u/Ill-Radio-8289

Can you tell me if i am shadowban ? Because i can't post anymore..

I think*

Honest disclosure first : I'm the founder of an app called Ban It (no ads). I'm 30 days off alcohol myself, not weed but the mechanics of quitting transfer enough that I want this community's perspective specifically.

The app tracks days clean on whatever habit you set, with a streak score that grows with a daily multiplier so day 30 visibly weighs more than just being "the day after 29." There's a milestone progression (badges at 3, 7, 14, 21, 30, 45, 60, 75 days, etc) and a "stats" page that shows time regained and approximate count of avoided usage. I built it because every quit-tracker I tried did one of three things wrong : made me feel surveilled, looked like a corporate wellness app, or charged $40/year for something that should be a one-time tool.

What I'm genuinely unsure about for cannabis quitting specifically does a "streak resets to zero on relapse" mechanic feel useful or punishing for weed? I know the relapse psychology is different from alcohol - more chronic, less binary, more "I'll just take one hit" territory.

Is the gamification (multipliers, badges) helpful or does it trivialize what's actually a serious adjustment for long-term users?

Is the lack of journaling/note features a gap, or is the simplicity the point? Not posting this to push downloads. I'm posting it because if there's something structurally wrong about the app for this community, you'll see it before I do. Roast it if you have to that's more useful than polite feedback.

The dominant habit advice goes : you can't extinguish a habit, you can only replace it. The trigger fires, the routine plays out, and the only way to interrupt the loop is to substitute a different routine at the same trigger point. This works well for some habits. Cigarette → toothpick. Scrolling → reading. Sugar → fruit. Coffee → tea. The trigger keeps existing but the routine changes. It fails badly for other habits. Specifically : any habit where the behavior is downstream of an emotional state you can't substitute for. You don't drink alcohol because you crave the act of drinking. You drink because you crave the dampening of certain feelings. No "replacement" behavior can give you the same emotional outcome. Apple juice doesn't replace wine. Sparkling water doesn't replace beer. The behavior was never the point. Same for emotional eating. You're not eating because you're hungry. You're eating because food is the most accessible way to regulate a feeling. Carrots don't replace ice cream because carrots don't regulate the same feeling. For habits like these, the substitution model gives you a phase-2 problem. You "replace" the alcohol with a non-alcoholic drink. Two weeks later you're drinking three of them every evening because the actual need is still unmet, and the new behavior is just absorbing the dysfunction.

What actually works better for emotional-state habits is accepting that the feeling underneath is going to surface uncomfortably for a few weeks. Not as a failure of replacement, but as the actual work. The substitute behavior is just a bridge while your brain learns the feeling can exist without being immediately dampened. For some people that bridge is therapy. For some it's just time. For some it's accepting that the first three weeks of any addictive habit quit are going to feel emotionally raw in a way the books don't really warn you about. The clean takeaway : if you're trying to quit something and "replacement habits" keep failing, the issue isn't your willpower. It's that your habit was emotional regulation in disguise, and you're trying to replace a regulator without doing the regulation.

I'm 30 days alcohol-free. For someone who'd failed at every habit attempt for 7 years, this is a personal record by a wide margin. I went into this thinking discipline was the missing piece. I'd been a low-discipline person for as long as I'd been a person. Every previous attempt at quitting anything failed because I couldn't push through the discomfort. So this time I expected to suffer and grind. What surprised me is the discipline that actually mattered wasn't the discipline of resisting cravings in the moment. It was the discipline of making decisions when I wasn't tempted yet. Day 1, sober and rational, I got rid of every bottle in my apartment. That took 15 minutes of discomfort I forced myself through. Not fun but not hard. That 15-minute act bought me 30 days where the moment of temptation was never a real decision. 11pm on a Friday when I wanted a drink, there was nothing to reach for. The discipline of that moment had already been spent on day 1. I think this is where a lot of discipline advice gets it slightly wrong. It tells you to be strong in the moment of temptation. But the moment of temptation is when your prefrontal cortex is least available. You won't win those fights consistently no matter how hardcore you think you are. The discipline that works is uncomfortable in a different way. Texting your friend group "I'm not drinking for 30 days." Throwing out the supply when you'd rather save it for "moderation later." Telling someone your goal out loud so backing out would cost you publicly.

Those are the moments your discipline actually has to show up. The cravings later are downstream of whether you did the unglamorous work upfront.

Every habit you can't break is using dark psychology on you. Same techniques manipulators use on people, just deployed by products, environments, or routines. Recognizing them is half the fight. Using them against the habit is the other half.

The five most common techniques your habits run on you : Variable reward schedules. Slot machines, social media, dating apps and any habit that gives you inconsistent payoff. The brain attaches harder to unpredictable rewards than to consistent ones. Why "one beer to relax" turns into seven : the relaxation hit is variable, so the brain keeps chasing it. Identity hijacking. "A smoker." "A wine person." "A gamer." These aren't descriptions, they're cages. Once your habit becomes a noun for who you are, breaking it feels like erasing yourself. Cults do this. Cigarette companies pioneered it in advertising. Sunk cost framing. "I've already failed this week, might as well start fresh Monday." Same trap people fall into staying in bad relationships. The brain refuses to write off invested time, even when continuing costs more than restarting would. Near-miss exploitation. Casinos engineered this. Your habit does it too the night you almost didn't drink, the day you almost cut your scroll time in half. Near-success feels like progress your brain wants to repeat, even when the actual outcome was failure. Social proof manipulation. Your environment normalizes the habit. Everyone at the bar drinks. Everyone in your group scrolls. Everyone you know vapes. The brain reads the visible majority as the correct answer.

