My phone was glued to my palm.
Every day, I wake up, and the first thing I do is grab my phone, go through all the notifications, and start scrolling YouTube Shorts.
I need to fight a battle just to convince myself to get out of bed, brush my teeth, and get ready for college.
In between classes, I play video games or scroll.
And every night before falling asleep I watch porn and masturbate. It became a habit.
To be honest, at that time, I didn’t know that what I was doing was ruining my life.
Because that’s what everyone around me was doing.
Scrolling felt normal, watching YouTube videos felt normal, and doing dirty stuff felt “good.”
It was when I stumbled upon a self-improvement, I realized every single thing I was doing was wrong and destructive.
I said to myself, “Fuck this, I need to change. This is not the way to live. Everyone around me is living the wrong way. I don’t want to. I’m not gonna follow the crowd.”
My journey began.
I started fighting my addictions and got into self-improvement. It wasn’t an easy journey. It took me almost a year to quit YouTube and video game addiction. 4 years to quit porn addiction. But now, I’m clean. I have control over myself.
I hit the gym every single day, I write every single day, I started making money online, I read every single day, I eat clean, and the quality of my life has improved a lot.
I want the same for you.
So, today, I’m gonna share 5 important things that actually helped me break free from my addictions.
Let’s begin.
1) Don’t follow the crowd
You’re going to lose a lot of friends once you embark on this journey.
Because all your friends are probably addicted to social media, video games, movies, junk food, etc.
When you quit social media, stop playing video games, watching movies, and eating junk food.
You’ll not be able to talk about that latest social media gossip or trend with your friends.
You’ll have to stop playing video games with your friends.
When your friends discuss that recent movie they watched, you’ll have no clue what they are talking about.
You can’t even go out with your friends because if you do, you have to eat junk.
You should be fine with all this.
In fact, if your “friends” are not disciplined and simply waste their time doing shit.
It’s better to get away from them.
Being alone is better than being around people who drag you down.
Also, personal growth happens in solitude.
Start building yourself alone.
2) Understand that it takes time
Let’s make this clear:
You can’t break free from your addictions in the snap of a finger. It’s a slow process.
If you think you can break your addictions today. I’m sorry. It’s just not possible.
Why?
Imagine a 350-pound guy saying he wants to lose 175 pounds the next day. It’s just not possible. He can’t undo the years of bad eating habits in a day.
It takes time and effort.
You’ve been addicted for a very long time. You’ve built strong neural pathways in your brain for all your addictions.
To break your addictions, you need to weaken those neural pathways.
And weakening your neural pathways takes time.
The longer you are addicted, the stronger the neural pathway will be, and the stronger the neural pathway, the longer (and harder) it will be for you to break the addiction.
I can’t give you a fixed number of days or months, or years about how long it will take for you to break your addiction. But I can say one thing. If you keep trying without giving up, you’ll break free.
It took me almost a years to break my YouTube addiction and 4 years to quit porn. 2 years to quit junk food. It takes time.
3) Increase your self-awareness
Your addiction is unconscious.
You don’t think when you grab your phone and scroll. It all happens in split seconds.
Your hands and fingers have developed a muscle memory to grab and scroll. It doesn’t require you to think.
And this is a really big problem.
Because you can’t overcome something that’s not in your control.
You need to increase your self-awareness level.
You need to become conscious of your addictions before you can think about breaking them.
Here are some best ways to increase your self-awareness:
- Meditate for 10 minutes every day.
- Journaling every day before going to sleep.
- Go for long walks without your phone.
To break the muscle memory of your hands and fingers, you need to create some friction between you and your phone.
Here is how you can do that:
- Delete social media.
- Remove fingerprint and face lock, and set a difficult-to-type password like “WhatAmIGonnaDoAfterUnlockingThisPhone?”.
Self-awareness is EXTREMELY important.
4) Handle urges correctly
On this journey, your brain will try it’s best to pull you back into scrolling, wasting time on YouTube, watching porn, etc.
It will make you feel uncomfortable and miserable.
You might even lose to those feelings and fall back into your old routines.
But what you need to understand is this…
The uncomfortable and miserable feelings you experience are signs that your brain is rewiring.
You are becoming a different person.
Even if you relapse. Immediately get back and start fighting your addictions again.
Let’s say you watched porn today. It’s okay. Don’t be so hard on yourself. And don’t think like, “I can never break this addiction. It’s better I stop trying.” Never ever come to that conclusion. Keep trying. Slowly, you’ll break it. I promise.
You’ll only lose if you quit.
When you get an urge, do one of the following:
- Go for a long walk.
- Read a book.
- Play sports.
- Talk to someone.
- Watch TV (I don’t recommend it, though)
- Just go out.
Just have a busy schedule. From the time you wake up till you go to sleep, you should have something to do.
Try to stay out more. Go to a library. Go to the park. Go to the gym.
5) Take it as a challenge
Take breaking your addictions as a challenge.
This is what I did.
I took a 90-day challenge.
No scrolling.
No porn.
No junk food.
No video games.
No YouTube.
If I fail on day 13, I have to start over the 90-day challenge.
Taking challenge like this makes your journey more interesting.
In fact, I have written an entire book about breaking free from your addictions in 90 days. It is completely free.
The book is action-packed. It is an easy-to-read 63-page eBook that will give you all the knowledge and tools to overcome your addictions.
After you finish reading the book, you’ll take a 90-day challenge. To make your 90-day challenge interesting. I created 3 Notion Templates to help you keep track of your progress and stay accountable. They are free as well.
The book is called The Ultimate Guide To Breaking Addictions.
Grab your copy👉 The Ultimate Guide To Breaking Addictions.
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P.S. You can do this.