Reddit
I miss what it was, not what it has become.
I was never on it for as long as some other people but I definitely feel some nostalgia when I hear talk about the reddit of years and years past
Just as I opened Lemmy this morning, my first thought was how I used to get news faster on reddit. I feel so uninformed…AND NOW FOR YOUR COMMERCIALS
I mean there are a lot of communities for news here I think, I also check Hacker News and stuff too
I think what it was, was mostly what the world was. The web as we now know it was just taking off and we were the first. I remember when they made r/DAE because the front page was filled with Does Anyone Else posts. What a naive time. We’ll never see it again.
Haven’t kicked them. Stopped using nicotine and alcohol but man is the addiction still there. 🥲
Hey, stay strong. Shit gets easier, I promise. Six years sober, two years without nicotine here. I did it, and you can too.
Likewise! It’s been 8 years without nicotine and 2 years sober here.
Here’s a good one about the monkey on your back: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rUvzx73-cCY&pp=ygUSc3R5Z2dlbiBww6UgcnlnZ2Vu
But you gotts understand norwegian: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/styggen-på-ryggen-bastard-my-back.html
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.
A friend of mine in his 60s has been on a prescribed benzodiazapine since he was a child. He is tapering a microgram per day and struggling with the withdrawal symptoms. It’s going to take him several years at this rate but when he lowers by more it’s debilitating.
At that point, what quit?
I probably wouldn’t. He said he wants to see what his life is like without it.
My pops was prescribed 2mg Klonopin daily for uhhhh 20 years?
He quit a year ago. He told me about it and I thoroughly researched quitting methods. I’ve dabbled and stopped with bad effects before, but only like a week of bad before I was fine. He wanted to go cold turkey from 1mg and I HEAVILY discouraged that. He tapered down to .25 twice a day, then .25 a day, then stopped. He had a month of bad sleep and then slept much better.
I wanted him to do the Ashton method, but he didn’t want to take other benzos. He still did good and I’m proud of him. No idea why or how his doctors all thought that was fine. We know so much more now than when he was first prescribed, and they never warned him. He didn’t know anything about quitting until he talked to me—he’s lucky I was a raver in the ‘00s and studied every drug I had ever tried!
I haven’t self harmed for a long time
You rock, keep it up, sending love!
Well done!
Smoking. 7 months in, feeling great, not looking back!
Fuck yeah dude!
I smoked half a pack a day for a year or two, then one day I realized it just didn’t feel good anymore. This was RIGHT when 510 cigalike vapes were starting to come out, so I picked up a couple and a ton of cartridges and juice. I just stopped one day, vaped occasionally, then stopped that. I feel very lucky my body turned out that way.
Now to quit drinking…
Biting my nails.
I started at about two years old and chewed them to the quick for over 35 years.
I bite my nails, have as long as I can remember, and honestly don’t care particularly whether I continue or stop.
That said, I once accidentally kicked the habit for a couple weeks in probably the strangest way possible
I’ve heard of people getting small magnets implanted under their skin in order to sense electrical/magnetic fields. This idea was always interesting to me but I’m not ready to commit to implants.
But curiosity got the best of me at one point and I got some tiny neodymium magnets and super glued them to my fingernails.
It worked, probably not as well as implants since the magnets couldn’t react as well since they were glued down and couldn’t wiggle around under my skin, but I could definitely feel some things (strongest reactions I got were probably the forklift charger at my job and an electric pencil sharpener)
I didn’t do the neatest job of gluing them on, so there was a bit of super glue covering a good bit of my nails.
And that bit of weird texture from the glue was kind of off-putting and every time my hand absentmindedly went to my mouth it gave me a reminder not to do that.
So for a couple weeks until the magnets fell off and the glue wore away and I got sick of reapplying them, I had nails for the first time I can remember.
Slipped back into my old habits pretty quickly though.
I didn’t feel like my life was in any particular way better by having nails, though to be fair I don’t have the worst or most-extreme nail biting habit out there, and I didn’t particularly appreciate having to trim and file my nails and the crud that managed to accumulate under them.
I quit biting my nails when COVID started. Now I keep them painted, so I’m even less inclined to bite.
I don’t bite them, but use clippers to cut them down to quick. Am kind of obsessive on doing this. Working as an engineer I hate the sight of oil/grease/muck under nails, so they gotta go.
Can I quit? Call it a work in progress.
how?? i do that compulsively ever since i had it long and it got ripped off.
I’ve tried so many things throughout my life. Getting yourself to stop is going to be a personal thing. The last thing I tried that succeeded was taking a job out of town where I worked 12-16 hour days. It was manual skilled labor. I was working with my hands, they were often dirty, and frankly, there wasn’t much downtime to find myself chewing my nails. This attempt to stop just happened to finally work for me. It’s been almost four years. Keep at it, you can do it!
