Benzodiazepine addiction. Was abusing etizolam at first then graduated to clonazolam and was getting fucked up and going to work. I have no idea how I didn’t get fired honestly. I have some videos of myself doing things and I’m clearly fucked, but I suppose I didn’t get that twisted for work. My memory went to shit and a bunch of other things did too, because who gives a shit when you’re constantly wrecked. Weight dropped from normal 185lbs to a skinny ass 165lbs. Mind you, I’m 6’3”. It wasn’t a good look.
It took me 2 years to slowly taper down and that still was a pretty shitty process. Now I’m 9 months clean and up to 205 lbs by lifting weights and actually eating.
What a nightmare. Fuck benzos and godspeed to anyone who’s been using them for longer than a few weeks. Even at clinical doses you’re going to be in some shit when you stop. You’ll be glad you did, though. I’m helping a friend quit etizolam after I told him of my problems and he told me of his addiction. He’s doing great and making a lot of progress on the taper. It helps so much to have someone you can talk to.
A less serious answer - Reddit. Fuck em for killing the apps. Lemmy has been pretty great except for a few rare encounters with tankies. I genuinely enjoy posting here, the smallness is great.
I smoked for a decade and have been quit for 19 years.
Like half the thread, I quit smoking and legitimately feel like it was easy in hindsight. Once I really made up my mind to quit it was not hard. The most difficult part was breaking out of the rituals - smoking in the car, after meals, coffee and a cig...
Honestly I still end up having one every few years when I'm drinking and it's kind of nice, but I will never go back to being a smoker. Unless I ended up dating a smoker, which I would avoid. Unless they were like really hot. Or rich. I could totally fix them either way
I used to drink heavily daily. Turns out it had more to do with anxiety/stress/depression than biology. I used to be afraid to be sober in a night. Now it's not even on my mind and my tolerance has dropped to nil. Two light beers on friday hits me like a sixer of 8% used to, and i can enjoy it instead of it just being an escape.
Video games. I used to play 4-6 hours per day (or often more), every day. It was kind of my default activity when I wasn't forced to do something else. If I ran out of steam trying to focus on work or family I would drift into playing a video game. The result was a MASSIVE sink of time into something that left me with little afterwards. I didn't learn new things, I drifted away from my kids, and I didn't take care of my home.
Video games are fine. They're entertaining, but they're also potentially life consuming. I watch people who want to do more with their lives, but instead they just put more time into some game or another.
I managed to kick the habit and it's been a great 10 years since then where I play very little and only in very short, controlled bursts when I can play with my kids for a bit (they usually destroy me these days). With all of that saved time, my career started flying, my home is in better shape, and I actually don't drift away from family events like I used to.
Video games. It wasnt for long thankfully but it took all of my time.
When I was the most depressed and the addiction was at its worst I could sink more than 100 hours a week into destiny. I wanted to get to the "good part" of destiny, get the best guns, gear and stay competitive in PvP (its very meta heavy). After hundreds and hundreds of hours and sun setting, I realized I was still at square fucking one. Sun setting made many old weapons "unusable", to keep it brief, and I had grown sentimental for my favorite guns and the memories I made with them.
On top of that, the power level resets, increases further with every season and becomes exponentially harder to increase near the cap (which you need to experience end game content). Destiny is the definition of Sisyphean. Sunk 700 hours and got nowhere, not in real life or even the game.
I also played other games like Minecraft, terraria, don't starve and oxygen not included and whilst I harbor much more respect for them, I still despise their grind and slow progression.
I sunk like 168 hours into a terraria master death calamity run with friends and we only got 2/3 through until I quit and it disbanded.
What was the nail in the coffin for me was getting meaningful and useful hobbies. I was always under the assumption that skills were excruciatingly hard to learn and master. The whole "it takes 10 years and 20,000 hours to master something".
Once I started participating in some I realized you can learn as fast as you want, if you're passionate enough. I'm no master but I've gotten good at computer repair, soldering, cooking and woodworking.
If you're dedicated you can pound out a piece of furniture, in a day, with hand tools. You can cook lots of delicious food in an hour It could take DAYS to get a single weapon I wanted in destiny. .
I learned these skills in just a few years after kicking my habit. Now I'm going to start a business soon and begin teaching others. I still love the occasional game, but not the kind with hour long side quests of traveling to fetch some random shit. They're old, fast paced shooters that will leave you satisfied after a quick session.
Life is interesting, you just have to find it.
Nicotine, and I really think I've totally kicked it this time.
I made the mistake the first time I quit of thinking that cigars and pipes wouldn't be addictive because there's no inhaling. Yeah, I was a moron.
But I know that it's a zero use thing now, and while I miss the ritual of smoking, neither tobacco or more modern nicotine delivery tempt me at all.