How to reverse each one against the habit : For variable rewards make the reward of NOT doing the habit visible. Days clean. Money saved. Hours slept. The brain attaches to whichever reward it can actually see. For identity hijacking change the noun. "I don't drink" beats "I'm trying not to drink" by a wide margin. The first identity has no escape clause built into it. For sunk cost - reverse the math. Don't count what you've failed at. Count what you'd lose by restarting. Day 15 of a streak costs more to break than day 2. For near-miss exploitation, count successes only when they're absolute. No "I only had two drinks tonight." Either zero or it's day 1 again. For social proof - engineer counter-proof. Find one person who quit and stay close to them. Public commitment works too. The brain follows whoever is most visibly aligned with the new identity. The brutal truth : "willpower" doesn't lose to weak character. It loses to a manipulation stack designed to bypass willpower entirely. Until you recognize your own habits are manipulating you, you'll keep losing the same fight on different days.

I’ve been the person who quits everything by week 2 since I was 14.

Gym memberships. Language apps. Journal entries. Diets. Side projects. Sleep schedules. Reading habits. Phone detoxes. All of them lasted somewhere between 5 and 11 days. I had a folder on my laptop with the corpses of like 40 abandoned attempts. Every January 1st I’d promise myself this year would be different. Every January 12th I’d be back to the same patterns telling myself I’d start again Monday. The thing I never wanted to admit is that I’d built an identity around being someone who tries hard and fails. It was almost more comfortable to be “the guy who keeps trying” than to actually succeed and have nothing left to chase. The thing that finally changed wasn’t motivation. Wasn’t a self-help book. Wasn’t even rock bottom. It was accepting that I had a system problem, not a willpower problem. Every time I tried to quit something before, I’d announce it to nobody, write it in a private note, set zero stakes, remove zero temptation, and then act surprised when I caved on day 6. The bad option was always free. The good option always required effort. Of course willpower lost. Willpower always loses to a system that’s stacked against it.

What I did differently this time was three things. First, I got rid of every bottle in my apartment on day 1, no “moderation phase”, zero supply. Second, I told my closest friend group I was doing it, so a public stake created a real social cost on relapse. Third, I started counting visibly. Day 1. Day 2. Day 7. Day 14. The number itself became the thing I didn’t want to break. That’s it. Three changes. No transformation, no new discipline. Just stacking the deck so the right option became the easier one. I’m at day 30 and genuinely don’t feel like the same person who couldn’t stick to anything last year. Not because I changed. Because the system I’m operating in changed.

If you’ve been in the “I keep trying and failing” loop for years, the issue isn’t you. It’s that nothing in your environment is set up to make you win.

I quit alcohol 30 days ago. To stay accountable I tracked my streak with a points system every day you stay clean adds points equal to your current streak length. Day 1 adds 1. Day 30 adds 30. The total grows quadratically.

Last week I plotted the curve to understand my own data better : The shape of that curve named something I’d been feeling but couldn’t articulate.

At day 5, breaking would cost me 15 points. Annoying but recoverable. At day 30, breaking costs 465. Devastating to start over. But here’s what hit me hardest. The most dangerous zone isn’t the start. It’s days 7–14. The curve is still relatively flat you’ve built enough investment to feel pressure, but not enough to feel like you have “too much to lose.” That’s where I almost broke. Twice.

After day 14, the math starts working FOR you. The line steepens fast. Every additional day makes breaking exponentially more painful. By day 30 the streak almost protects itself. The takeaway : the people who quit successfully aren’t more disciplined than you. They just survived the middle zone where the math hadn’t kicked in yet.

If you’re in the early days of trying to quit something alcohol, weed, porn, gaming, scrolling your job isn’t to “stay strong forever.” Your job is to survive the first 14 days. After that, the structure of your streak starts doing the work for you.

What helped me through 7–14 :

Removed the option from my environment (deleted apps, no alcohol at home). Tracked visibly seeing the score grow daily made the abstract feeling of “building something” concrete. And knowing this curve existed, so I expected the urge to peak before the math caught up.

Not looking for motivation tips or morning routine advice but I'm genuinely curious what was the actual thing that changed it for you. Not the habit itself, the mechanism. The thing that made this attempt different from all the previous ones that didn’t stick.

For me it was making it visible to someone else. Every previous attempt was private. The moment another person could see my streak, the whole dynamic changed.

What was yours?

For years I told myself it was just bad discipline. I'd eat well for a few days, then something stressful would happen and I'd be back to eating everything in sight. Not because I was hungry. Because something else needed managing.

The moment I started actually tracking the pattern, not calories, just what was happening emotionally right before I reached for food, everything became obvious. Boredom. Stress. Loneliness. Sometimes just the habit of eating at a specific time regardless of hunger.

The habit wasn't the problem. It was the solution to something else I wasn't addressing.

What changed things wasn't a stricter diet. It was making the pattern visible. Giving it a number. Tracking the days where I stuck to what I actually intended versus when I ate on autopilot.

Seeing the streak grow made the next day feel worth protecting.

Still figuring it out. But understanding the why made the what a lot more manageable.

Anyone else find that tracking the emotional trigger was more useful than tracking the food itself?