I smoked for a decade and have been quit for 19 years.
Ruminating on fake emotionally charged social altercations in my head.
It just kept happening. I couldn’t stop. Just felt the absolute need to “prepare” myself for bad events/fights with people so that I’d be “better prepared for it”. What a load of shit.
The mind is its own worst enemy sometimes.
I find that imagining stuff like that helps me. If I am ever in a situation similar to what I imagined I can always “rely on protocol” and it works out.
It’s usually pretty simple stuff like what if it gets quiet during a conversation, or exiting one when i don’t want to engage and stuff like that. It’s also sometimes going over what I’d do in a car accident, or if someone suddenly collapsed on the street in front of me.
mine never really happened in real life. the rumination was pointless 9/10 times.
Oh mine were like “how do I explain my way out if this person I just walked past starts picking a fight with me”.
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
so you would still date Obama?
I would definitely wreck myself over anyone in that family.
I quit smoking four times, IIRC. The first week was always the shitty part, and then it would get dramatically easier. Three of the times I started back up because my ex-wife would secretly start smoking, get tired of hiding it, and offer me cigarettes (‘just one, as a treat’). The last time I quit we were in the process of separating prior to divorce, and so that shit didn’t happen. That was a little over ten years ago now.
This last time I quit because I was waking up every morning coughing. I had that nasty dark-yellow smokers’ phlegm that I’d cough up, and I’d have that first cigarette along with my cup of coffee. When I realized the direction my health was going, and that no amount of cardio and weight training was going to fix it, that’s when I decided to quit.
Each time I quit was cold turkey, no aids. The times I tried cutting back, using gum, etc., all failed miserably. Vaping wasn’t a thing at the time.
I still love the smell of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars. That’s never going to stop. But it’s pretty easy to resist now.
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.
You make it sound easy (no disrespect on my part, I’m sure it wasn’t easy at all).
But what worked for you?
Again no disrespect, feel free to dm me if you want.
Don’t take my experience as a generality. It was not meant as such. As far as anxiety and stress: financial stability, moving to a new country, and therapy did it. I’m extremely priveleged to be able to have done those things.
But if i could have realized back when that i really needed therapy i could have faired a lot better. Societal concepts around masculinity and “manhood” played a big role too. You can’t deal with your emotions if you can’t interact with them. Which is what drove me to drink. I wouldn’t need to deal with emotions if they had an off switch. I needed to remove a lot of the sources of pain before i could handle leaving the switch on even for a little bit.
It took two years since changing my situation before i was able to get a hold on my drinking.
For lots of people including myself bilogy plays a big role in alcoholism. I think for me, combating that is hard enough but manageable and easier the linger you maintain good habits. But for others that might not be the case and abstinence might make more sense. No shame in that.
In any case, try to find a therapist if you can afford it, and don’t settle. Find someone who challenges you but you click well with. For lack of that find some volunteer or community org and dive in 100%. Any non-drinking social activity that gets you out of the house. (D&D, hiking trail work, food not bombs, etc…)
Yeah, sorry, my post came off much more confrontational than I wanted. Not my intention.
But yeah, I know I have to do therapy. Thankfully I’m in a country that it’s at least one somewhat covered. As you said, I just need to find the right one (tried one a while ago and couldn’t open up to her).
We definitely have some different reasons for drinking, but I think it all comes down to what you’re saying. You need to find something that works for you.
Thank you very much for your reply, I sincerely mean it. I’ve sort of been trying to taper off (slowly) and think I’m ready to reach out to someone (a therapist or psychologist).
Your post definitely helped with that. Thank you.
Wow, I’m honored. I sincerely wish you the best in finding the right fit as well as getting to where you want to be with it!
I am one of the rare people who managed to taper from actual addiction to social drinking. For me it was because I got fat, and then got serious about diet and exercise and then got in shape, and then mostly quit drinking.
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.
Same, I posted another long comment about if you want to read it.
It’s scary how many games require more time and attention than full time jobs.
Respect. Games are my getaway. I have burnout on games, and I’ve had withdrawal from games. I could limit my game play, but honestly, I don’t have a reason to.
I just bought a Steam deck primarily to fill the time in my work breaks. I feel like if I’m able to game during lunch time, then I’ll be less antsy about getting home and playing something, and I’ll be able to spend that extra time on house work or whatever.
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.
I have a big one rather than a small one. 11 years sober off all drugs and alcohol. Took going to rehab and sober living after but I made it.
That’s amazing. How do you rate the improvement in how you feel?
Meth. Used to shoot up 2-3 times a day. Had 3 years sober, relapsed for about a year and a half and kicked the habit again about 2 months ago. Feels good man.
yeaaaahhhh ! good on you
nice man. mainlining uppers is some stressful shit
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.
