I started playing again (free to play that time). During 2 years, I managed to have a better life (sports, music highly demanding activity, friends, good healthy food,vacations, dates...) but with anyway super strong regular playing periods. Sometimes even weeks again. For example between 2000 and 4000 minutes of game per week(sometimes even more), then uninstall for 3 days, get back on tracks on my work/social life, and start playing again. Always, I was on the edge of screwing up forever jobs, relations, health. And I could always at the very last minutes manage to do something which looked like 100 hours work in 2 hours, do few physical exercises so that my body could still be more or less fit, shift to a genuine contemplative emphatic mood.

Then I stopped again last week.

I have an idea but can not describe it fully today, but I think that I managed to disgust myself of myself. It's not that easy. I know I successfully managed the same way some years ago with cigarette: being disgusted by myself. Hope it will work the same way...

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The book " The power of habits" is really helpful and a great read.  Many of us have read or are reading it on this forum.  I wonder did you substitute the gaming habit for the smoking habit?  Many move our addictions around instead out and out finding healthier ways to cope with stress to help us through those tough times.  It is good that you are not giving up and that determination will help you especially as you learn better tools to get through tough times.  Peace

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No no ! I could both smoke and play at the same time! No limits to bad habits ;-)

What I realize how easy it was to completely stop smoking without any help, just by being disgusted of myself (particularly coughing every sentence when you talk to someone). I still have many people smoking around me, but I never felt tempted.

I was already hard core gaming long before I stopped smoking, so no, in this case I did not replace one bad habit by another.

But you are very right about moving a habit to another, I know that each time I tried to stop gaming, I immediately switched to googling. This time I try to avoid facing screen as well.

Concerning the book, I am a bit tired of that kind of literature showing processes... It most of the time makes a lot of sense, but it's too rough for me. As Cam said in his first videos, you can not replace gaming by something you just try to escape (processes belong to a phase of my life I want to get rid of).

Will keep posted !

 

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Thanks !

Today I have had cravings for 10-15 minutes, even watched a game streaming. Hopefully had a rehearsal at home and musicians arrived to cut that... saved by the bell !

Now no cravings anymore since...

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