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Old school rune scape
Being too damn nice.
I quit heroin and other heavy opioids just before fentanyl really hit the streets. Quit cold turkey after losing a few friends and realizing that I could get a bag cut with fent and die, and I couldn’t do that to my siblings; they’re a lot younger than me and really idolized me at the time.
When I was well enough to get to a store without shitting myself or throwing up bile everywhere, I went and bought a handle(1.75l) of the cheapest vodka I could. I continued that every day until 4 years ago.
I have cirrhosis, and my liver could shit the bed at any time, but I’m alive and I’m clean (for the most part) and sober. I work in recovery and am working to become a Drug and Alcohol Counselor now.
I quit smoking about 6 months ago. I went to the store, didn’t have quite enough for a pack, and just haven’t bought another. Tobacco has been the hardest for me by far. Alcohol withdrawal almost killed me - I had to be hospitalized for near a month - but I was on high doses of benzodiazepines so I don’t remember much of it. The cravings for a cigarette are intense. They’ve gotten better zand they will continue to do so, but damn, it’s rough.
Ozzy Osbourne called it the hardest drug to quit and that man has done many drugs
Doom scrolling. The thing is though when I take time off work I don’t touch the internet at all for days on end. I work on my hobbies instead. It’s when I only have a day or two of free time (even less when you account for having to do chores) and not enough time to finish whatever I’m working on along with whatever I have to come back to next Monday weighing on my mind that I just turn to my phone instead. That’s only working 40 hours a week too. There are people in far worse situations than me.
Fiction. Written. Scifi almost exclusively.
When I can’t get the good stuff I use the bad stuff. But I’m always using.
Phone
Weed was easy. Don’t even think I was addicted. For me, I’ve been struggling for with sleeping pills lately. Might go back to the weed but just do oils before bed for sleep. I’m a shift worker in a high stress job so I need something at night to calm the nerves sometimes.
I’m luckily sensitive to most medications, and find good success with herbal stuff like valerian and passionflower, any of the GABA ones really. They don’t make me sleepy as much as they get rid of that little burning anxiety stress that keeps me awake.
It’s worth a shot for some people.
Tried that kinda stuff lol I’m unfortunately a horrible sleeper
Porn and weed.
I’ve no doubt there are people that can use it moderately, but my brain just keeps wanting more. I quit cigarettes with no issues. I went from drinking a 6-pack a night to barely drinking at all. But those two really are hard to escape. Every time I kick weed I always have a night where I’m relaxing and I go and get a preroll - then end up getting more and smoking for the next few days before I realize what I’m doing. Same thing with porn. I can smoke a hell of a lot of porn.
But seriously, it’s hard to quit. And I think that part of the reason is due to my inability to label either of those things as “real addictions” in my head. Neither of those things are demonstrably decreasing my quality of life, at least not the way cigarettes and alcohol did, so I’m having trouble contextualizing them as harmful. Porn is easier for me in that regard, since it definitely subconsciously affects my views on the human body, and noticing that more is helping me shake the habit.
For the record, I do think weed is a lot less harmful than booze. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use it, and I’ve been using it the wrong way for so long that I don’t think I can use it the right way.
To quote one of the great philosophers of our times:
“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn’t gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn’t gonna fund terrorism, but, well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored, and it’s when you’re bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren’t good at anything.”
Now, I don’t necessarily think all of that is true. Plenty of people are creative and innovative and also smoke pot, but it does make you content with doing nothing. Very relaxing in the moment, until you realize, after a few years of daily smoking, that all your friends have been learning new things and growing and you’ve been sitting on the couch watching TV the whole time. It’s totally fine to use every now and then, and by no means should be illegal, but we do need to start being realistic about how daily cannabis use quells that burning desire to be active and improve ourselves.
Tobacco. 10,000%.
I smoked 3 packs a day for 25 years.
Then when vaping appeared on the scene, I switched to vaping - HEAVY vaping, loads of nicotine (you could buy 100 mg/ml nicotine base by the gallon for a few bucks back when it was still free). For 10 years.
Then finally I quit vaping. It’s been 5 years.
I’m finally free from tobacco. And it’s entirely thanks to vaping for me. I tried a million times and only vaping finally peeled me off tobacco (and then it took me 10 years to peel myself off vaping, but that was easier).
That’s what it took and how long it took me to get off tobacco. I curse the everlasting shit out of the day I took my first drag on a cigarette…
I quit a $240 dollar/day opioid habit, but they ain’t takin’ my damn nicotine
$240/day?! How much were you taking?
240mg oxycodone, unknown amount of fentanyl towards the end there
That amount of oxy alone is a LOT, good thing you were able to stop. Must’ve been hard.
Yeah it was gnarly. That was my once every ~24 hours dose, with about 1/3 of the time not being able to afford it and having the equivalent of a severe flu from withdrawal. It was like that for years. Everyone that I ever hear about being prescribed any painkillers, I give them a very serious warning.
For anyone already struggling with opioid addiction, MAT (Suboxone) is a perfectly viable option to get off of that shit, it’s not perfect, and it’s expensive, but it’s no where near as expensive as your habit, and you’ll get your life back.
did vaping make it easier to taper off?
I never tapered off. I replaced hard smoking with hard vaping almost overnight - and when I mean hard vaping, I mean big mods with big drippers, tons of power, tons of clouds, tons of nicotine.
I calmed down a bit with the vaping over the years because I didn’t feel I needed as much. Then one mornng, I simply left the mod at home and stopped vaping cold turkey.
