How I Overcame Video Game Addiction & Reconnected With My Family
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I’ve been hooked on many things. Coffee, food, alcohol…you name it. But earlier than it all, I turned hooked on video games. In this episode, I will walk you through my struggle with online game addiction and how it nearly cost me my dating with my circle of relatives. Before I cease nowadays’s an episode, I can be brutally sincere with you. So put together yourself.
My Playstation: Love at First Sight In 2002, my parents offered me a PlayStation 2. When I turned into a child, I became diagnosed with interest deficit hyperactive sickness, or ADHD — to a twelve-year-old with ADHD, getting a Playstation changed into like crack. Except this had to flashlights and colorful characters and didn’t kill your desires and wreck your lifestyles.
On a primary day, I performed for around 12 hours. Soon, I become spending a median of 8-10 hours gambling on the PS2 every day. On days that I didn’t have school, I performed for anywhere from 12 to fifteen hours every day. I cherished God of War, Resident Evil four, Timesplitters, Devil May Cry three, Burnout, and various other video games.
The first time my mom locked up, the PS2 changed because I wasn’t studying sufficiently. Or perhaps it became due to the point I wasn’t getting any workout. My mother locked it up in her cabinet while she went to work. But what I recall was I turned into livid. How dare she? How many want to she try this? She didn’t have the proper to do this! My coronary heart becomes beating honestly fast, and I couldn’t think surely. I become experiencing palpitations; I become tense, irritable, and extraordinarily unable to consciousness. And this turned slightly 2-3 hours after she locked up my Playstation.
Btw My arms had been shaking; I couldn’t assume straight. I didn’t understand this lower back then, but I have experienced signs related to addiction. I pressured our cleaning lady to provide me her copy of the cupboard key, and I opened my mom’s cupboard. I quickly took out the PlayStation 2. I plugged it in, and the moment the loading screen came on, I felt all my tension dissipate. I felt waves and waves of remedy wash over me. And I felt disgrace that I became so susceptible.
The other difficulty becomes my fitness. My most significant problem approximately the food I ate was that it needs to be easy to eat simultaneously as playing, tasty and that it was either fried or sweet. We want the comfort of sugar, deep-fried food, and the reassurance that it offers. Couple that with the truth that junk food is merely clean to overeat, and I turned into on the street headed straight for disaster. FB TW I changed into already an obese child, and I felt like humans made a laugh at me regularly… and due to this, it became smooth to find my consolation in an online game. An online game might in no way harm me (besides, for you, Pokemon Go).
A video game wouldn’t make amusing of me and make me experience terrible about my weight. It didn’t assume me to be okay with jokes and even outright insults, approximately how I seemed. My buddies did. I never permit upon how bad I felt. I continually smiled and acted to find it irresistible to become a funny story I was ok with. But I wasn’t. Even these days, I experience unattractive and unpleasant. So can you blame me for selecting video games over actual life?
Because of all the time I spent sitting and gambling on video games, I gained extra weight. Soon, I became a teen who was morbidly obese and was recognized as pre-diabetic. Eventually, my mother reached out to one of all my cousins. I take into account this vividly: I changed into sitting on my couch, playing Timesplitters, and my cousin became sitting with my mother on the sofa on the alternative side, trying to talk to me approximately my trouble or in their words….My “dependency.” He’s telling me that my mother is dissatisfied and feels harm.
I don’t care. My eyes are still on the display screen. He’s telling me how my mom is concerned approximately me. I don’t care. I don’t react or reply. My mom starts crying and explains to him that I have a hassle. I don’t even bother looking up from the TV. I tell him she’s lying. FB TW Then my cousin factors out that my mom is crying while I’m sitting and playing. He asks me if I experience no disgrace.
Then I ultimately replied. I argued with him. I yelled for a while. But eventually, I couldn’t hold denying it any extra. That became once I hit rock backside. All of 13 years vintage, I hit rock bottom. I hated myself. Addiction consists of great shame. Every addict is aware of the sensation. When you try to strive, and you hate yourself, you then provide the component that controls you. As an addict, something you’re addicted to contains the weight of shame with it. You hate yourself. You hate how vulnerable you sense.