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dms wrote:

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
Gonna sound weird here, but matching the purchasing habits of the ex I lived with.
We were together about a decade, and his reaction to depression was to constantly buy, so that there was in influx of mail and new things, games, miniatures constantly. I got drawn in to this as a habit myself. I'd match his pace on purchases, not competitively, but because we both enabled each other.

Good lord that strikes a nerve. Sounds like this person had it way worse than I've ever had... but recognise the feeling. I'd get a kick out of buying something and would hit a real low pretty much after I'd opened the package or gotten it home.

I ended up starting a spreadsheet on what non-essentials I bought so I could see how much I was spending... after looking at the cost of what I'd bought every month for a couple of years it really made me feel very different about spending money.

I figured it was something understandable for folk here. My apologies if it was uncomfortable. I really didn't mean for it to be.

My "wake up call" (for the habit, not the ex ) was attending a wargaming show, and one of the traders I knew quite well, was dealing from crates on the floor... Boxes upon boxes of completely unused RPG books, miniatures, board games... You guessed it, some poor guy's lifetime collection that his widow had asked the trader to help sell as she had no idea what to do with it.
What killed me wasn't that she had no concept of what the things were (the trader was getting a fair price for her) but that they were to an item, utterly untouched. Unread books, unopened miniatures. Plans never realised.
My ex was a couple decades older than me, and I looked at the boxes, looked at him, watched him buy things from them, and noped out on the entire concept.

Last year I helped a FLGS do a house clearance from a guy in the miniatures industry who had sadly passed in his sixties, and that was another reminder to paint your damn figures.

I had to quit an idea about myself. That I could do everything. At work, at home, at play, I could do it all. I could take on that project. I could help that guy move after work. I could do (extended) family dinner by myself. I don't need help. I can do everything.

I would have anxiety attacks about saying "I can't do it". Because I could. I could do everything. I am ok, I can do it.

And while it probably sounds self-indulgent of me to say, I now say I can do anything, but I can't do everything. So cliché. Even though I still want to do everything. It is very hard to maintain perspective and prioritize and accept my limitations.

Euyuck! I am anxious just typing that out. It is hard to quit my sense of being unstoppable. I don't like it. But I need to, so I have. Mostly. Sometimes.


I'd say smoking, but I quit that all the time.

Opiates.

I'm not joking. And no, I didn't get into them recreationally. Had a bad accident and was in excruciating pain for months during surgeries. Coming out of that, I was an addict to narcotic painkillers.

Then the coming clean part is what sucks. I was mean. I was emotional. I was always hurting but it wasn't hurting. I was sick, I had no appetite, I lost weight, my hair fell out in clumps, I didn't sleep. Couldn't remember anything.

It just took time.

Chemical addiction is awful, I tumbled with Coke and Alcohol.

Unfortunately I know/Knew so many young people that just faded away and didn't make it into full fledged human beings. Its very sad, but you sometimes cant help someone if they are not willing to help themselves..

I think pharmaceutical opiates are the absolute tip of the big pharma evil Demon incarnarte giant phallus. Wish the world wasn't so corrupt and rotten at the top. Some sort of divine retribution of fire and brimstone is needed to combat that cesspool...

Overcoming mental patterns is one thing. But mental patterns with a chemical addiction... no thank you sir.

TBF while the top end may represent he worse side of us all it is still representative of us. Power may corrupt but not so much as it brings out what was already there. Someone willing to do a little harm to society for a little gain is willing to do a lot of harm for a lot of gain. A lot of people 'become' rotten when they have power... because a lot of people are rotten.

To be fair, many pharmaceuticals are there to make people better, not worse. People can die from shock and trauma without *heavy* painkillers. Yes, they are addictive but in some cases that means a person must overcome addiction rather than being dead.

We’re all addicted to the food that keeps us alive. Nobody points out that farmers aren’t trying to “cure” hunger rather than making it a daily treatment regimen.

Some people require medication to stay alive. Both my Great-Grandmother and Grandmother wouldn’t have made it past 50 without daily medication. “Big Pharma” made it possible for me to know them both.

Vaccines are possible thanks to “Big Pharma”. Please don’t confuse negative side effects and corporate greed with denying the value of pharmaceuticals.

 Elbows wrote:
I quit an incredible paying job mid-recession. So that wasn't the easiest decision. I'm still worse off for it, but mentally in better shape.