I'm sure as hell not paying for some herbal cigarette crap, because those were never worth a damn to begin with. And I can't smoke weed because it fucks with me. So, I won't be dragged back to it that way, even if I wanted to find alternative rituals to do.
It also helps that I can't handle the smell of cigarettes now. It hits my nose, and I'm sneezing for an hour.
I quit right as covid was hitting the news, and after six months, I didn't even have the urge to engage in the ritual after meals or sex.
Also, no smoking = better sex. Kinda difficult to do it right when you can't breathe right and get winded fast.
Smoking, drinking, weed and sugary drinks. All happened between 2013-2018. All took effort, but smoking was definitely the most difficult. Switched to a vape first and then slowly lowered my nicotine level, once every 2-3 weeks until I get to 0mg nicotine. Going from 1.4mg to 0mg was the hardest, but about 3 weeks after, I forgot to use the vape for a whole day. Never picked it up again.
Caffeine
I lowered the daily dose very gradually, and eventually I was drinking only one cup of tea every day. After that, I could just quit caffeine entirely.
After about a month, started drinking coffee again, but at that point I was more aware of the quantities I was drinking and what the effects were. Currently I’m drinking only two cups a day, and that seems to be pretty good dose for me. However, I’m planning to switch to tea once I run out of coffee. Maybe I’ll keep tea in my life in the future… we’ll see.
Nicotine.
I stopped counting when my last nicotine hit was, which I think might be the key here. A couple of years at least.
No urges, never even think about it.
Alcohol. Last drink was 42 days ago. I was getting very drunk every day for years. I feel pretty good right now, getting therapy to work through the issues that I was self-medicating. Also making some big positive changes.
I guess it's too early to say with confidence that I "kicked" it, but I haven't gone this long without a drink for a very long time and I'm determined to never touch alcohol again.
My first wife
- Quit nicotine several years ago and never went back (shisha, cigarettes and cigars).
- Quit porn because it had become a bad coping mechanism (still struggling with it a bit tho).
- Slowly trying to quit my bad eating habit (I see them as addictions). I don’t gain weigh, so bad eating habits happens.
- Slowly trying to quit my soda addiction.
Drinking, finally for good I hope! I'm 3.8 years in. I first blacked out at 12 and was drinking liquor regularly by 14 so booze was my way of life. I can't socialize very well as I am naturally super awkward then never honed my "don't be super weird" skills, but I'm finally free to live my life how I want!
Sugar. Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. I don't eat anything with added sweeteners. (Like, if it has sugar, honey, HFCS, corn syrup solids, cane juice, apertame, sucralose, agave nector, dates, maple syrup, etc, that's just a deal breaker for me.) And I don't eat anything that has natural sugar any sweeter than a tomato, red bell pepper, or carrot.
I've been doing that for the last 15 years at least and made very very infrequent exceptions. (Like, I can literally count the times I remember making exceptions to this rule in the last 15 years on one hand.)
...because any time I do make an exception, I have severe gastrointestinal symptoms.
Smoking cigarrettes. I was up to two packs a day. Quit coldturkey fourteen years ago and haven't picked it up since.
Reddit
🫣 But...
Both alcohol and nicotine. Corona probably saved me with its lockdowns (though I did go back to hard drinking to some degree after). I still have the odd drink and odd cigarette, but neither are everyday things for me anymore and I can go weeks without either (though on days I do drink, it certainly makes me want to smoke).
Currently battling coke zero. I will dehydrate rather than just drinking plain water (carbonated makes little difference) as I just don't want to drink it and forget about it. As a kid, the place I lived had well water that didn't taste great, so that's probably something to do with it. I've managed to somewhat replace it with a zero-calorie sports drink powder that I put in water. Still, it lacks the mouthfeel and satisfaction.
The other current battle is gluten and thus wheat and everything containing it. This is more-or-less impossible here in Japan if eating out (most soy sauce has gluten). The background is that I likely have Celiac's (dad has it with very rough symptoms starting in his 60s, I'm in my 40s and a DNA test already told me I had inherited markers for it was likely to develop it). I was called "the bread kid" as a child because of how much I liked to eat (particularly homemade) bread. Until very recently, I baked bread and stuff a lot. It really sucks because I really miss the texture and taste of good bread. It's also difficult when thinking about what to eat. "Oh, I've got some pasta that will just take a few minutes to cook" is not a thing anymore. I have to make rice or potatoes ahead or have nothing but meat and veg.
Cigarettes. Went cold turkey every time. 3 time's the charm! It's been 13 years now, but I still occasionally get cravings, and sometimes I dream about having one and then wake up feeling super guilty and horrible about myself even though it wasn't real.