Vaping had two functions for me:
- Inject nicotine into my system in a safer way than tobacco
- Reassure me that no matter what happened, as long as I had a mod nearby, I never needed to touch a cigarette again. And my most pressing source of anxiety was to want to smoke again.
After 10 years of vaping, I really felt like tobacco was well and truly alien to me at that point, so the “crutch” aspect of vaping disappeared. As for the nicotine, I figured I could always smear some nicotine base VG onto my gums. So I quit vaping but I left home with a bottle of nic that morning, but ended up never needing it.
That’s my tobacco cessation story. Everybody’s is different 🙂
Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).
I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.
For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.
I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.
Born in 80, so a similar vintage to you; and yeah, we have connections and information now, but I feel like we should have stopped some time around 05, before smartphones really took hold.
I’m absolutely willing to accept that I’m wearing the highest grade rose tinted goggles, but not having to do everything online certainly felt better than whatever all this is. gestures broadly
I remember what it was like before I could stave off boredom at any time, but even then I don’t think the convenience outweighs the problems. Though in fairness it’s not really the phones, but the companies who make billions from us using them. But those companies had nowhere near the same amount of power, and I can’t help thinking that was a good thing.
I am confronting the fact that I have lost the ability to just be bored. I need to get that back.
Yep! Embracing boredom is likely the path back. Because it’s not a dead space. It’s a canvas.
I’m slightly younger (born in 86) but went through a similar thought process a couple of years back. I remembered being an avid reader as a kid but could barely make it through a book or two a year, and struggled to maintain any form of attention span. I forced myself to read more for about the first month, then I got addicted to it again and ended up reading 42 books that year. I’m very conscious now about pretty much always having my devices in some form of focus mode/app time limits and prioritizing focus/reading time. I feel much better.
I’ve been starting to think that it’s something us older millennials can actually do for our younger friends … remind, demo and teach what a less tech ruled life can look like, how tech can be treated as more humane and not a necessity.
Excessive amounts of food. I have to eat, but cutting back to the amount I should be eating for my age and physical activity is so tough.
The cause is binge eating in my youth when I was extremely active but didn’t eat three meals a day due to adhd absentmindedness. Frequently I would only have one or two meals a day, but eat two or more meals worth of calories at a time and burn it off in short order.
Now with family and a desk job with a scheduled lunchtime it is basically impossible to eat when I’m hungry instead of when it is ‘time to eat’ and portion control is a struggle. Quitting smoking required buying a house and quitting together with the wife, at least that had a cutoff date that I could say “I haven’t smoked since moving in”. Eating less is something I need to do every day!
When I was assessed for (and diagnosed with) ADHD when I was 39, 5 years ago, I asked the psych whether my obesity was perhaps linked to it. He replied that, “no, probably not. Most of the people I see are thin”.
This had the double whammy of making me doubt my diagnosis and consider that I’m just an irredeemable fat cunt.
Which was nice.
He said most, not all. If my parents had been more regimented about me eating every meal I probably would have had weight issues earlier on.
To spin it positively, being exception to the general trend makes you exceptional!
Since covid, there’s been a lot of food in the house. Something about not being able to get it when we wanted made us buy more, more often and stockpile. Of course, food expires and throwing it away means that it was a bad decision to buy so much, so eating it is the only financially responsible thing to do, right?
Alcohol. I never drank until I got an IT internship and the boss was big into craft beers. I started drinking craft beer every night just to have something to bond with him through to try to turn the internship into a full-time job. I did get the job, but then struggled for years with alcohol dependence.
After my dad died I nearly drank myself to death and managed to quit for an entire year. Then I got cheated on, and home was no longer a safe space, so I hung out at the bar every day instead. It’s been 6 months and I’ve gone from ~75 beers / week to ~24. Just tapering myself off slowly. Wegovy helps - I can’t have more than a few drinks without feeling super bloated now.
watching Corner Gas!
Porn I’m afraid. Starting as a way to combat boredom and loneliness and anxiety as a preteen has turned in to a fifteen year long struggle and descent in to various medications and treatments that only impede my ability to develop healthy intimate relationships. Nofap, yorubrainonporn, abstaining, none of it has been effective for more than three weeks of it. Even being a pen tester when the compulsivity hits, it’s me versus my skills. And it’s always a losing demoralizing battle.
I’m currently trying to quit that too. It’s harder than I expected. I’m not severly addicted or anything but I’ve recently learned a lot about why porn is bad and why we should stop consuming it. The two aspects to it are basically the exploitation of the industry and the effects that watching it has on the viewer. If anyone’s interested, I can also go into more detail on that. For the first reason it would be enough to watch porn that’s not made using real people, like hentai but the second reason is why we should stop it entirely. It’s just that I grew up with phones and the internet, so I’ve jacked off to porn since I was 11 and it’s kinda hard to jack off without it because that’s where my mind goes automatically. I should be able to just do it without having to watch anything but I end up just not doing it at all. I don’t know if there’s any advice or something that could help me there.
What is a pen tester? I’m sorry to hear your problems and hope you get better soon
I do red team cybersecurity. Basically I try and break in to systems. Putting blockers up in my place is always a challenge as I break through the, by sheer skill.
Caffeine I have quit a few times and that has the worst physical withdrawal of anything I have quit (hard drugs & alcohol I have never used enough to become physically habituated). Speed probably the most difficult emotionally/psychologically.
I don’t worry about caffeine anymore, just maintain the habit.