That's a really hard thing to do honestly, and I've been there myself. A couple years ago I had a pretty good paying job but the stress was just wrecking me mentally/emotionally. It got to the point the hat it was straining my marriage with my wife. I finally had enough and said good bye. Took about 3ish years to get back on track financially and this year is looking like the one for us to get back on top again. I'm in a job now that I'd SO much better for me in that regard and I'd say by next year's pay raise should be even to the job I left some years ago. Far less toxic and stressful, management is a great bunch of dudes, fellow employes are mostly awesome arena I even won a trip to Maui for being in the top 5% of the company back in January, and that would never happen at the old job.


Sometimes you just need to get out and think about your overall health and well being rather thank that paycheck

 Buttery Commissar wrote:
Gonna sound weird here, but matching the purchasing habits of the ex I lived with.
We were together about a decade, and his reaction to depression was to constantly buy, so that there was in influx of mail and new things, games, miniatures constantly. I got drawn in to this as a habit myself. I'd match his pace on purchases, not competitively, but because we both enabled each other.

When I left him, and emptied the house, I realized how much stuff was stored in my house that he had never even used, crates of it. Garbage bags of it. More than a small car could contain.
I realised my life probably had the same amount of compulsive comfort purchases. I banned myself from buying anything I wasn't gonna immediately use, and it's taken 3 or so years, but I broke the habit.

I also unloaded tons of miniatures and games on friends who ran clubs, it was great to see things being repurposed.

That...sounds a lot like me actually.

 greatbigtree wrote:
To be fair, many pharmaceuticals are there to make people better, not worse. People can die from shock and trauma without *heavy* painkillers. Yes, they are addictive but in some cases that means a person must overcome addiction rather than being dead.

We’re all addicted to the food that keeps us alive. Nobody points out that farmers aren’t trying to “cure” hunger rather than making it a daily treatment regimen.

Some people require medication to stay alive. Both my Great-Grandmother and Grandmother wouldn’t have made it past 50 without daily medication. “Big Pharma” made it possible for me to know them both.

Vaccines are possible thanks to “Big Pharma”. Please don’t confuse negative side effects and corporate greed with denying the value of pharmaceuticals.

Everybody needs to eat. Every day.
Not everybody needs medicines. Only people who are not well and are vulnerable need medicines.

Ohh absolutely no denying, modern medicine is healing witchcraft spells in a pill when its done right. A lot of people wouldn't be here if it wasn't for modern medicine. But how many people in the world cant afford it because of a 2000% mark up?
Suppose it becomes a big moral question of our time; should medicine/healthcare be a business and should we be profiting from those unlucky ones to be affected by diseases. And you mileage may vary on that.

I stand by my opinion that producing medication with horrendous addictive side effects and using political shady deals, abusing the system and make it the go to drug where there are other cleaner alternatives is the stuff of Nurgle.
Oxycontin... I'll say no more.

I quit caffeine a couple of years ago, but it only lasted a couple of months before I started drinking Mountain Dew and stuff again. The headaches were horrible during that first week and I was grumpy and aggressive, but I felt better after that. I still couldn't stay away from the stuff due to needing the extra energy sometimes, and at this point I have no plans to try quitting again.

A harder lifestyle change for me recently is taking better care of my teeth. Having a bunch of dental expenses changes your perspective on that stuff real quick. I've pretty much quit eating sticky candy (I still eat chocolate though!), and I now brush my teeth twice a day instead of just once, in addition to starting flossing and using mouthwash, and I'm going to be getting regular dental cleanings from now on. Some of that seems basic to most people, but I was just brushing in the evenings right before bed before, and only a relatively quick pass over my teeth at that. The dentist put me on the right track after I broke a tooth because of a cavity and needed an expensive crown on it. I also needed a deep cleaning to get the tartar that was below my gumline out of there (which was causing me to have mild periodontitis), and I still need to get my wisdom teeth out and four small fillings done. Before the tooth broke, the last time I'd seen a dentist was probably 16 years ago.

And as for the people who said they started buying things because of depression, I definitely feel you there. I had a bit of that a few years ago, and to be honest I still struggle with that some. Nowadays I have a little more spending money than I did then, but I really should be saving more (hard to do when I'm paying for the aforementioned dental work though).

For me it is various ways of using the internet to procrastinate on stuff I actually need or want to get done. I have a pretty avoidant personality, and I often use reading about politics or watching some crappy youtube media criticism video as a way to zone out from dealing with stuff.
I am an introvert and a teacher, and so my job takes it out of me pretty badly, and I find it easy to distract myself on the internet rather than doing anything proper. My wife is kinda the same way, and we have been in a bit of a negative loop with the internet since 2016. Both of us are trying to break it, but it is really hard for me.
It pisses me off because it makes me miserable and leads to decreased focus, physical activity and all of that. Gotta deal with it. Weirdly apart from fora, I don't use social media, it is all politics news and crap youtube "content" with me.