Facebook (when that was still a platform young people used). I would obsessively scroll through it for hours each day, basically trying to look at and comment on EVERYTHING. On a whim, I decided to take a break from it for a month. By the time the month was up, I realized I didn't miss it at all, and that was that. One of the big takeaways was that I thought that I was forming relationships with the people I'd comment back and forth with, but in reality these were people who I would never hang out with outside of school and barely even talk with in school (if at all); it was all just superficial, and I was better off spending time talking to my actual friends.
It wasn't that bad, but in high school I mindlessly got into the habit of drinking a few cups of Coke each day (I think it started because I would get a 2 liter whenever I'd order pizza). I quit it pretty much cold turkey, and not only did I stop drinking it at home, I no longer order it at restaurants either, which is something I did ever since I was a little kid. The idea of just buying a bottle of soda and drinking it is straight honestly grosses me out now even though getting a can or bottle from a vending machine was something I'd do without thinking. The one exception is when I'm pigging out at the movies with a bucket of popcorn, but that's pretty rare.
sweats profusely in ADHD
Not long after my mother recovered from chemotherapy, my grandmother passed away. I was tasked with disposing of my mother's morphine, however I decided to take it for relief.
I was addicted not to the feeling of being numb so much, but the initial euphoria. I would snort the morphine in powder form. I know I did some rudimentary conversion, however after kicking it I forgot every single step and cannot remember a lot of that time.
Over a year had passed, yet my knowledge of it is very little. It feels as though I have lost parts of my life... Like I mean, literally lost.The euphoric kick got less and less prevalent, and I felt as though I needed more in order to gain that initial kick - however I wasn't even aware of this effect happening, despite all manners of media being rife with this step of opiate addictions. The act of increasing dosages came so naturally I don't even think I made a conscious decision to, yet my tolerance rose to points where I was taking multiple times the lethal dose (for someone with base tolerance levels).
I saw what it was doing to me at one point, just by happenstance of looking into the mirror for a moment longer than usual.
I went cold turkey, and it was... Well, hell doesn't even describe how this felt. It took about a couple of weeks, with the first being the worst.
I had locked myself up in my room, telling some folks to check up on me periodically, online friends mainly, and what to do if I don't respond within a given time. I recall a moment where one of my friends was about to call an ambulance, because I was one minute late to answer (I was probably vomiting profusely).The very last time I did that was in the second or third week of November, 2012.
I understand that going cold turkey could be very dangerous, especially with a built up tolerance, however at that point I would not have been able to wean myself off of the stuff. I was too far in, and without going extremely hard into it I probably would have died not too long after.
If you have a friend going through opiate addiction, please be there for them. That's all I can say.
I'm down to a soda/caffeine drink at most once a day, down from drinking two or more every day.
Smoking. Vaped off of cigarettes and then gradually decreased the nicotine levels until I had vaped 0 nicotine for two months, then stopped vaping.
Quit smoking a few years back, that was an absolute bitch to do.
Still get the feeling every now and then, only 'relapsed' once at a funeral.
Nicotine and I guess drinking (the second one is mostly due to getting old though haha).
Smoking. Accidentally through vaping? Switched to vaping never intending to quit, but ran into issues with my vape, couldn't use it, and one day I just sort of realized I was fine.
I had one of those early Kangertech models and i kept having issues with coils (even new ones) and then later with the battery. I guess I could have gone to the disposable kind but yeah. It just sort of happened.
I remember the fear i used to get thinking a certain cig was my last one ever. I think taking that out of the equation is critical. Either by lowering your dose or just cutting back in number, working down slowly, and keeping the process open ended is best.
Alcohol, though I swapped it for a THC addiction instead.
Recently quit being a man after a couple of conditioned behaviour
Sodas
@tilefan That's weird, it's not that I'm purposefully get rid of addictions, I just kinda... lose interest.
I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. I also used to drink a lot. I don't mind a cigarette or a beer or a shot every now and then, if the mood is right and the company is fine, but doing it every single day? Nah.
It's not that I kicked it per se. I just ran out of fcks to give.
Smoking. First nicotine and then weed.
Currently working on my addiction to junkfood, sugar and general overeating.
Still highly addicted to caffeine and possibly in denial about a sex addiction. But I think I'll keep those two.
- Xanax
- Codeine
- Tramadol
- Marijuana
- Cigarettes
- Going out to friends houses all the time
Still depressed and can’t face the fact I have another 30 years of work left and it’s killing me slowly everyday.
Biting my nails. By cutting them short. If they grow long I eventually bite them off.
Porn
8 months since last drink. Though I have more id like to do, starting somewhere has helped with personal motivation/self esteem.
Biting my nails till they bleed
