A friend of mine quit video games cold turkey, because he wanted to be more productive. His blood pressure skyrocketed. The cold turkey was dangerous.
One of the signs of addiction, and I want to put air quotes around the word addiction, but won’t, is that after going cold turkey, you experience severe symptoms of loss and withdrawal; the usual ones you know about. Irritability, depression, withdrawal, sleep problems, eating problems, focus problems, etc.
here’s an excerpt from a site about video game addiction:
The video gaming behavior of gaming addicts and non-addicted problem gamers often looks the same. Both groups play a lot, neglect other things in life, and suffer some consequences in their relationships, health, work, or education. The differences sometimes do not appear until moderation is tried. Non-addicted gamers can take a break or limit themselves to certain games or hours, are able to attend to their lives and needs, and often feel much better in the process. Meanwhile, gaming addicts often are afraid of cutting back, fail with any kind of limits, feel too overwhelmed to deal with life, and feel worse when taking a break from gaming. Your attempts at moderation should tell you what you need to know.
So, you don’t really know you’re addicted to something, until you stop trying to do it.
You can swap ‘smart phone’ or ‘social media’ into that paragraph for ‘gaming’ pretty easily.
As much as I have struggled with 12-step programs and addiction models for things like technology, food and sex, I’m now poking at on-line 12 step groups, and see the following breakdown:
- Internet and Technology Addiction
- Social Media Addiction
- Smartphone Addiction
- Streaming Addiction
Of course, you’re not supposed to talk about the meetings, like AA, though I guess I could mention I just sat in on one.
Bumped into the higher power of course, there; it’s a higher-power kinda place, the 12 step group.
Sigh.
I have been to a lot of AA meetings, Al-anon and other such-like. Never have I come across one that does not get into a higher power somewhere along the line. Sadly, at this point, “higher power” is kind of a trigger thing for me, and I often stop listening or caring when they get to that point. Now that I have to work a lot less than I used to, I worry about things like video game addiction or streaming addiction, but so far, I have been able to stop those activities cold-turkey without problem. And I think I may be the only person in the world who has a smart phone, but still uses it for ’emergencies only”, I.E. I take it with me when Im on my bike, and at no other times is it even turned on or power up. The AA and similar meetings never helped me with my drinking issue. That, I had to do by myself. It may sound trite, but I find that Werner Herzog’s advice on stuff like that, helped me the most. He said “The only way to stop drinking, is to stop drinking.” P.S. I still drink craft beer… but far, far less than I used to, and I no longer touch hard alcohol at all.
I react badly to the higher power stuff too. I get the idea of it, if you have tried and failed over and over again, you need some way to do it again and believe it can work, this time. I’ve cold turkeyed the social media, and feel pretty weird. I cant’ tell if it’s just my baseline weird or if I’m rally withdrawing. I tend to think it’s a sign of something.
I thought 12 Step groups were deliberately agnostic about what you could designate your higher power. Like, you could designate it your spouse, or your dog, or your well-thumbed copy of Atheism for Mouth Breathers. Innit? No reason to ditch 12 Step bc of the Higher Power clause (there are plenty of other reasons if you want to ditch it).
Jay, I got your response in email. Amazing! But when I revisited this page to read it here, I didn’t see it. Also amazing! Did you delete it, or is the blog sw just very wonky?