There are so many things I want to do. But at the cost of hours spent immersed in game play?
I know I want to do the other things … but the reality is I seem to be demonstrating that I do not want to do them as much as I want to play games.
This makes me feel bad about myself, leading me to want to play games EVEN MORE.
What can you do?
I’ve been experimenting with feeling more neutrality (specifically LESS NEGATIVE JUDGMENT about myself). So feeling badly tonight about my desire to stop TRYING so hard to wade through quicksand towards doing all these other things I want to do, and just DO WHAT IS EASY AND IMMERSIVE … get the bare bedtime minimums done and crawl into bed to play games on my phones.
One of the pitfalls about game playing (especially on mobile devices, I suspect) that make it so addictive is how easy it is to interrupt the conflicted, bad, and/or reflective feelings and thoughts and considerations and just PLAY THE GAMES. Stop thinking about it, and DO it. The phone is right here at hand for most of us all of the time.
Fortunately I also have wordpress installed on my phone, though, and a nice full-sized bluetooth keyboard in the cabin where I usually sleep (man, I have been squandering hours playing games in this cabin for a long time when I initially started renting it to do something entirely different). Making it somewhat easier to go ahead and interrupt the feelings with journaling about the feelings, like this. It’s some kind of CBT tool, I think, and it *is* helpful. To step outside of my head just a little bit and try to look at what is going on more objectively. With less judgment.
I don’t know what the answers are, but at this moment I feel more at peace by reflecting on the feelings and quieting some of the guilty feelings of shame, self-recrimination and futility.
I’m reading a YA book about a kid with an overeating problem. Read books. That’s one of the things I want to do more of! And I can read them on my phone! Instead of playing games! So …. why do I play games more often than read? Anyway, it is helpful to read this person’s feelings and triggers and shame and hopelessness to put my own into better objective perspective. You want so much to reach through the pages and tell this character that feeling shitty about yourself is NOT going to make things better.
But then I think about recovery wisdom that I mostly believe are true. Like “the disease protects itself”.
The dis-ease protects itself by keeping you looking for THAT THING that offers EASE, comfort, and relief. More quickly and more EASily than other stuff.
And when you’re dealing with dis-ease by escaping into game play rather than drinking or doing drugs or destroying your endocrine system’s ability to control your blood sugar … IDK … it seems like small potatoes.
But maybe that’s part of what makes gaming “addiction” so depressing; you DON’T have an actual physical dependency in the same way someone with a heroin problem has. You absolutely supposedly still have a choice. So maybe instead of being a sick person, you are just a BAD person. A hopeless person. A person who lies about wanting to do better and more useful things with their time. A person who is full of shit. A lazy fuck who takes the easy way out nine times out of ten. A non-learner. A waste of resources like air, food, shelter and water who will never put back into the world everything they have taken while they consume electricity, ruin their posture, and decay into the supportive comfortable surfaces beneath them (bed, couch, wherever we play our games).
IDK. Seeing those thoughts “out loud” in text form on my screen I see they are a little harsh. Melodramatic.
Goodnight. That is enough of this.