Addictions and you - what I learned these past years about myself
Heya! Back to the usual topics after our brief gaming detour (which won't be the last for those who enjoyed them).
So - addictions. I always prided myself on not being addicted to something. I never drank very much alcohol (back when I still did), I never smoked, neither tobacco nor other, never took any drugs of the sort. I don't think I ever was addicted to gaming? Sure, not a lot of time goes by between gaming sessions, but I wouldn't say I ever needed to do it every day. So yeah, I always considered myself a clean girl - until I actually checked my habits.
It was at the start of this year when I had just begun my new job and I was in between training sessions. There wasn't much to do in the beginning so I was on my phone a lot since I was at the office. When I had just finished a training session, I grabbed my phone and opened reddit, scrolling memes and news. Since I had scrolled my timeline beforehand on my way to work already, not many new posts had popped up, so I closed the app back down and went to my homescreen. Unsure what to do next with no new messages on Discord, I instinctively... opened the reddit app again. Checking the same posts I had checked before, knowing fully well I had already seen them. Why? Why did I do that? Later that evening, while waiting for my party to fill up in WoW, I opened my browser, clicking on the reddit bookmark. I had already read these posts on my way home from work, so I scrolled a bit past them to see if anything else had popped up, but nothing caught my eye. I closed the tab, opened a new one... and opened reddit again. Without even thinking about it, without so much as a thought as to why I did that. My mind started to wander - when did I start doing that?
I successfully managed to stay away from short-form content like TikTok or YouTube shorts, with the rare exception of such a video being shared with me by my friends. I never much fell into the endless scrolling they offered, or so I thought. I did however fall into the content well that was reddit. I've used reddit for the better of thirteen years at that point, it was engraved in my early adult life back when it was still a niche platform to use with many closely-knit communities. I don't know exactly when or what it did to become mainstream, but there was certainly a shift in the culture. Reddit had adapted well to the younger consumers with the rise of the smartphone and became more of a content aggregator than a collection of communities. Sure, there had always been more popular subreddits than others, but back then the scales were a bit more balanced in favour of smaller, niche communities. Nowadays, most posts on the frontpage /r/all are from the same ten subreddits.
Reddit had managed to trap me in its web successfully and so gradually I never really noticed. Checking my screentime on my phone, the reddit app was by far the biggest outlier on my on-screen time, taking up more than 50% of it. And the worst part was, I couldn't really pinpoint when it had started. But now that I knew, I had to do something about it. You know how often people say that the hardest part to solve a problem with yourself is to accept that you have one? I didn't quite agree with that statement since understanding your problem and doing something about it wasn't quite on the same level of difficulty for me. I knew that I had a problem, but in the beginning there wasn't much motivation to do something about it. Everyone has something they scroll on to pass their time on, right? Well, maybe, but that was beside the point.
Since I started noticing my behaviour, I begun thinking about it. What else could I have done with the time I had spent doomscrolling on reddit? I had always mourned not finding time to continue writing my novel or fanfics, or practicing my cooking more. I had often blamed it on my gaming habits, but it turns out that I was spending a lot more time scrolling than actually gaming. Sometimes I even did both simultaneously, leading to me being distracted from my game by something on reddit. It even poisoned my gaming time, which was detrimental to someone that enjoyed story-focused games. But even knowing all that, it was difficult to stop. I had used reddit for thirteen years at this point and even after I figured out how toxic it was to my life, I had a hard time not opening the app or website. Even when I placed a screen time restriction on it and blocked the website from my browser, I found myself circumventing the restriction to continue browsing. I felt horrible about it, but never was able to do something about it. That is until I told my friends about it.
Tackling a problem that seems impossible to on your own is much more doable when you have friends to talk to about it. I didn't ask them for better ways to bar myself from a website or told them how miserable I felt about it. I simply stated the facts and that I wanted to change about it. One of my friends who I consider to be a big sister simply held me accountable for it. I would report to her about my habits, told her how I felt about it and what I planned to do about it. Simply just telling her and not wanting to disappoint her made all the difference. Of course, I had relapses and often considered simply lying to her to get out of a scolding. But I would have felt even worse about that, and she never was truly angry or disappointed in me. My big sister would always encourage me to keep trying, to seek alternatives to pass the time and remind me that I'd do it for my own good. Eventually, I got to a point where I deleted my accounts to remove the last incentive to visit the site. I still somewhat struggle with the urge to open reddit, but I at the very least recognize it and remember how much better my life is without it.
I understand that I was incredibly lucky to have someone so supportive help me through this, but the takeaway I want you to have is not to that. The takeaway should be that if you cannot help yourself that it is imperative that you ask for help and that you let yourself be helped. It is a long way from realization to request help for a problem you're facing, but it is a necessary step to help yourself heal. Another takeaway is that even something as seemingly harmless as opening a website more than you should can have detrimental effects on your day-to-day life and that you should question your habits every so often. Stay safe out there and make sure to stay healthy!