That...also sounds like me.

 Ouze wrote:
Reading political news.

Don't laugh, I'm not kidding.

Now that you mention it...... #metoo!

For me, food.

Not as in like, starving myself, but managing food.

It's so easy to end up eating 3-5k calories a day or more, without really thinking about it. Especially if you're not making great money and/or have limited time.

That 2 for $5 Carls Jr. Western Bacon meal sure is a lot of tasty food for a paltry amount of cash when you're zipping through your lunch break, but that and a soda and fries after an early morning energy drink and costco muffin, and you're already closing in on 3k calories by noon. After some office munchies and dinner, you've taken in 4500 calories, possibly on as little as $10-15 that day, and all you've done is sit around an office or cubicle farm. It's not at all hard to see how people end up losing total control of their weight and fitness, especially when that food ticks all the right psychological and taste boxes to make you not care.

The process of recognizing that, adjusting eating habits and your own sense of "full", avoiding certain things or looking at parts of menus you never looked at before, trying different things to sate different urges (e.g. a 200cal slurpee instead of a 1000 cal milkshake), and generally just managing intake, has been a years long process for me.

 Vaktathi wrote:
For me, food.

Not as in like, starving myself, but managing food.

It's so easy to end up eating 3-5k calories a day or more, without really thinking about it. Especially if you're not making great money and/or have limited time.

That 2 for $5 Carls Jr. Western Bacon meal sure is a lot of tasty food for a paltry amount of cash when you're zipping through your lunch break, but that and a soda and fries after an early morning energy drink and costco muffin, and you're already closing in on 3k calories by noon. After some office munchies and dinner, you've taken in 4500 calories, possibly on as little as $10-15 that day, and all you've done is sit around an office or cubicle farm. It's not at all hard to see how people end up losing total control of their weight and fitness, especially when that food ticks all the right psychological and taste boxes to make you not care.

The process of recognizing that, adjusting eating habits and your own sense of "full", avoiding certain things or looking at parts of menus you never looked at before, trying different things to sate different urges (e.g. a 200cal slurpee instead of a 1000 cal milkshake), and generally just managing intake, has been a years long process for me.

I struggle with this exact thing. My biggest food weakness is pizza. It's my favorite food and probably the most unhealthy thing a person could possibly eat (like, seriously, so much carbs and fat and stuff). I also tend to eat way too many processed foods instead of taking the time to make a nice healthy meal. I'm too lazy to cook, especially since I live by myself.

I've tried to limit myself, but I always end up going back to my old ways. I've tried exercising more, but I always end up slacking off. I'll figure something out eventually, but I hope I'm not dead before then...

Oh God, where to start? I have severe depression and anxiety that has led to me trying to numb the pain through food, buying (40k models, novels, comics mostly), drinking (for a short period of my life, I've never really been an alcoholic and my liver issues led to me to quitting entirely), weed (this one was difficult to stop), pills, as well as a very persistent addiction that I still have not quit yet. I wouldn't be surprised if I was somewhat bi-polar as there have been times when I've felt extreme happiness for no reason, only for it to come crashing down sometimes only a few minutes or even seconds later. I procrastinate horribly and spend too much time looking at dumb crap online, though I am starting to eat a little healthier and am developing more of a social life. My sleep schedule can often be erratic, and it has been very difficult for me to fix this issue. Politics is horrible for me and my state of mind, but I'm somewhat addicted to following it, and I have a bad tendency of looking up stuff from points of view that make me feel mad and sad in order to get some kind of righteousness rush. I work to treat people well generally face to face, but in my head, I love mocking people and feeling superior to make myself feel better, and that's been very difficult for me to quit. Through all of this, I want to break down and cry sometimes to release the emotions but I've numbed myself in a number of ways and have trained myself not to cry for fear of looking like some kind of wimp, and I'm afraid that if I start crying, I'll never stop. I try to put on a no-nonsense, voice-of-reason, semi-tough guy facade, but that's just it, a facade to hide all of my insecurities. My doctor says that I should severely decrease my sodium levels and what happens? I load up on salty food that causes my feet and legs to swell up, causing pain to my toes. To some extent, I'm addicted to suicidal thoughts, as many times I've thought "Hey, if things get too tough for me, I can just end it and be done with it" or "You know what, I think I'll go commit suicide so I don't have to deal with the thoughts swimming through my brain." I haven't made any plans or really tried to attempt it, but it's always in the background, like the worst best friend ever that I just can't quit.

