Get Rid Of Your Small Addictions: How To Feel More Fulfilled And Live Happily Ever After by Andreas Wagner

Author:Andreas Wagner [Wagner, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2020-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Part 3 - Taming All Other Addictions

The famous American writer Mark Twain was once quoted with the words: “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I have done it thousands of times.”

Abstaining from porn and doing intermittent fasting are surely two of the greatest tools to lead a happier and more fulfilled life, but the truth is that overcoming any sort of addiction helps boost happiness. The same principle with regards to dopamine secretion and eventually desensitisation applies to any addiction and therefore – as obvious and simple as it sounds – getting rid of addictions in general is the key to happiness. I’m not going to talk in depth about obvious addictions like drugs and I will also leave out alcoholism, although I don’t think I have to mention that they are very detrimental for anybody’s (mental) health. But there are a few addictions that might come as a surprise to you because you might not even be aware that they are addictions or that they are something bad. Basically every superstimulus I talked about at the beginning of the book can lead to an addiction. On the next pages, I am going to talk about some of these. Some are well-known, while others usually stay a bit under the radar, but they can be equally as damaging as some of the more obvious ones.

Video Games

Let’s start with a semi-obvious one. In the last 30 years or so, video games have seen a big increase in popularity. Be it the simple and rather unsophisticated phone games that people play on the bus or be it the high-resolution games like Fifa, World of Warcraft or Fortnite that captivate especially young people around the globe. They all are dopamine releasing catalysts that lead to addiction and ultimately all the same symptoms as excessive porn or sugar consumption. By playing these games, you trick your brain into thinking that you are doing something productive. After all, you just shot down some enemy planes and thus spared your people from being taken over by alien populations or you won the decisive play-off match to clinch the division title. But in reality all you have been doing is wasting your time in front of a computer screen while isolating yourself from the outside world. You probably had fun while doing it, so you won’t notice the negative effects straight away, but you definitely did not do anything productive. At this point, I would like to mention that there are even reports of people who died from playing video games for an excessive amount of time.

I have never really been into video games myself, but there was a short period in my life as a teenager, when I played some of these games excessively. I would come home from school and start playing some NBA basketball game. And I can honestly say that no activity ever in my life contorted the perception of time so drastically as that game.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.