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NEW VIDEO: The EASIEST Way to Stop Gaming

I'm wasting my life and I'm done with it


Mhyrion

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Hello all,

CAUTION: wall of text ahead ^^

I'm 23, maried, dutch, graphic design student and I'm addicted to gaming.

I've been playing video games for years now. It started out casual and I played together with my -then- boyfriend. I started to play WoW with him on a private server, with a very tight and fun community. It was also there that I started raiding and playing the game a bit more serious. When the private server was shut down, I did not play games for a while, but later played WoW on the real servers and also played LoL.

I've denied that gaming was a problem in my life. There were a few moment that I said to myself: this is too much, you gotta tone it down. This was only after getting play time reports from WoW for more then 60 hours a week, or having done nothing besides LoL for a couple of days. And so I did quit for a little while. But it never lasted long. I've come to realize that I need to quit every single game, in order to quit at all. I've deleted games from my laptop before, only to download them again the next day, or just play another game in the meantime or watch esports. I've also come to admit that my studies have been delayed severely due to gaming. I'm trying to finish my studies right now, but I might need to add another half year, again.

For me it was very important to understand, why I do, what I do. Why do I game so much? I think gaming for me mostly worked as an escape from real life. I'm depressed and have had suicidal thoughts. I've always been very emotional and unstable. I can have good weeks, I can have bad weeks. During bad days and weeks, I would game a lot. It would make my head clear(or at least, that's how it feels) and make me unable to think the negative thoughts I would have. That this excessive gaming also ruined my sleep and social life, I did not see. I get very anxious when I game a lot, and will often ignore messages from friends or family when I'm in my 'anti-social bubble', as I came to call it. Anyway, although I think depression might always be part of my life, I need to learn how to better deal with it. Why did I fail to quit before? I guess there's a number of factors. I denied that the problem was as big as it is. I felt like, if I didn't need to game EVERY day, it was not thát bad. Right? And as long as I got my normal life sort of going, that was also ok. I feel now, it is not. I wanna live life to the fullest. I want to accomplish things, I want to enjoy. I also know now I need a good, repetitive(boring!) structure for my weeks, or else I'll get lost. I also need to find other free time activities to fill the void of many many hours a week that I would normally spend gaming. I have no clue about hobbies I like yet, so I'm up for a bit of discovering and I'm looking forward to that.

I've not talked with many people about my addiction at all. My family would not understand, even though addictions are quite common in my family. Only one of my fellow students knows about it (he happened to pick gaming addiction as subject to his research project) and I talk about it with him sometimes. My closest friends know I'm depressed, but not that I game this much. They do not game themselves, so for me it feels hard to explain how you can get so lost in a digital world. But I feel like it would be a good step to include them into my process, as they would be invaluable support. My husband knows that I game a lot, but not how severe it is right now. I've noticed I've developed a pattern of lying to obfuscate how much time I really spend gaming. I would say I have been to the academy to study, while really, I've been home all day playing games. I feel like I really screwed up here, and I need to fix that.

Thanks for reading,

Mhyrion

 

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I've deleted games from my laptop before, only to download them again the next day, or just play another game in the meantime or watch esports.

Oh, I can so relate to that. It's the very first thing that came to mind when I thought about quitting videogames. And I've done it numerous times - with the same result every time. Well, at least it helped me to realize that we're talking about addiction here, not merely overindulging.

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