Is Your Addiction Fooling You?

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Is Your Addiction Fooling You?

                Sometimes, addictions are almost unshakable; they are deeply wired into one’s brain and take serious willpower and dedication to be broken.  Some examples would be smoking tobacco, doing marijuana, cocaine, heroine, opium, methamphetamine, or any other drugs, biting fingernails, video games, the internet, just to name a few.  However, I recently shook an addiction, just over a week ago, and frankly, it was easier than hell.  I believe that some addictions are like this; they are bad habits and consume a lot of our time, but all it would take to quit was to just say, “No!”

                My recent addiction was to Bike Race, a stupid, worthless game on my iPhone.  However, despite its uselessness, I was engulfed by it, and I played almost two thousand multiplayer games in the course of a month to a month and a half.  One day near the end of this addiction, I sat down and calculated how much total time I have wasted from my life on this game, and how much I was wasting every week, and every day.  It came out to be about eleven to twelve hours a week, and I was very aware that many days I spent two hours playing.  I simply decided that this would have to stop soon, and a couple days later, I literally just stopped completely.  I went from playing well over an hour one day to absolutely none the next, and for the past week. 

                I’m not sure why it was so easy, but I think it’s because I just stopped thinking about it, and just thinking about returning to Bike Race is quite repulsive to me.  I’ll be honest, over the last week I have played maybe five games because they were with people I just really wanted to play with, but they only take an average of ten to fifteen seconds each, so that adds up to about a minute of total play.  This is how much I should be playing this game.  But really, I am reluctant to play even this much.  I have totally lost interest in the game after quitting it, and I am proud to say that it won’t waste any more of my life.

                I think that a lot of people’s bad habits and addictions are similar to my situation.  They just don’t know how easy it would be for them to stop easily at will, because they are constantly engaged in their habit.  However, if they just mustered up the courage to say, “No!” one time, then they could be done forever, and it would be as easy as that.  I hope that just one person will read this post, and then be able to easily and relatively painlessly stop a bad habit.  That would make it worth the effort from me.