u/Blackboa

It's been 6 days since I last played any video games as I try to intentionally stop gaming and instead put that energy into more IRL endeavors. This is after, for the last 10 years, easily putting between 6 to 8 hours a day at a minimum into playing MMORPG games. Let me tell you, gaming addiction is real and it is brutal.

The last 6 days of my life have had very bad mental withdrawals. I have been feeling the urge to break my self-imposed gaming ban pretty much nonstop, but I am going through this wanting to break the cycle of unhealthy gaming in my life because I know I am addicted and I know this has caused some bad things in my life.

My strategy has been to replace my gaming addiction with something else, and this has come in a few different forms:

1). daily walking and gym

2). daily reading

3). daily writing

While these things are helpful and I can feel good while doing them, the hardest part of the day comes at night when I already did those three things and don't feel like doing more of them. It leaves me pretty much in a state of doomscrolling on twitter or twitch, watching others game the games that I would normally game or stream myself. Without gaming, I stopped streaming altogether, and now I feel even worse because that was a way that I socialized with friends online.

With gaming being such a huge part of my life the last 10 years, I feel like I am losing myself and who I was and sort of leaving the simulated fantasy that I was living the last 10 years. I very much was more into my fantasy life than my real life, and realizing this, I struggle to identify who I am without gaming.

I know this is kind of a weird post, but I am mainly posting it in case others are going through something similar. It might help to share strategies of how you are coping without gaming in your life. What are you doing to fight the urge to game? If you are gaming in a healthy way, how do you do it? What ways are you able to limit the amount of gaming you do in a healthy way without it becoming an obsession like it has been for me over the years?

In any event, I continue to hold strong on my gaming ban. I need to see this through to rediscover who I am. I have applied to jobs and might have actually gotten a part time gig as a Gas station attendant, just as something to do and to supplement my now nonexistent income from streaming. I am hoping I can finally free myself from the simulation in some way and play in the IRL simulation instead. Lord knows if I can hold out, but I am trying my hardest to do so.

Any tips on how to assimilate easier into IRL while cutting out gaming completely (or finding a healthy balance) would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Blackboa