Sorry for long rant, but I just had to get it off my chest.

Porn. Since I discovered free internet pornography ~15 years ago the longest I've gone without watching it is about 6 days.

Cheese, marmite, chocolate, scones, ice cream, basically anything high in phosphates. All at the same time. When I was 8 or something like that up until I was 14, almost 15.

Chronic kidney failure is a dick.

Excluding my depression (which took me years to get out of and honestly kinda never has gone away entirely), the hardest thing I ever have quit probably is the temptation to check WhatsApp every 5 minutes. It was a damn though habit to shake, but I feel a lot less stressed now that I check WhatsApp only about 2-3 times a day. The constant social contact and fear of missing out was a big source of stress.
Downside of course is that I now do indeed miss out on a lot of things. Stress does kinda still pop up whenever I check WhatsApp after a while and see that I have over 99 unread messages :0

Sugar!
Been trying since januar, i still cannot go more then 3-4 days without candy.
It is said the addiction to sugar is stronger then moust drugs, i belive that to be 100% correct.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Sugar!
Been trying since januar, i still cannot go more then 3-4 days without candy.
It is said the addiction to sugar is stronger then moust drugs, i belive that to be 100% correct.

I tried cutting down sugar in my tea and failed miserably...

Sugar, been a years long struggle and clicking on " 'X'th Appeal to overturn political discussion ban" threads. Though the latter fixed itself apparently.

People.

I still struggle with scars from early life around feeling unlikeable and unlovable, so when someone shows me anything more than basic Human compassion and friendship, I want to hold on to them forever.

Sugar is BS imo. That stuff is crammed everywhere, and there's no easy way to get away from it. I make bags of nuts and fruit everyday for lunch at work, to keep the energy up. And finding dried fruit that isn't covered in sugar can be a task. It blows me away that people/companies need sugar on fruit! IT'S FRUIT FFS!!!!

 The Forgemaster wrote:
The purchase of plastic from this odd company called GW... ever heard of it?

Hehe, well done

Everquest.

Kept at it way beyond the time it was fun as it had become a routine for me, to help me wind down every night after work.

It was the use of the /played command (which showed me how many hours of my life I'd spent in Norrath) that gave me the push to log out for the last time.

Fizzy drinks. I've found myself falling back into the energy drink every morning thing, which I want to get out of. I've capped myself to 1 energy drink and 1 full-fat soda a day, with less restriction on diet ones (honestly switching to diet has dropped my about 2" from my waist in a few months through doing nothing else).

Debt is the big one. I earn well but a lot of it goes back out on debt. There's always something needing money spent (like a new household fixtures). The plan is to use my bonus money to pay down the debt and only buying stuff that's necessary. It's not going too well so far, but I'm still on top of it (just).

Herzlos wrote:
Fizzy drinks. I've found myself falling back into the energy drink every morning thing, which I want to get out of. I've capped myself to 1 energy drink and 1 full-fat soda a day, with less restriction on diet ones (honestly switching to diet has dropped my about 2" from my waist in a few months through doing nothing else).

Debt is the big one. I earn well but a lot of it goes back out on debt. There's always something needing money spent (like a new household fixtures). The plan is to use my bonus money to pay down the debt and only buying stuff that's necessary. It's not going too well so far, but I'm still on top of it (just).

Energy drinks are the devil. so much sugar in those, not to mention the vast amounts of chemicals. theyre not good for you at all. there are guys at my work who have 2 a day. it cant be good for them. I went through a phase of drinking cans of Monster but stopped when I realised just how bad for you they are. Nowadays I occasionally have a lucozade as a treat, or if i'm driving on a sunny day to keep that sleepiness at bay.



I'm a sucker for coke though, especially with rum. I tend to avoid drinking fizzy drinks in the week, in order to allow myself the odd rum and coke a couple of evenings per week when I paint.

Moderation is key. I dont think theres anything wrong with consuming sugary foods as long as its not all day every day. Trying to cut them out completely actually makes you more likely to fail, than if you moderate your intake to every now and then.

I like the weekend plan, and keeping it as a treat.

I'm making an effort to not touch the energy drinks (diet or otherwise). I'm not sure I actually notice the difference, but since I have 2 young ASN kids I find I need something to help me wake up in the morning. I'm going to try sticking to tea/hot chocolate and keeping more hydrated to see if it makes a difference.

I've never fallen into the habit of having coffee (helps that I dont like it) in the morning, so I'm usually good once I've had breakfast.

I'm not familiar with ASN? dont want to guess and cause offence.